If you’ve checked out videos from our time in Seattle, New York City, Philadelphia and Boston, you’ve seen how much fun this crew has at Pearl Jam shows and the events surrounding them. This video features some footage left off of the original documentaries. A few songs and clips are the same, but this is mostly a highlight package displaying all the fun we had at shows this year!
All Podcast Episodes
For the third week in a row, you voted for which 2024 Pearl Jam show to cover – this time from the second North American leg! Without question, it was an easy choice as Philly Night 1 ended up with nearly 70% of the vote! And no bias came into play here at all! A large percentage of you are well aware that this was a special night for me, but beyond that, this show is unquestionably the best that Pearl Jam had to offer this year. This Saturday night crowd in Philly did not mess around, and while the setlist choices were excellent, the crowd and the energy that the band fed off them was the story.
For long time followers of the podcast, you probably have a good understanding for how personal this story is to me. Brain Of J. has been my white whale ever since I started going to shows 16 years ago. It was the song that truly kicked off my infatuation with this band back when I was twelve, and in 33 shows I had not seen it until this night. It was a cathartic moment that we’ll relive, not just for myself, but also for my friends who understood what this meant to me. And the version is an absolute banger to boot! So yes, a lot of the conversation is dominated by this song and my thoughts during and after the moment, but that wasn’t even my only fish I caught as Long Road was something that I had never seen open a show before.
Everything in this set is eyebrow raising, but we’ll spend time on great performances of Why Go, Red Mosquito, Running, Chloe Dancer/Crown Of Thorns, State Of Love And Trust and much more from this show. We also invite good friends of the podcast, Aaron Redmond and Mike Cribier, who I got to attend this show with to talk about how special it was.
Another travel documentary about the day of the Fenway Park night one show from 2024. This was a pretty wonderful experience where out of the blue, we were offered tickets to go down from our seats on the third base side all the way to GA! This video is all about us having fun and appreciating the music. Enjoy!
We’re continuing our coverage featuring the best shows from 2024 this week with the selection from the European tour – Barcelona Night 1. There weren’t many shows to choose from thanks to a few cancelations on this run in London and Berlin for two shows, but this Barcelona show is the return after Ed caught a serious case of bronchitis that put him on the shelf for 10 days. Joining us on the podcast this week is our friend Alison, AKA the Voice Queen! She is a speech pathologist that specializes in voice recovery, and we’ll get to learn some pretty remarkable information about what age can do to someone’s vocal chords and how someone in Ed’s situation can make a full recovery to perform again. This is a can’t miss interview!
As for any concerns of Ed coming into this show not at 100% due to illness, those concerns can be halted. Ed will demonstrate right away how powerful he sounds by utilizing his lungs at full capacity playing the harmonica on the Footsteps opener, and sounding absolutely pristine on Nothingman to follow that. There are no signs of damage at this show, and all the layoff did was made the entire band hungry to take the stage because this night is all about the energy from both band and crowd alike. Songs like Given To Fly, Even Flow and Do The Evolution have a little bit of the South American flair that fits the passionate Spain crowd, but the Dark Matter songs were also big highlights here. From Scared Of Fear to Upper Hand and Setting Sun, they were at the top of their game when it came to new material.
We’ll spend a lot of time discussing the speech referencing Ed’s “near death experience” that was shared during Wasted Reprise, and we’ll talk about how Ed’s vulnerability in moments like these can help us as fans better communicate with one another. Also, lots of gear talk! Boosters, hammers, a killswitch and a Fender on steroids will dominate the technical segments of the program…
…and lest I forget… Hardcore Nudity!
The travels along the east coast in September of 2024 continued as Pearl Jam stepped foot in Philadelphia for an unbelievable night. We kick off the doc by doing the most Philadelphia thing imaginable (LOL) and then we spend Saturday hanging out in the merch line and meeting good friends before the show. I’ll react to maybe the greatest PJ moment of my life, and then celebrate my birthday around the city with cheesesteaks, records, and a live podcast where we are greeted by a Philadelphia sports and music icon!
Back so soon? After Pearl Jam just finished up a 37-show 2024 tour, they leave almost no time to breathe before announcing their next set of dates featuring shows in the south and the rust belt. Randy and Javier break everything down from the importance of some of the locations where they have not stepped foot in in well over a decade to some of the demand for each show. Join us as we get ready for the new tour year and can’t wait to get on the road again!
It’s that time of year! We have eleven months to take in all of our experiences from 2024 that we bottle up for one big review of everything once December rolls around. So this entire month will feature episodes covering Pearl Jam shows from each leg of the 2024 Dark Matter tour as voted on by you the listeners! So we’re kicking it off with the winner of the May leg poll which happens to be the first night in Las Vegas. These back to back Vegas shows were make ups for having to cancel back in 2022, so these fans who had waited to see them in Vegas – not for two years, but it had been 18 years since they had last played in 2006, they got a setlist tailor made for diehards.
This being the fifth show of the year meant that a lot of the kinks of Dark Matter were still getting worked out, including setlist placement and fan reactions for some of the songs. The first four shows of the year put an emphasis on highlighting those songs and sticking within a relatively standard set of songs not uncommon to hear at a Pearl Jam show in any year. Pun can be intentional or not, but Vegas was the first gamble where many of the big moments from this show came from songs they don’t usually play. An opening combo of Sometimes and Hard To Imagine sets that tone, and then performances of songs such as Breakerfall, Tremor Christ, Inside Job and Breath reinforce it. Even some of the common songs felt like big changes as Black was the third song played in the set, and Corduroy was featured in the encore which included a little U2 flavor on the intro.
We’ll tell the story of the set, but there will be no better story than the one we share from a moment where Ed gave gambling money to a fan named Erin with the challenge to double it. We’ll hear the full details of that story from Erin’s perspective and how it led to a very sincere and special moment at the second show a day later.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and all of your loved ones! Out of absolutely no attempts to make any puns or jokes for this episode, it just so happens that we are covering the 1996 show from Istanbul, Turkey. Yeah, believe it or not it’s just total coincidence that it’s coming out this week… Anyway, this is the one and only time that Pearl Jam has traveled to Istanbul, and no one seems to remember it. Why is that you may ask? Well, as you’ll hear in this episode, this bootleg is no where close to being top notch even for the time. But the promise is that by the end of this podcast we’d cover every show in the catalog, so why wait to put this in the books?
We’ll spend a lot of time discussing this one off location and how perhaps the language barrier or unfamiliarity with the crowd initially kept the band from interacting. As you’ll see by the end of the show, they’ll find ways to all sing along together. This is a crowd that was very familiar with the popular songs from Ten – Even Flow, Jeremy and Alive, and you’ll hear them singing along loud and (somewhat) clear. Even though this bootleg is a tough listen, we are able to provide the one high quality recording that came out of this in Hail, Hail, and you’ll be able to decipher enough going on to get a pretty good feel of what this show was. Included in that is a total forgotten gem – an 8-minute version of Blood that we’ll gush over!
Since the tour has come to an end, we’ll share our final thoughts on how it turned out and look ahead to the possibilities of seeing them again in 2025. Get ready for next week as all throughout December we will be covering a show from every leg of this year’s tour!
The 2024 tour documentary series continues with this collection of footage taken prior to the 9/4 Madison Square Garden show. Myself and friends get to have fun in the city pregaming with karaoke, telling great stories, sharing special moments with friends and of course witnessing a banger of a Pearl Jam show!
So it’s come to this. After a big album announcement in February that led us to a World Tour that spanned seven months across the east and west coasts of America, a few spots in Europe and the Oceania area, we have reached our final destination. But if you are gonna end such a memorable tour with a bang, this is EXACTLY how you do it! The final night of the tour was a kitchen sink show with moments that some may have thought they’d never experience.
The biggest moment of the show is when they busted out one of the ultimate rock anthems of the 90’s for the first time without it’s counterpart, Chris Cornell, since he had passed away. Hunger Strike had this Sydney crowd in complete shock and awe, and immediately turned this show from very good to an instant classic. We will get into all sorts of discussion about the performance, including whether or not this song almost had it’s “Alive curse” broken.
And how about the Vitalogy tributes here? While no full album, nor my prediction of Bugs was played, they paid homage to the 30th anniversary of the album with excellent performances of Tremor Christ, Immortality, Spin The Black Circle and Better Man. And that in most cases would usually be good enough to call it a night… BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE. Brain Of J, In Hiding, Save You, Dissident, No Surrender as a cover, Alone, Yellow Wing! This band took no shortcuts on making this night an extraordinary way to end the tour.
For the last time, we hear from our No Surrender Aussie Crew featuring the likes of Chris and Chantelle Warne, William Rees, Alex Hoggard, Caroline Vader Ritter, Brad Arundale, Gianluca Camma and many many more voices. Please send them a thank you note for their tremendous work helping out on this tour!
I hope this dream lasts forever… Thank you for all of your support during this entire tour run! Looking forward to more in the future!
Pearl Jam walks in to Sydney after setting an extremely high bar for their last show in Melbourne, which means they know they have to end the tour on a high note. The penultimate show of the tour was yet again another phenomenal effort from this band. This show had a ton of requests and dedications in the form of songs like Come Back, Last Kiss and Even Flow, but the marquee moment of this show comes with an absolutely stunning Mike McCready performance during Black. Or Porch, depending on who you ask.
The crew from site led by Chris Warne is back at it again giving us the rundown of their favorite moments. However, there is a lot of discussion about Vitalogy right now due to it’s 30th anniversary. There has been a group going to the shows holding up a massive sign requesting them play the full album. Every other 90’s record has been played live except for this. You have to wonder if those weird interstitial songs like Pry, To, Aye Davanita and Stupid Mop are what holds it back, but we will get into a full blown discussion on the opportunity for the last show of the year to have something legendary go down during it. And I will make a very bold prediction when it comes to nausea being tickled…
One more to go. Can’t believe it’s over, yet at the same time, I can’t believe we made it.
We’ve come to the end of Pearl Jam’s 2024 Dark Matter tour, and our final destination of the year is Sydney, Australia. We go back to a show from 1995 in this episode to get you hyped up for the last shows. This was on the band’s first ever tour of Australia, so they are familiarizing themselves with this crowd and territory. Not to mention, this was at a time when the band went on hiatus from TicketMaster, and there was a ticket situation surrounding scalpers from this show that we’ll get into detail on.
We know the drill. It’s the Vitalogy tour. The performances are explosive, gritty and loud. While Ed was dealing with a sore throat at this show, it didn’t hinder versions of fan favorites such as Go, Spin The Black Circle, Corduroy, Not For You and Porch. This show also took place on Jeff’s birthday, so we get a big cake celebration and an appearance from a Chili Pepper to cause chaos. Flea joins the band on stage to play a very unique rendition of Needle And The Damage Done on bass with no accompanyment from Pearl Jam.
After next week, we’ll be busy covering the best shows of 2024! Don’t forget to vote via our social media pages for which shows you’d like to hear us talk about in December!
We finish our two night stint in Melbourne with the show and setlist that should have everybody talking. This is what it’s like for this band to find a groove five shows into a tour. This show had spectacular moments ranging from surprises to a few rare ones. Most importantly, the return of the It’s OK tag after six years! After being left on the chopping block at multiple shows, we finally see Setting Sun make it’s Australia debut. Light Years is the first Binaural song to appear down under. But the magic is what made this night truly special, and we’ll dig into that with some of our favorite guests we’ve heard from every night on this tour.
Chris Warne is back with the Live On 4 Legs super team featuring Alex Hoggard, William Rees, Caroline Vader Ritter, Brad Arundale and a cast of more characters to chat about how unbelievable this show was for them.
Two more in Sydney before the 2024 tour fades.
If there were a city in Australia that’s known for being the defining Pearl Jam location, Melbourne would by far be the one everyone gravitates towards. They played a legendary show there in 1998 that has been pressed on vinyl, so returning for the first time since the “real” release of Give Way meant the stakes were gonna be high. There aren’t a lot of times where this band won’t rise to the occasion and exceed every bit of expectations, so of course this show was more of the same.
We’ll get to hear from a lot of our friends out on site for this one, including many first timers who have now experienced that amazing feeling of what it’s like to bare witness to it. Chris Warne rounds up the troops again and chats with Caroline Vader Ritter, William Rees, Alex Hoggard, Brad Arundale, Gianluca Camma and many more folks who stop to share their stories.
One more in Melbourne on Monday, see you then!
Many of us know what it’s like to sit through a weather delay at a Pearl Jam show. The energy gets tense, there’s a lot of impatient waiting and a sense that perhaps the show will not go on as scheduled. We had a little bit of a scare here in Gold Coast as thunderstorms caused the night to be tampered with a little bit, but the show took place and the crowd was treated to a 22-song setlist with a few surprises here and there.
The biggest surprise comes from the form of “Got To Give,” the one song off of Dark Matter that seemingly had its cord cut after the second show of the year in Vancouver. They play it here, and we’ll get into a discussion of what the future of this song live may be. Other performances we see are “Man Of The Hour,” “Severed Hand,” “I Got Shit,” and “Corduroy” as an opener.
This may be a set where you look at it on paper and it could look more impressive than the Auckland shows due to it’s variety, but we’ll hear from Chris Warne and the gang from site about why the storms might’ve affected a little of the energy from this one.
Excelsior, Melbourne!
Pearl Jam’s short Australia/New Zealand is underway, and the next stop on the map is Melbourne! It’s a city that has a very rich history with this band featuring countless of classic shows from the early 90’s. Due to special Patreon request, this week we are covering the 2009 show. It’s a different setlist than what we covered from Auckland last week, but we’ll dig into more Backspacer deep cuts, crowd friendly moments and Ben Harper collaborations.
Some of you may know Javier’s frustration with 2009 from a sound perspective, how they were using tube amps that did not aid some of the intricacies that Stone and Mike add to specific songs when they play. We’ll have a good long discussion on how all of that works from both the technical and non-technical POVs, and present examples of songs it benefits and others that it doesn’t. We have some great moments in this set to get into including Indifference and Red Mosquito with Ben Harper, Throw Your Arms Around Me with Liam Finn and a version of Porch that unleashes the best of Stone Gossard.
New Zealand is in the books! After a big return for night one, the band came out again and did what they do best to put this crowd in a frenzy and play some of the best songs in their catalog. In this show, the big moment takes place during the encore when Ed invites Neil Finn to the stage to play an incredible rendition of “Throw Your Arms Around Me” that should be considered the highlight of this short tour to this point. We got the Haka dance to begin the show again before Release, only 4 Dark Matter songs with “Wreckage” being the only repeat, no “Setting Sun” after cutting it on Friday and an encore featuring “Smile,” “Animal,” and “Rearviewmirror” that looked like a big treat for this crowd.
The LO4L Down Under crew are back to tell their stories! Headed by Chris Warne, he’ll chat with Alex Hoggard, William Rees, his 8-year old daughter, and more friends, including a guy who traveled from Boston that Ed shouted out on night 1.
Next up, Gold Coast!
Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back. It’s the final leg of a great tour run that we’ve had this year, and we’re celebrating the band’s return to both New Zealand and Australia for the first time in 10 years! The setlist was very much like a welcome back set. The band came out there and hit this crowd with a barrage of their biggest hits and got a warm reception for their troubles. From the emotion of “Small Town,” the excitement of the Dark Matter songs being played for the first time down there, to the surprise of “Hard To Imagine,” there is a lot of good takeaways from this show to set the tone for the next six.
We get to hear from one of our favorite Kiwis, Chris Warne, and one of our favorite Englishmen, Alex Hoggard, who will do their fair share of reacting and responding. They’ll discuss everything from the energy, to expectations and how a song like “Quick Escape” maybe didn’t quite hit with this crowd (how dare they!). Glad to hear from the both of them, and you can expect them to be staples of the reaction episodes every night on this tour.
So, there is a bit of an elephant in the room in regards to some events that happened in America earlier this week. Some people may feel ecstatic over the outcome, others may feel fearful of the future ahead. Even though they are not in the US right now, it seemed pretty clear that they would address it somehow, as they are a band that always tackles the issues head on. While there was no naming of any names, Ed’s speech before Just Breathe was consistent with his statement the entire year – let’s stand united. Now in discussing this, I suppose I could not help but add in my own personal two cents. The intention is not meant to shame any one, but just like Ed, I’m putting forth a way where the next four years may not have to be a nightmare for us like the last 8 were, and it comes with one simple request… respect one another. As many of you know, I’m not gonna shy away from using my voice, and I promise that this will not be a common thread throughout the foreseeable future. But I felt like if there were any time to say something, it’s right now…
And Javier is on this episode!!!
Pearl Jam goes back on the road this week, and for the first time in ten years, they are making stops in Australia and New Zealand! The run will begin in Auckland, which is where our episode this week took place in on the 2009 Backspacer tour. Thanks to our Kiwi friend, Chris Warne, for putting in this episode request through our Patreon. He’ll have info on some fun stuff going down at the shows, including the post-game reaction spots.
This show offers a very unique OTOTO performance that you’ll only get when touring the country. With the help of Neil and Liam Finn, there’s an excellent performance of a song called Not Given Lightly by local legend, Chris Knox. We’ll spend good time on this rarity that you may not have heard before. Other big highlights include one of the best versions of Severed Hand you’ll ever hear, an amazing version of Faithfull, the uber rare Hold On played for only the second time, a fired up main set closing with Better Man and Red Mosquito featuring Ben Harper on slide guitar.
All that, and we prepare for the upcoming tour starting this weekend!
Happy election day! One of the most important times in America happens every four years where we use our democratic power to decide who we want to see run our country for the next four years. As we will be waiting impatiently for the results, we’ve decided to release a little bonus episode focusing on a short performance that Pearl Jam was featured on in Washington DC as the Vote For Change tour in 2004 winded down. Only five performances here, but if you need five songs to define what this band was going through politically during the 2004 election run, I don’t think you’re gonna find better choices. We’ll break them all down and talk a little bit about the event that took place featuring all of the artists who went out on tour, but mostly we’ll complain about Rolling Stone articles from 20 years ago being paywalled after the first initial read, preventing some information getting out to you guys that we planned to share. Outside of that, enjoy!