Pearl Jam Podcast Episodes

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.

This episode begins our coverage celebrating the 30th anniversary of Pearl Jam’s Vs. tour in 1994. With this tour falling smack dab in the middle of the band’s prime, there are a plethora of storylines inside and outside of the shows that make this year a memorable one. Vitalogy songs were getting played in the set prior to the album’s release, legendary shows took place in cities such as Boston and Atlanta, dealing with Ticketmaster, bomb threats, backstage break-ins, and Dave Abbruzzese exit from the band.

This episode features a Rock For Choice show that took place in Pensacola, Florida a year after the death of Dr. David Gunn, a doctor who performed safe abortions on women who were unable to birth a child. The band has actively supported a women’s right to choose going back to their formation. You may remember moments such as Ed wearing a t-shirt with a coat hanger on it during their 1992 performance on Saturday Night Live, and most famously at MTV Unplugged where Ed wrote pro-choice on his arm with a marker. The point of the episode is to discuss some of the band’s history of activism, but also within the nature of our world at this current moment, it was extremely difficult to provide an episode on abortion rights without addressing what’s going on. That means you will get to hear our heartfelt opinions on the subject at hand. If this is something that you are uncomfortable listening to at this point in time, please take note of that before checking out the podcast.

The entire night had references (some subtle, others not so much) to the cause that they were fighting to defend, none more relevant than opening with a cover of Tom Petty’s I Won’t Back Down. The performances are the height of the era with the band absolutely locked in, and Ed tearing into the vocals on songs such as Dissident, Glorified G, Blood, Alive, Porch and many more. We also get to hear a speech from David Gunn Jr. as well as instances where Ed will attack the subject head on.

For this episode, we’re going back to Pearl Jam’s first ever appearance at Fenway Park back in 2016. It’s appropriate timing because they’ll be playing two shows there to close out the tour in September. While it has all of the baseball references and former Red Sox player appearances, the overarching focal point of this episode will focus on the personal experience that Randy had during this show. Have you ever had a concert blunder that you wish you could take back? Did you ever miss a chunk of the set due to arriving late or other negligence? That’s what we’re going to talk about here as this show was the one and only time that Randy was not in his seat for the opening song. He’ll take you through the whole story and hopefully absolve his demons by the end of the show.

***Please note that our audio for this episode is not up to snuff due to connectivity issues during the recording. It’s listenable, but expect some glitches throughout***

Playing in one of MLB’s legendary cathedrals, Ed would mention on multiple occasions at this show that playing Fenway was a dream come true. It was a night dedicated to celebrating the big moment, and there were plenty of special guests and special performances to back that up. We get our fair share of rarities at this show, including one of the ultra rare deep cuts in their catalog, Strangest Tribe. Back to back with Into The Wild song Society may consist of the rarest opening to an encore of all-time. We also get two massive covers that hadn’t been seen at Pearl Jam shows going back a decade. Bob Dylan protest song, Masters Of War was a massive highlight that hadn’t been played in 200 shows prior to this, and I’ve Got A Feeling brought you back to the early 90s and was played for the first time since 2004. Add in that former Red Sox pitcher, Bronson Arroyo, joined in to play Black and former first baseman Kevin Youkilis brought out a uke, it was jam packed with unforgettable moments.

Our Gear Guru segments on this episode will have Javier talking about a delay effect coming from Mike on Masters Of War, and a little bit of Ed talk on guitar during Porch.

This episode is jam packed with stories and breakdown from the first night of Pearl Jam’s two show stint at the Barclays Center in Brookyln from 2013. We invite a very special guest onto the pod, the former COO of Barclays and the Brooklyn Nets, Fred Mangione. Fred gives us an angle that we haven’t discussed a lot from the professional landscape – the business side of booking concerts. As a diehard fan of the band himself, Fred will talk about when the Barclays Center opened, there was stiff competition to pull acts away from Madison Square Garden, the biggest destination for entertainment acts in New York City. He’ll talk about how they managed to get Pearl Jam to pivot from their usual location to land them on the Lightning Bolt tour. We’ll also get to hear the story about how they were originally set to play in Brooklyn for 2016, as well as the details of how the band’s attendance record was broken thanks to The Boss.

Continuing with this month’s theme of focusing on shows that the hosts attended, Randy will talk about his stories from this night… or lack thereof. Riding solo at this show, we’ll start a conversation about how memories can tend to fade over time without having anyone to share them with. Going to shows alone is great, you get to dictate when you get in the building, you don’t care if you embarrass yourself if you sing a little louder and you can focus on your own fun. That’s all great in the present, but when looking back over a decade later, those memories tend to fade a little bit because you never created a bond with a friend going through the same experiences that you did. Now, it’s probably impossible to forget everything. We’ll spend some time talking about songs like Crown Of Thorns and Oceans where the memories have been kept fresh over the years.

There are no Gear Guru segments this week. Why you ask? Because the whole entire show is a Gear Guru segment! Javier joins Randy to help break down this show, and he’ll go in depth on songs like Release, Infallible and Yellow Moon.

We take a trip to what is now eight years in the past (extremely hard to fathom!) to cover Pearl Jam’s show in Columbia, South Carolina. There are two major themes heading into this show. Firstly, this show was originally intended to take place a day after a show in Raleigh, North Carolina, which was canceled in protest of the state’s HB2 law. The other big storyline heading into the show was the untimely death of rock ‘n’ roll legend, Prince, that was announced earlier in the day. With heavy hearts, the band set forth to pay tribute to a man who had given so much of his life to music, as Ed would call him, the most amazing guitar player he’d ever seen.

This is another show where we get to talk about John’s adventures and stories, so we’ll dig deep into the two top stories that dominated conversation on this night. It was a set with a shared balance of the deep cuts like Oceans, Light Years, Marker In The Sand, Sleight Of Hand and All Those Yesterdays mixed in with massive showstopping performances of Lightning Bolt, Immortality, I Got Id, Rearviewmirror, Chloe Dancer/Crown Of Thorns and more. But one of the more peculiar things about this set is an OTOTO (one time, one time only) performance of the Into The Wild track, Rise. Done as a birthday dedicated to his mom Karen, this song has not been seen at a Pearl Jam show since.

We’ll dig deeper into a few songs during our Gear Guru segments where Javier will break down Lightning Bolt rarity, Infallible, and for the first time ever give a full breakdown of Crown Of Thorns.

We’ve had a very busy week! Album announcement? Check! Debut single announcement? Check! Tour announcement? Oh you better believe it, check! So of course there was a lot to react to during this time period, which we did with two episodes focusing on all of the great stuff that lies ahead. While the normal weekly episode may have been pushed back a day, there was no way that we weren’t going to get to Atlanta 2012 this week.

This one is personal in many ways for John. It was his first show in 14 years, but he would tell you that more importantly, this is the last time to date that Pearl Jam has visited Atlanta. Twelve years have gone by without returning to the city the featured one of the greatest Pearl Jam shows of all time in 1994. It seems a little befuddling, right? While much of this episode focuses on stories of being there and experiencing them for the first time in over a decade, there is a lot of questions to be asked as to why the band has ignored the ATL, and perhaps a plea or two to try and convince them to go back in the near future.

We have some solid performances of Better Man, Porch and Corduroy in this show, and Javier’s segments this week will focus on Why Go as well as an interesting effect added to a cover of The Clash song Know Your Rights. It’s tour time people, get excited. It’s the best!