Pearl Jam Late Night Series: Ep. 6 – Letterman 1996

Ladies and gentlemen, we’re back with another installment of the Late Night series!

This is the first of many episodes in a row where we’ll cover the band playing The Late Show with David Letterman. This is the first one, and it’s interesting because it’s not solely focused on the just the one performance. Obviously everyone knows the friendship that Letterman has built with the band from all of these appearances to the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall of fame induction, but it all started because Letterman couldn’t get a specific song out of his head – Black.

For weeks and weeks in early 1996, he begged Paul Schaffer every night for the band to play Black. Then he started to beg for Eddie to swing by and sing it. These went on for weeks and weeks until Ed finally showed up and did it. We’ll run through the entire timeline of that story and why it’s never good to watch people talk about you on TV while you’re high.

Of course we’ll end up getting into the Hail, Hail performance as well, mostly to discuss Stone the traffic cone, but also a ripper of a performance that may go down as one of the best versions of the song of all-time.