Podcast Episodes

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.

Pearl Jam loves to play in legendary venues. They’ve conquered the two oldest baseball parks in America, massive stadium venues in South America and plenty of the most famous arenas throughout the world. In London, the absolute cream of the crop when it comes to concert venues is Hyde Park. Back in 2020, Pearl Jam was scheduled to play Hyde Park alongside the Pixies, but after Covid cancelled all plans, they decided to add an extra date due to the demand. This episode covers the first night of a memorable two-night stay.

With massive screens erected for the 65k people to all witness this band from far and near, they came out firing right away. Better Man as an opener sets and amazing tone, Breath was a big surprise played early, Quick Escape featured a little Sex Pistols on the backend and a heartfelt dedication to a fan for Light Years really built up this show to feel as massive as the park. We’ll talk about all of the big moments, as well as focusing on the ticket situation which is currently going happening for the show in London this coming weekend.

It’s time for Pearl Jam to take the Dark Matter tour over to Europe! For the next month, we’ll be doing the same thing as we did in May – focusing on past shows from locations they’re about to embark on. First stop is Dublin, Ireland. It’s been 14 years since the band has been back there, and strangely enough, they’ve only played there six times in total! This episode covers a show from Dublin in 1996 during the No Code tour that marks first of three appearances at The Point Theatre.

This episode will lean heavily on the coverage of No Code tracks as we get in depth with Hail, Hail, In My Tree, Mankind and Who You Are. Of course with this being a Jack Irons show, he’ll dominate much of the conversation. We’ll dig into why some of the Ten songs may not have been his specialty as we touch up on tracks such as Release, Even Flow and Alive. We’ll also spend some time preparing you for the upcoming tour leg and try our hand at coming up with some ideas that could end up being huge surprises this month!

There are countless Pearl Jam shows where all you need to do is mention a location by name and the majority of Pearl Jam fans know exactly what you’re talking about. For one lone night at a chocolate factory, when you mention this Hershey show from 2003, everyone knows that it’s remembered for one thing – mosquito bites! No, this outdoor venue wasn’t invested with mosquitos. The band was greeted by a flasher at this show who had taken her top off in order for the band to recognize her. But what she didn’t realize was that they were coming off of one of the longest shows in their history in Mansfield, MA, meaning a six hour drive to Pennsylvania in the same night potentially left Ed a little sleep deprived. It leads to an all-time rant where he comments on the size of her breasts, a quote that has gone down as one of the most memorable things he’s ever said.

With that being said, the band faced the challenge of following up the experiment by putting together a fun show with a lot of energy. They made up for two songs that were left out of the experiment in Last Exit and Glorified G, dug into some of the deeper Riot Act cuts with Help Help and one of the last versions of Get Right to date, and we get a random appearance of a harmonica on… State Of Love And Trust? Yeah, you read that right. Also, we’ll uncover the true story about a friend of Stone’s who guested on Rockin In The Free World at this show. Where is he now? The answer may surprise you… really surprise you.

Javier makes his return in this episode and will talk about the unique tuning of Daughter, and how that helps transforms the song to make it sound acoustic, even on an electric guitar.

As the west coast leg of the Dark Matter tour has come to a close, now is a great opportunity for us to dig into a few great Pearl Jam shows without covering upcoming tour locations. That takes us to November of 1995. A five-show run featuring shows that were postponed from earlier in the tour year that have gone down in history as some of the best of the era. After being forced to postpone a June Salt Lake City show due to weather conditions, the promise Ed had made was that the band would come back and play twice as long. Which means they came back and played two shows instead of one for their make up. This run will always be most known as hosting the live debuts for both Red Mosquito and Brain Of J, the former of which we’ll talk about in this episode.

Ed would make a quip on night two that it was like the crowd’s parents came to night one. While this show may not reach the excitement of night two, that quote has given this show an undeserved stigma that we’re out to prove is inaccurate. Some great performances go down on this night including ones from Corduroy, Deep, RVM, Immortality and what amounts to probably the longest version of Blood in the catalog. We’ll also dig into an improv titled Seven Years Waiting and a Porch closer that got a little bit weird in the solo.

We’re also only a week out from the Seattle shows, so we’ll chat about the experience and some of the best performances that held up from that night.

Pearl Jam is playing two shows in the City Of Angels this week, so once again we’re back to cover another show from their history that they played in The Fabulous Forum. We’re going back to 2006, the Avocado tour. A tour that we can kind of connect to what they are doing now with Dark Matter considering the high representation that you’ll get each night from the album. This show in LA featured 10 of the 13 tracks while Dark Matter has consistently hovered around 8 of 11. We’ll talk a little bit about the impact of the setlists thus far on this tour and where they intersect with Avocado.

A great crowd show here (which is disappointing when you look at the ticket sales for both Forum shows for this week) and we’ll get into how they made what could be considered a standard setlist to many feel exciting. The crowd came to participate on songs like Release, Corduroy, Even Flow, Small Town, Last Kiss and Alive, but also reacted well to the brand new songs. The highlights of this set that we’ll get into come from Rearviewmirror, Crown Of Thorns, Gone, Big Wave and Inside Job, and we’ll get to see an appearance from Tim Robbins joining in on a modern take of a song by folk musician Phil Ochs.

Javier will join us to talk and teach about the Dumble amps that they’ve been using all tour, and he’ll do a breakdown of Big Wave as well. Stay tuned as he’ll join the show next week in preparation for Seattle!

The Dark Matter tour keeps trucking along as we now have four shows under our belt and are looking forward to a big weekend in Las Vegas where anything can happen! To get you even more excited for that, this week’s episode goes back to the Vegas show during the mighty 2003 Riot Act tour! Coming off of an absolutely legendary performance for their 10th anniversary show in 2000, this crowd came in with a ton of excitement and never let down all night.

This show will feature two guests who are vital to the existence of Pearl Jam – Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart. They’ll join the band for a fun rendition of Rockin’ In The Free World, but before that we’ll get into a conversation about why if it wasn’t for Nancy, Pearl Jam may not have been able to fund Ten following the death of Andy Wood. It’s a story that doesn’t get told often and it never got a mention in PJ20, but we’ll share how it all went down for you here in the episode.

This show should be recognized as a Mike McCready explosion! Mike was on fire the entire night putting on a clinic during such songs as Even Flow, Go, Love Boat Captain, Breath, Crazy Mary, Fuckin’ Up and that just scratches the surface. Javier will join us for two segments to gush over the tone of Even Flow and Crazy Mary for this one!

The Dark Matter tour is now underway! As Pearl Jam took the stage this past weekend for two shows in Vancouver, we now know how the songs on the brand new record sound like, and know a little of how they’ll be structured live. The tour will be addressed at the top of the show, but for more, tap into our reaction episodes over on our Patreon!

The show we’re covering in this episode preps us for next week’s show in Sacramento as we’ll breakdown Pearl Jam’s show there from 1998. There is a notable running storyline in this show that will dominate the talking points. Back in 1998, Pearl Jam had invited legacy rock acts such as Iggy Pop, Cheap Trick and Frank Black to support them as their openers. Legendary punk band X took the stage at this show with the entire band watching them from the side stage. Eddie Vedder even introduced them onto the stage. While they were excited to witness the renowned Los Angeles band, it did not translate to the crowd in a way that satisfied Ed. He keeps a grudge with him the entire night featuring moments where he’d shout ‘fuck you’ and ‘you really pissed me off tonight’ in order to get his aggression out.

A lot of the discussion will stem from the middle of the set where a lackluster demeanor was present, but there are also great moments here to address such as Spin The Black Circle to open the show, a firey Go to end the main set, Matt Cameron’s first performance of In My Tree, and a version of Corduroy dubbed “slideuroy” that Javier will dig into featuring Mike using a slide pick on the song.

It’s tour time! Pearl Jam is about to get back on the road for the first leg of their Dark Matter tour on the west coast, and we’re continuing to focus on past shows from the locations that they’ll be playing in May. This episode takes us to Portland, Oregon from the 2000 Binaural tour. The back half of the tour that year featured some of the best shows that Pearl Jam has ever played starting with their 10th anniversary show in Vegas and ending on an instant classic to end the tour in Seattle. This show in Portland checks every single box from what you want of that era – Matt Cameron’s absolute dominance of the drum kit, Ed’s fierce and ear shattering vocals and Mike McCready’s spacy, yet piercing solos from the left side.

The overall theme for this show was how the band started off on fire and almost never took the foot off the pedal. A six song kick off of Sometimes, Grievance, Corduroy, Go, Hail, Hail and Dissident made a statement and set the expectations immediately. We’ll get into other massive moments such as a phenomenal stretch featuring Untitled, MFC and Habit in a row, a different take on the Man Trilogy now featuring a feminine presence, but most importantly of all, we get an improv before closing out encore 1 with Rearviewmirror that is the absolute stand out from this show.

Javier is back and will break down Stone’s solo on MFC and a little bit of how Ed had a great show on the axe specifically highlighting a banger version of Habit. But most importantly, we take listener questions about the upcoming Dark Matter tour and some of your expectations and inquiries of how it will all go down!

Ahhh, we’re officially in our Dark Matter era! This tortured podcaster’s department is delighted by the release of Pearl Jam’s brand new record, and furthermore are even MORE excited for a big tour year in 2024! That’s why today’s episode is the beginning of a six week run that will focus on every big location that Pearl Jam will play on the west coast. We’re gonna kick it off with the tour opener town covering a 2005 Canadian tour show in Vancouver!

Coincidentally, this Vancouver show in 2005 was also seen as the true kick off to that tour. The memorable Gorge performance was the night before, but since this run took you all the way through the Canadian plains, Vancouver got it started. We’ll talk a lot about how this tour was perhaps the first of it’s kind where the band wasn’t promoting a record, so they had the freedom to create some wild sets. This tour was also known for it’s heavy usage of songs featured on Lost Dogs, which had been release a little over a year prior to that time. We get to see a few at this show, including the rare appearances for songs such as U and Bee Girl. Save You, Better Man, Love Boat Captain and Immortality are great highlights, and you’ll get to see which song Ed tried to turn into a whistling sensation that may have backfired on him.

Oh, did I mention that we have our first taste of live performances from Dark Matter?! We’ll discuss Pearl Jam’s appearance with Howard Stern and get into both performances of Scared Of Fear and Running. Potato!

It’s a big week here on the podcast with lots to celebrate! It’s Dark Matter week! Coming off the heels of the film experience, we’ll share our instant reaction to listening to the album in that environment including what songs we’ve gravitated towards, and what we’re excited to hear live. Keep in mind that the Live On 4 Legs listening party will happen on Thursday night when the record drops everywhere, if you want to be a part of that round table, please reach out!

Although the brand new record is the lead, we don’t want to bury the purpose of the episode because it’s extremely vital to the history of Pearl Jam. The Paramount Theater show to close out the 1994 tour in the gallows of Madison Square Garden was one of a few fan club shows from this year. It comes a day after their legendary Saturday Night Live performance, a little over the week since the death of Kurt Cobain, and it is the final show involving drummer Dave Abbruzzese. While the fan club crowd was red hot and participated in every song from the hits to the b-sides, this was a night where Ed had a lot on his mind as he was unsure about the future of this band. We share excerpts from an article written in Melody Maker where a frustrated Vedder expresses his anger over Kurt’s death and even questions his own mortality. Directly following this show, Pearl Jam would cancel their plans for a summer tour and part with Dave A shortly afterwards.

Big storylines aside, this is an electric show with some absolute barnburner performances. Rearviewmirror, Daughter and Not For You all came off the heels of the SNL performance the night prior and proved to be just as powerful as they were on TV, other Vitalogy songs such as Whipping and Satan’s Bed are notable moments, Ten b-sides Alone and Footsteps were huge crowd moments and Garden and Blood were huge standouts as well. We’ll have a plethora of guests here as Javier’s Gear Guru segments will focus in on Dave A’s contributions to the band, and we invite Patrick and Brian from our sister podcast, Hallucinogenic Recipe, to come in and discuss the bootleg distribution for this show back in the mid-90’s.

The beginning of April in 1994 marked the start of a stretch that may go down as one of the most important runs in Pearl Jam’s history. It all starts with the Fox Theater show in Atlanta that everybody knows, and then shortly afterward the news of Kurt Cobain’s death shocked the world. Pearl Jam would go on to play a legendary show at the Orpheum Theater and then shortly after, they are front and center on Saturday Night Live. This show we’re covering here is from Rochester that took place the day before Cobain’s death was announced. After a few instances of playing through some tough off stage issues in the middle of the tour, this was during a run where the band was on a big time hot streak.

This show has some notable moments that makes it stand out among the others from this tour. Wash was the show opener, something that was so rare for the time that they had only done it once all tour. On top of that, it’s a big highlight from this show. This night features the second version of Corduroy ever played. We’ll break that down into detail and discuss how some of the identity remains the same as today, but little tweaks afterwards have made it more of a showstopping performance. And we’ll talk about Ed’s quote in reaction to the real story about Jeremy. Many great performances, and stories from our Patron Robert Rieb who requested this episode!

Let’s look back to a Pearl Jam show that was played less than two years ago in Copenhagen, Denmark. Every time the band makes their way through there, its with heavy hearts attributing back to the 2000 tragedy at the Roskilde Festival where nine people lost their lives. During the initial 2020 run scheduled before Covid happened, the date that they were set to play Copenhagen was on June 29th, just a day short of the 20th anniversary of that day. The band wear their hearts on their sleeves for an emotionally powerful version of Love Boat Captain where Ed expresses his sorrow and explains how it changed the band moving forward.

This week we have an interview with Joshua and Yonat Goldberg, a father and daughter who experienced their first Pearl Jam show on this night. We’ll get to hear their background of how they discovered the band and bonded over them before deciding to take a visit to Denmark to see them. It’s a great story for anyone who has passed music down to their children in hopes to get them to feel the same impact that they experienced at a young age.

Outside of Love Boat Captain, we’ll focus in on performances of Lukin, Daughter, Retrograde and Never Destination, While Javier will join us to discuss the 2022 reemergence of Garden, and a little bassy Stone Gossard on Dance of the Clairvoyants.

This episode is about uncovering unsolved mysteries within Pearl Jam lore. We’re back to celebrating the 30th anniversary of the memorable 1994 tour, and we find ourselves covering a Memphis show that does not get the acclaim that other shows from this run do. But perhaps this show is more significant than we think? We invite on Patron Mike Cribier to share his stories from this night that had been held back for quite some time. After sharing his recollection of this show to Pearl Jam fan run sites, his information could not be verified, and his story was never told. We’re going to rectify that in this episode!

As video from the early 90s tends to be a crapshoot for some Pearl Jam shows, this is indeed a show that does not have any visual aid. So how is it possible to tell if or when things are happening just by listening to bootleg audio? The stories that get revealed feature a fan getting heavily involved in Leash, Mike crowd surfing while wearing a Nosferatu mask and potentially the most important, Ed smashing his mic stand into the ground to create a massive hole. This is something that was famously done in Boston only weeks after, but could this have been the first ocassion?

We’ll get into talking about those storylines, as well as some excellent performances with the highlights being Deep, Not For You, Porch and Blood. We’ll also talk about a pre-Vitalogy version of Last Exit… that a fan in the crowd knows the lyrics to?

Pearl Jam was on a special run as the season turned to spring in March of 1992. They were headlining small club shows in Europe, clicking well together on stage and getting incredible reactions from the crowd who knew the catalog. While we have looked into some of the highly praised Netherlands shows from this run (Den Haag, Utrecht), this episode touches up on a show that is a bit forgotten about from Eindhoven.

Being the 20th show on a rigorous touring schedule, being on the road can kind of catch up with you after a while. After canceling a show two days prior to give Ed vocal rest, he came into this show without the normal zip on his fastball. Songs that are usually known for high-octane intensity were a bit laboring on Ed’s voice. We’ll talk about that, and how the setlist likely needed rearranging to try and capture momentum, but we’ll also talk about some of the major issues that they were having with crowds at the time. During this version of Alive, there are multiple moments of commotion – a guys loses his “spectacles” and stage divers are carelessly jumping on and off the stage whilst kicking people in the head and stepping all over the band’s gear. We’ll focus on a message from an irate Jeff Ament, who had just about enough of the shenanigans happening at the time.

Also, we had some new sound bytes revealed from Dark Matter this week! We re-recorded our original opening segment that was about it being a little bit too quiet with a month to go until the release date because we got snippets of both Something Special and Running within the days between our recording schedule. We’ll talk about what we hear from those songs, and we’ll break down Stone Gossard’s interview with Jonathan Cohen for SPIN.com.