Episode 222: Sendai, JP – 2/28/2003

It feels like whenever a band embarks out on a ‘world tour’, you can’t coin that phrase unless you make a pitstop in Japan. While Pearl Jam has never done a true official world tour, they’ve had the opportunity to visit Japan twice. The first time was in 1995, and then they went back for five shows in 2003. This episode focuses on the Sendai show from the Riot Act tour. These shows are always interesting because the crowd is a lot more reserved than your every day average concert crowd. This factor mixed in with a venue that maxed out at 1,000 seats meant that the band could create more of an experimental setlist, moving songs around in parts of the set that stray from normal scenarios.

The best example of this show going through the experimental route happens at the very beginning. It starts with Of The Girl, which seems normal, but the performance in itself sets up for the unconventional trio that follow – Immortality, Insignificance and 1/2 Full. The rest of the show maintains weird spurts of momentum with not many radio hits mixed in the main set. As for the hits go, this isn’t the crowd that’s going to follow the same kind of cues we’re familiar with. We’ll concentrate mostly on Better Man and how strange it was without any participation from the crowd.

We’ll answer our question of the week this week which stems off of the first four songs of the setlist, and our Gear Guru segment features Javier breaking down the juxtaposition between Mike and Stone’s solo on the show closer, Porch.