All Podcast Episodes

As Pearl Jam is preparing for another memorable weekend at Wrigley Field this week, we were put in a somewhat difficult spot as to what we should cover to get you guys excited for the show. The dilemma was that we had already covered all five Wrigley shows back in the summer of 2020, so what would we do? Well, there’s a little show that took place in Chicago in 2005 that doesn’t get discussed as much as it should. To raise money for Hurricane Katrina relief funds, Robert Plant and Pearl Jam combined forces to create an out of this world all-star show. Our friend Jason Brown was lucky enough to be there that night, and he’ll join us to tell the stories of how it all went down.

To get into this show that took place in an intimate venue that has a capacity of less than 2,000, you had to make a $1,000 donation in order to get in. Jason made that donation, but you’ll want to hear the wild story of how it happened. As legendary Led Zeppelin front man Robert Plant and his band The Strange Sensation opened up the night, the place was abuzz of whether the two rock ‘n’ roll titans would combine forces. Lo and behold, they did! The set they played with Plant was pretty remarkable, a combination of Given To Fly and Going To California as a wink wink to the song’s influence kicked things off, followed by a few standard 1960s songs such as Little Sister and Money (That’s What I Want). And then the band truly breaks out the Zeppelin heavy hitters – Fool In The Rain and Thank You. We’ll have a very interesting discussion on Fool In The Rain featuring facts that may surprise you.

The Gear Guru also joins us for this show and while we spend some time talking Zeppelin with him, we’ll dig into Save You, Porch and Rearviewmirror that may or may not have sounded like other Pearl Jam songs.

With the new tour firing up this week in Montana, on Monday Pearl Jam will be heading to Indianapolis to take care of some unfinished business. Last year was set to be the band’s first appearance in the city in 13 years until illness took over and caused a postponement. As they make good on their promise to return, this episode covers the last instance where they visited Indiana’s capital back in 2010. We’ll get you hyped up for the return of the tour and answer some of the questions that you guys posed to us via social media!

With a new show on the horizon, is it fair to say that Indianapolis doesn’t have a Pearl Jam show that’s considered an all-timer? While neighboring places like Detroit, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Milwaukee have all laid claim to have hosted shows that people hold in very high regard, this year may be Indianapolis’s year. 2010 is not by any means a bad show, but does it stand out among a very good slate from that US run that year? With the conditions not going the way of a typical concert, marred with a 90 minute delay due to thunderstorms, the band came out and played a very efficient set that took two hours and ten minutes to play an impressive 29 songs. Most of these songs are of the shorter, pop-rock variety to keep the mood of what may have been an anxious crowd after a rain delay lighthearted and fun. The positive outlook of the Backspacer era tunes helped that cause with songs like Unthought Known and Supersonic flourishing in this spotlight.

We’ll spend our time talking about some big moments that include a fantastic rendition of Off He Goes, Force Of Nature, Wishlist and a nod to hometown heroes, the Jackson 5.

We’re getting you prepped up for Pearl Jam’s second North American leg of the Dark Matter tour by once again featuring shows in the locations that they’ll be playing. First up is a hometown show for Mr. Jeff Ament as we cover the Missoula show from 1995. This is the beginning of the Vitalogy era and is the send off show before they embarked on a trip through the Pacific Rim.

As always with this era, this show is all about Jack Irons leading the charge. His time in the band was still in its infancy, but you can see the direction that the band wanted to go with him. While the brand new Vitalogy songs were squarely in the forefront, it pushed aside songs from Ten that had been extremely popular only three years prior. There’s only two songs from Ten in this show (feel free to include State Of Love And Trust from the time period) and the way those songs were attacked was in a way to trying something different to make them feel fresh. Porch was lifted from it’s normal closing role to the fifth spot in the set that saw it’s typically iconic live solo abridged, Even Flow experimented with a new intro and pieces of the song that strayed from the radio version, and SOLAT is a completely different monster that they did not continue moving forward with. This show also has killer versions of Spin The Black Circle, Immortality and one of three full versions of W.M.A. that Jack has played on. Also, we have a song that’s a Live On 4 Legs first at this show!

Javier’s segment will focus on that incredibly insane version of W.M.A. and we invite one half of the Hallucinogenic Recipe podcast, Patrick Boegel, to break down the circulation of the bootleg tape from this show.

This episode takes us back to a time when Pearl Jam’s popularity was skyrocketing. MTV Unplugged had took place, the Jeremy music video was out and the band garnered a lot of attention traveling on the Lollapalooza tour as one of the afternoon openers. This episode covers a Lollapalooza show from Fairfax County, Virginia where the band were in their prime and “all the rage”. The episode will cover not just Pearl Jam’s impact on the festival, but also the festival’s impact on the culture of the early 90’s.

This show is seen as somewhat of a pillar moment for the band this summer because as they were rising up the charts, so were their Seattle brethren Soundgarden traveling on the same tour. Right around this time as both Vedder and Cornell became the defacto faces of the grunge scene, people were starting to pick up on the collaboration that they did for Temple Of The Dog a year prior. Hunger Strike was blossoming into a massive hit and wasn’t something that was played often until they decided to join forces at this show. From there, it became one of those rare moments that people salivated for. They’d continue to bust it out on occasion during this tour, including during a random side stage performance in Phoenix.

This episode is produced a little bit differently since we are only working with eight songs. You’ll get the rare experience of listening to an entire show on this podcast! Of course we stop and chat in between, but every song will be played in full with Even Flow as a lone exception. This episode also features a conversation about the newly retired Aerosmith and how that happening this past week tied in perfectly with this episode.

It’s Olympics week, and since we’ve been following heavily on some of Pearl Jam’s past European shows lately, why not add one more into the fold to keep the theme alive? This show from Vienna is like running a marathon as the band treats us to nearly 3 hours of an excellent 35-song set. Everything was on the table here as they dipped into songs from nearly every album, including many of the check list songs for all of the serious collectors.

The theme for this show? Less talk, more rock. The band wasted no time at the beginning of the show going on a run of eight straight songs to start the show. This was not necessarily a night for chatting, it was a night for amazing bass grooves and solos ala Gossard. We’ll talk about how great they both sound at this one and highlight songs such as Hail, Hail and Brain Of J where they both thrived. But the rarities also dominate the night as it’s the last time to date that they’ve played Can’t Keep, Rats and the deep Backspacer cut Speed Of Sound is also featured at this show. We also hear some rare covers involved including Rain, Public Image and Needle And The Damage Done.

We’ll also get into a deep conversation about how meaningful encore 2 sets are outside of creating the party atmosphere to close your night.

It’s time to cover our first show from Pearl Jam’s Dark Matter tour, which also happens to be the first show from Pearl Jam’s Dark Matter tour! It all got started back in May as the band headed north of home to Vancouver to try some new ones out on the Canadian crowd. With 17 shows under our belt now, this is a good opportunity to look back and get a sense of how the new songs are being implemented within their setlists every night.

The first night of the tour saw nine of the eleven album songs played, everything except Waiting For Stevie and Got To Give. Right away you can tell how hard the band had worked on these songs to make them stand out in front of their dedicated crowd. A few things we’ll touch up on with the new ones is how hyper-focused they were during Scared Of Fear in comparison to the looseness of React/Respond, Why Dark Matter has yet to fully flourish, the complexities to how the intro in Upper Hand comes together and why Setting Sun has been an absolutely perfect closer so far.

Those topics, plus some fun versions of other songs in their catalog such as Wash, Red Mosquito, Chloe Dancer/Crown Of Thorns and more!

It’s been a rare occurance throughout Pearl Jam’s history to see them as the opening act on a tour. They toured in support of Neil Young in the early 90’s, and famously for a set of shows for the Rolling Stones in 1997, but for six shows in 2006, Pearl Jam appeared as the opening act for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Pretty good company to cede the headline to, right? This episode covers the second night of Milwaukee’s Summerfest from that run.

A majority of this episode is dedicated to talking about what Tom Petty means to not only us personally, but music and pop culture as a whole. We’ll share stories of our favorite memories getting acquainted with his music, and what he meant to the band as an influence. For a 17-song set, this could have been seen as a typical festival set, but they took advantage of the opportunity and cranked out some special moments. Last Kiss was played as the opener at this show, an occasion that’s only happened two other times, we get rarities such as Sad and Around The Bend and Smile with a little dedication to how the story of the song came to be.

We’ll also discuss the performances of The Waiting and American Girl from the Heartbreakers set that Eddie got to help out with, and the Javier segment is a little bit different this week, so stay tuned for what’s in store!

As we plan to bid farewell to a rocky European tour this week, we’re prepping for the final show of the run in Lisbon, Portugal by covering their performance at the NOS Alive Festival from 2018. This is the same festival that they’ll play this week that they’ve played two other times in previous years. We’ll get to talk about a very special guest who appeared on this show to partake in Rockin’ In The Free World, the legendary Jack White!

The theme of this episode will circle around the stigma that festival shows get for being way too run of the mill setlist wise and too casual crowd wise. For a crowd in Portugal who goes through extended stretches without seeing this band, this show absolutely bucks the trend of being what some may consider a more generic set. This crowd has a few big moments that transpire here like Low Light being used as an opener with Better Man as the follow up, big crowd participation moments on Daughter, Black and Rearviewmirror, a few deeper cuts thrown in like Rats and In My Tree, and a song that we barely get to talk about on this podcast, Can’t Deny Me.

Check out the usual rundown of the setlist, but at the top of the episode we’ll do a quick reaction to the recent shows that took place in Barcelona!

Well. Originally this episode was slated to get you guys excited for the shows taking place in Berlin this week, but while the band was forced to cancel their plans, we’ve decided to stick with ours. Berlin is one of Pearl Jam’s best cities to play in that perhaps nobody ever talks about. This crowd comes into every show ready to bring their a-game, and at this show in 2014, nothing was spared. From waving their arms in the air to clapping in rhythm, bouncing up and down and singing every lyric and guitar melody, the fans in Germany absolutely know how to give this band the best they got.

This Lightning Bolt era show went for nearly 3 hours and featured 34 songs from every variety of rarities to the radio hits. This show will have plenty of great crowd moments, including on songs like Do The Evolution and Sirens where the band is greeted with post-performance melodies. Checklist songs galore here that include God’s Dice, Sleight Of Hand, You Are, Who You Are, All Those Yesterdays, Bee Girl and one of the rarest songs in the Pearl Jam catalog, Hold On played for only the fourth of a total of five times. But that’s not all! Find out why this crowd needed to hear the dulcet tones of the voice of their favorite guitar player, and the hilarious ensuing result.

We’ll of course start the show reacting once again to the news of cancelations, and once again bring more context to the situation.