The last week has been filled with disappointment for Pearl Jam fans. One canceled show after another, it was tough to wake up in the morning or arrive to the arena and hear the news that Pearl Jam would not be playing. After Vienna, Prague and the first night of Amsterdam, they had one more shot to make this work. Luckily enough, Ed’s voice had been given the green light and the show proceeded as scheduled. Although it was promised from the beginning that this would be a very different show than anything they’d ever done, they came and delivered on their promise. An electric sit-down set to start, a few requests and rare songs and then the big guns that Ed had to adjust his voice a little bit to pull off made this night as close to an instant classic as there is on this tour. And everyone got a chance to sing! Lot’s to cover, last one until we come back in September! Enjoy! (Edit note: I may have said Mike McCready didn’t get a lot of moments and I clearly failed to give a nod to Nothing As It Seems. Rare L I suppose)
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Nobody ever wanted this. Especially twice during the touring year. But here we are. We were so close to the finish line, only four more dates left before closing the chapter on this European run, and as we saw in California, the van broke down on the way to the arena. They actually let people in the building this time before an announcement was made. It’s heartbreaking, but furthermore, you now have to put into consideration that this is part of the deal moving forward. We know that they aren’t getting older. Bodies wear down after a tour like this, and it makes it all the more difficult that families couldn’t attend this time around.
This reaction is an honest discussion of what the future may look like for Pearl Jam. How can they prepare a tour moving forward that isn’t going to cause them to cancel mid-way through? What options could they consider to make it work? Who will be effected in the long haul? We’ll also talk a little about the fan reaction and how YOU should prepare for shows and traveling moving forward. It’s not a happy one, but it had to happen. Hope to see some good news for Prague.
After a memorable show in Krakow on the 2022 European tour, we’re set to go back to Poland to cover the Heineken Open’er Festival show from 2010. The show was a day after the Berlin show from that year, which had a touching tribute to the Roskilde victims being the 10th anniversary of the tragedy. That theme was on their minds at this show as Ed has to deal with some early crowd rambunctiousness that he had nearly no patience for.
This was in the middle of touring for Backspacer, so we’ll be able to catch up on songs from that album for the first time in about 6 months. This is including The Fixer, where we try to make sense of the recent infatuation that blew us away after it was crossed off a setlist earlier in this tour. Great versions of Hail, Hail, Even Flow, Amongst The Waves and Rearviewmirror are all discussed, but perhaps most importantly, we get a version of Just Breathe with bass!
Joining us to tell her story is our Patron Anita Stelmasiuk who had a long journey before making it to her first show. Get to hear her stories about joining the Ten Club at an early age, the challenges she faced in order to get to this show and some of the moments that impacted her that night.
The European tour is winding down to it’s final week and there’s only four shows left! This stop took them to the capital of France, the city of lights and one of the most romantic cities on this planet – Paris! A Lollapalooza show with an eclectic line-up led to a crowd that may have seemed like a mix bag in comparison to normal Pearl Jam shows or even other festivals. Did you know that Instagram models were there for good vibes and photo ops?!? Anyway, just like most shows on this tour, we have a decent mixture of the routine songs that are mixed in every night or every other, but then we have a couple of unexpected surprises. Satan’s Bed makes a really rare appearance here, and after Rearviewmirror’s inexplicable absence, Go would be the next one that you’d think absolutely needed to be played. We’ll check in with all of that, and maybe a little on climate change.
Ahh finally! The conversation since London had once again turned into a ‘where’s Rearviewmirror’ conversation. We shared numbers, we shared milk carton memes and you guys responded sharing the same position. Now we finally got it again. It feels like a breath of fresh air that an old friend came back to visit. The set up and anticipation for it with Porch at the number 2 spot and then waiting during the killer main set to see if the band heard our voices, when it happened, it was cathartic. I’m not sure if the band and team pays attention to us, but enough voices put it out there and it feels like we sent a message that was received. Good on you! This show isn’t all about RVM, we’re gonna dig into the five Gigaton songs that were played and how what’s happening in Ukraine impacted a lot of the themes of this show, culminating in a massive performance of River Cross. And Hard To Imagine! Hard to imagine that! This is a big one, enjoy it folks!
After the big memorable weekend in London, Budapest was the next on the bus schedule. It’s unfamiliar territory as Pearl Jam hasn’t played there since 1996. But just like we saw in the last time Pearl Jam played in a city where they haven’t returned to in a while, they get all of the songs they’ve missed in that large span of time! Wash opener! Brain of J (grrr)! TWO from Riot Act! and of course… the return of SLOW LUKIN! Lots of conversations to have here, even if the video was sparse. We’ll also return to the never ending conversation of where’s Rearviewmirror? Helping us with a little RVM guitar tutorial is Branden Palomo from the Better Band Podcast! Also, another PJ pod host joins us as Chris Warne from Ventricles Pumping shares his experience and favorite moments from this show!
This show has been on our radar for quite a while and we’re happy to finally get it out to you in this episode! In the summer of 1993 prior to the release of Vs., Pearl Jam was doing some touring opening up for U2 and Neil Young getting at most around 45-60 minutes of set time. That was until they hit the middle of the prairies in Manitoba, Canada to headline Sunfest. However, nobody knows this show under that name. This show has properly been dubbed, Mudfest. A rainy evening up in Gimli caused for slippery conditions and a misty drizzle that followed the band around the whole night. But the legend of the show doesn’t end there. We got a racous, inebriated Eddie Vedder at his absolute best firing up the crowd and letting his voice growl and shred the entire night. The early performances of six Vs. songs are eye opening, especially Go, Animal and Indifference, which had the same show closing vibe that we are known to see nowadays.
Come for the mud, stay for the belittling of SetlistFm.
Prior to this tour overseas, the shows that everyone had marked on their calendar as being the ones to look out for were both nights in Hyde Park. We got them this weekend, and boy did they deliver! This reaction episode zeroes in on both nights as we tackle all of the big moments from Better Man being a surprise opener, to some of the songs we may have thought were out of rotation such as Breath, Rats and Leash, and then a powerful dedication out of Light Years and an extremely impassioned speech on gun violence prior to Throw Your Hatred Down. What show was the better of the two? Help us decide because it’s nearly impossible to choose! Also, we’re gonna talk about merch in this one for the first time in these reaction shows!
First time we’re digging into a profile episode in a while! Today we get to chat with Horizon Leg Patron Amy Wynn about her Pearl Jam fandom. She’ll join us coordinated with her episode choice this week about Lollapalooza from Shoreline Amphitheater in 1992. It’s a great conversation featuring her early obsession with the band, dropping music altogether and then rediscovering her fandom and making up for lost time by traveling the country to experience them live. And we’ll discuss what happened in Sacramento a month and a half ago and how we had to readjust when the band had to cancel.
A two for one special as this episode will include recaps of both the Stockholm and Copenhagen shows. These shows have a deep range of emotions, reacting to what’s going on in our world from continued gun violence to America losing abortion rights, as well as returning back to the country where the most challenging tragedy of their lives took place. We’ll get heavily into those topics, but also some discussion about people’s observations of the setlists up to this point. And songs, songs are included in these conversations because if they weren’t, we’d have absolutely nothing to go off of. Enjoy!
In this month we’re going to be touching up on some of Pearl Jam’s past festival dates, starting with the first touring festival that helped make the band at Lollapalooza in 1992. Two shows at the Shoreline Amphitheater kicked off this tour, and we’re gonna cover the second night because it’s the only one that has a bootleg attached. We’ll share a clip from our Horizon Profile episode with Amy Wynn, who was at the first night of the two-day kick-off. We’ll also get to talk about an entertaining interview that exists on the internet featuring Stone and Jeff on MTV’s 120 Minutes. They discuss how they met, how they felt about touring at the time, and a word that you can say on TV that absolutely caught the attention of Stone. That’s probably the big moment to tune in for!
We’d all circled this one when the tour was announced…June 30th. How would the band acknowledge what happened 22 years ago at Roskilde? They took the stage late in the evening and opened with back-to-back covers for the first time in nearly 30 years. John is joined by Dave JanTausch from livefootsteps.org to break down everything that happened at Rock Werchter 2022. We’ll talk about the politics of playing Whipping and Daughter, Ed’s speech before Long Road and the moment of silence that preceded it, and continue to put up missing notices for some Gigaton songs that seem to have disappeared. Plenty of stat talk for you stat nerds out there as well. Enjoy, and onward to Stockholm!
Is this gonna be a good episode? You’re darned tootin! With many Cohn Brothers movie quotes aside, this is our final episode of our OTOTO states month emanating from Fargo, North Dakota in 2003. This is the first instance in 188 official episodes and 224 shows in total that we’ve covered that we get to talk about Arc. Arc is one of their more fascinating songs due to the weight that it holds being the tribute written for the Roskilde victims. The band would go on to play this nine times, the same number of victims from the tragedy, and none of the official bootlegs include any performance of this. We’ll get into the unique presentation that it had live and how impactful it was, even as a show opener, in it’s short stay that year.
Another big point of conversation from this one is a version of In My Tree being played for the first time in 69 shows. This song having not been played for that long mixed in with an illness from Ed meant it was never going to be as crisp of a version that we would’ve heard in 1996. This became a little bit of an improv where the lyrics and music weren’t exactly linear. Ed has some things on his mind and comes up with some beautiful improved lyrics for the end. We’ll talk about how this set the tone for other versions of In My Tree that year, especially the version that everyone remembers from Madison Square Garden.
All this and good discussion on 1/2 Full, I Am Mine, Better Man, Thumbing My Way, Rearviewmirror, I Am A Patriot and Crazy Mary.
Well that’s more like it! We’ve been doing these reaction episodes for the last week hoping that we would get some type of differentiation in setlists on this run. Memorable and surprising moments. In Frankfurt last night, all of our patience was rewarded! The opening song set the tone for the night, a massive surprise in Inside Job that hadn’t been opened with since touring for the self-titled record in 2006. We’ll talk about all of the build up that the moment had and how it opened up the gate for other songs that had yet to be played this year such as Last Exit, Fatal and In My Tree. We’ll take a deep dive on some of the rarities in this one and discuss their impact on the set. We’ll also chat about a relevant line in Corduroy, Mike McCready’s spotlight, Josh Klinghoffer soloing and the backend of Gigaton getting representation. Especially River Cross which finally escaped the cut (thank you organ wranglers for your service). It’s the first massive show of this tour, you won’t want to miss this discussion!
We’re starting to get used to this show thing happening every other day again, yeah? The fourth show of the European leg transpired in Imola, Italy, home of the Formula 1 racing event Emilia Romagna Grand Prix. The show was off to the races from the start. A lot of topics to be discussed from the appreciation of no covers happening in this set, Even Flow’s consistent placement outside of the “Even Flow spot”, the first appearances of songs from Avocado and Riot Act in 2022 and Mike McCready’s psychopathic performance of Black. We’ll also spend time discussing the current state of America and the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Ed, never shy about his opinion on pro-choice, brought the topic into the set and made it one of the themes for the night. The two things that stood out from him expressing frustration were his aggression during the ‘sitting bullshit’ verse, and the W.M.A. tag off of Daughter. Challenging, but important topics needed to be brought up as our country spins into turmoil.
No John for this one, so Randy is joined by Hallucinogenic Recipe co-host Patrick Boegel! Enjoy the ramblings!
We’re back to react! The tour moves ahead to day number 3 as they plant their non-carbon footprint on Zurich, Switzerland. Follow up on a Berlin show that had it’s moments, but certainly some causes for concern, the band came back with 20 songs here and a little bit more of a blend of deeper fan favorites in their catalog. Animal, Present Tense, In Hiding and Smile all represented a nice change, and the deeper Vs. cuts in the Daughter tag were a nice surprise. But there are still discussions to be has. There’s still a lack of Gigaton, there’s still an entire chunk of 2000s records that haven’t been represented, and while some fans may be getting antsy, we try to figure out a reason why this may be the case. We’ll also spend a little time discussing the fan situation that happened during Animal, the opener streak being broken, a handful of songs getting cut for the set, and the tremendously large amount of Ten songs mixed in. Enjoy this, because we do!
We’re now two shows down on this European leg! Yesterday we saw the band take the stage on the longest day of the year in one of the most beautiful venues in existence – Wahlbuhne in Berlin. There is a good amount to talk about here – the opener streak extending to 15, crowd surfers, medleys, aging voices, four Gigaton songs played but is there enough variety? Seeing as though 2-hour 23 song sets are going to be what to expect, we try and make some sense of what later sets could end up looking like. Also, a big win for fan campaigns as Roland, a fan stricken with ALS, got a standing ovation ahead of Porch. It’s all right here! Leave your questions, comments, rebuttals down in the comment section below!
This episode is about promises. Promises broken, promises kept, and promises broken yet again. The band has had a bit of a rocky relationship with Idaho’s state capital, and while this episode will focus on all of the above, it will mainly be dedicated to the positive memories. If you go back to the beginning of their relationship, it began with disappointment as Pearl Jam had to cancel a date on the 1995 Vitalogy tour. They would finally set foot there in 2000 experiencing an unforgettable show that we’ll go into in full detail here. As Ed states multiple times during this show, it was an amazing crowd and one that he promised to return to. Alas, as sequel was initially planned for the Riot Act tour in 2003, but due to circumstances that we aren’t quite sure of, they had to cancel this show as well. The band has never been back to Idaho, and that’s why it’s a part of our OTOTO States Series!
This show was given the high honor of being an “apeman” bootleg, which meant it was one of 18 shows in 2000 that the band thought very highly of. It’s easy to tell why. The energy is palpable at this show, the band played extremely tight on a consistent high-tempo pace and the crowd ate it up the whole way. We’ll talk about great renditions of Go, Grievance, Small Town, Better Man with the Romanza intro, Daughter, Rearviewmirror and Parting Ways. How high will this one be rated? You may want to tune in to find out!
Aaaaand we’re back! It was only a month, but there were so many questions that were left unanswered after they left California. We’ll never know what would’ve happened in Sacramento and Vegas, so our attention drifts over to Europe to focus on the second leg of the 2022 touring circuit. They head back to one of their old stomping grounds, the festival made home to one of the most popular Pearl Jam shows of all time – Pinkpop. It had been 30 years since Ed jumped off the camera rig, and right off the bat there is an homage to that night, opening up with the Even Flow/Why Go combo. We’ll get to talk more about Gigaton, a crazy 14-show streak, a song that hadn’t been played in 737 shows and the return of Matt and Jeff. We’re back, enjoy it folks!
Our fourth OTOTO state this month has us heading to South Dakota early on the first leg of the Yield run. It was only the sixth appearance that Matt Cameron was making for the band at the time as a replacement drummer. Of course, no lack of confidence with playing this hefty catalog. Cameron throws in all of his patented flourishes and unmatched speed to create performances that at the time was a major change with some of these songs that have become major staples of the Pearl Jam set. We’ll run through it all and focus on some of the moments that Matt made special.
Speaking of special, this show features the debut of a grouping of songs that have become a rare instance that people chase from show to show. This night in South Dakota was the first time that they ever performed the “man trilogy” songs back-to-back-to-back. We’ll dig into how special this trio has become and how the grouping elevated Nothing Man to become one of the best singalongs in their catalog.
We’ll also preview the upcoming European tour, and find a way to get off topic a bit with in reference to wedding songs.