The Live Anthology (2009)
Disc One
1. Ladies and Gentlemen
2. Nightwatchmen
3. Even the Losers
4. Here Comes My Girl
5. A Thing About You
6. I'm in Love
7. I'm a Man
8. Straight Into Darkness
9. Breakdown
10.Something in the Air
11.I Just Want To Make Love To You
12.Drivin' Down to Georgia
13.Lost Without You
14.Refugee
Disc Two
1. Diddy Wah Diddy
2. I Want You Back
3. Wildflowers
4. Friend of the Devil
5. A Woman in Love (It's Not Me)
6. It's Good to Be King
7. Angel Dream (No.2)
8. Learning to Fly
9. Mary Jane's Last Dance
10.Mystic Eyes
Disc Three
1. Jammin' Me
2. The Wild One Forever
3. Green Onions
4. Louisiana Rain
5. Melinda
6. Goldfinger
7. Surrender
8. Dreamville
9. Spike
10.Any Way You Want It
11.American Girl
Disc Four
1. Runnin' Down a Dream
2. Oh Well
3. Southern Accents
4. Crawling Back to You
5. My Life/Your World
6. I Won't Back Down
7. Square One
8. Have Love Will Travel
9. Free Fallin'
10.The Waiting
11.Good, Good Lovin'
12.Century City
13.Alright for Now
I really really wanted to love this
album. I thought, "a live album with 48 songs for only $19.99! What
could possibly be wrong with that?". Well, a lot, sadly. Don't get me
wrong, this is a great record by a great artist who is magnificent when
performing live and it's long overdue. The problem really isn't what this
is, but what it could have been.
One of the things that I never liked about Tom Petty when he performed
live is that he played too much cover material. One cover or two in a
two-hour set is bearable, but any more
than that feels like you're cheating the audience when your own
catalog has so many nuggets that your fans would rather hear. Roughly
25% of the songs here are covers, and if you were to grab a sheet of
paper, you could easily come up with about twice as many original
Petty classics that
were left off this album to make room for all of
this stuff that not that many people care about in the first place.
So when reviewing the material here that is his original material, it's
safe to say that the music is great. Other than the fact that not every
fan will like the tracks that were selected, he gives his music decent
representation. He focuses a bit more on his older material, but it's
all presented well. There are plenty of nice acoustic pieces throughout
that allow for a nice change of pace as well.
You could probably say the same thing about the covers, the fact that
everyone has their favorites etc. I have to honestly say that some of
the covered material is great, some is good, but some is godawful. Why,
for example, does he include the instrumental to the James Bond movie
Goldfinger?? I mean, just how stoned was Petty when he
selected the songs for an "anthology"?? Then he does a lot of songs
that sound o.k., but don't belong here simply because there is nothing
distinctive about how Petty covers the material. Yes, the Steve Cropper
classic Green Onions sounds good, but when you've heard one
version of Green Onions, you've heard them all.
There are several covers, that I confess, are quite welcome here. Van
Morrison's Mystic Eyes is probably my favorite, even at nine
minutes in length. He also plays a wicked cover of Peter Green's Oh
Well, and Friend of the Devil
shows just how much his music had in common with The Grateful Dead.
Well, with almost four hours of music, it's very easy to "make your own"
live compilation with what's featured here, and since most people can
only handle maybe 2 hours at a time, it's very easy to whittle away
about half this album and still have a great collection. And remember,
you did get this record fairly cheap. Had this been twice the
price, I would have lowered my review score quite significantly. Sadly,
he did release a "Best Buy Only" version with a fifth disc
that was ungodly expensive. Glancing at the track list, it's about par
for the course - you know, about half the songs are ones that you could deal without.
So I never bought it. So, a great record, but it could have been so
much better. So much better.
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