We had bowl seats here rather than the floor, and almost immediately I was glad. The translucent light show they bounced off the surface of the stage could not be seen by the floor audience (Maynard sang while standing in a puddle of lava, for instance).

We got there just in time as the lights went down. "Oh what great timing!" my buddy said. We sat down and were treated to.... MELT BANANA! I couldn't believe some record company heard this band and thought: "Y'know? I think I could sell a lot of their records!" Every word of every lyric of every song was "corn chip". AJ and Danney could have come out and set a hamster up on stage with a nail file and some rubber bands and it would have been a goddamn masterpiece by virtue of following Melt Banana. ANyone notice when that little Chinese chick was announcing Tool she said: "Thank you. We really like to thank The Tool. We have The Tool for you."

Finally Maynard came out in this burning orange jacket and his big cowboy hat and proceeded to do his Nard shuffle to Jambi.

The show was great. I've seen them three times now, and I'm always amazed that AJ can generate those sounds live. That guy obviously never had any girlfriends because he had to have spent long hours caressing artificial harmonics from his strings.

Anyway, I think it was during 46&2 when Maynard pulled off the hat to reveal his perfect, beautiful mohawk. I'm so jealous.
Rosetta Stoned was wicked fast (who knew he could do the banana-danna line faster live than on the record?!) and Pushit was just as good as you could hope for.
Another thing I noticed: for his age, Nard still gets a lot of nasty rowls out. I had read that his voice was sucking this tour, but I thought he sounded as incredible as ever.

Jacksonville tomorrow night! w00t

Also, I'm surprised no one has mentioned the whole "zillion points of lighter lights" before Wings/10kD. The group went to the raised diaz, sat down, smiled at the audience as if posing. Five minutes go by while the crowd screams, cam-phones buzzing all over the place. Justin (or AJ maybe) lights his Bic, and 5 seconds later 50,000 Bics are lit (including mine). It stays that way, an arena filled with yellow wavering stars, for a while.

Then they get back to their posts, Nard says: "Now, no flash photography for this songs please," and they roll into Wings.