Episodes Covering Pearl Jam Concerts in 2005

We’re picking up where we left off last week as this episode focuses on night two of the two show run from Pearl Jam’s shows in Atlantic City in 2005. High octane performances, an intimate crowd and a Bruce Springsteen cover happen in night one, but what could possibly top that? A song debut from an unreleased album, Stone Gossard grabbing the mic and an appearance from a spaceman? Those three things could help the cause.

The band kicked off this show with a dynamite version of Present Tense and from there it just kept getting better and better. Immortality impacts the crowd with an intense ending, Not For You has a fun new section improved, they let Stone sing even though the crowd wanted to drop the Leash and we get the live debut of Avocado track Gone seven months before the album came out. We will spend a lengthy amount of time on the debut due to it’s uniqueness in the catalog. The song was written that weekend in Ed’s hotel room and featured no other band member’s accompanyment. So how was it able to be as impactful as it was considering the elements? You’ll find out in the show!

Also, we see a rock legend join up with the band for Rockin’ In The Free World here, and since we have finished up the North American run of our tour, we’ll spend some time discussing some of the OTOTOs played at Ohana Festival. While we give Whale Song some love here, the episode was recorded before the band broke out Gremmie Out Of Control on night two. So perhaps you’ll hear a voice talk about it real quick at a very opportune time!

This episode begins a two-part series where we dig into the shows at the Borgata in Atlantic City from 2005. These shows were unique for the band because of the small venue size holding a little over 2,500 people, but also due to the general admission area which was something that they had not done very often since the Roskilde tragedy in 2000.

After a year of touring in Canada and testing out new songs and setlists on the road, this show has it’s fair share of surprises and rarities for the time. Recently we saw Porch get played as the second song in Wrigley Field, and we’ll get to talk about that when it comes to this show. Songs like Sad, Low Light and Man Of The Hour are in their early infancy, so we’ll chat about how those songs were continuing to evolve at the time into the big performances that we’re familiar with today. We’ll dive into excellent versions of Save You, Crazy Mary and Rearviewmirror as well.

Javier joins in on this episode and will talk about some of the different things you’re hearing at these shows including Cameron playing with an open snare and Mike’s guitar featured behind in the mix. And we’ll talk about our favorite performances of Dark Matter songs from this tour!

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.

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!

In 2005, Pearl Jam dedicated the month of September to tour across an area they’ve never touched from coast to coast – the great plains and prairies of Canada. 17 shows over 24 days led to some absolute classics from this band that may get forgotten over time, but that’s part of why we’re here is to keep the discussion alive! This show in Winnipeg that we’re covering in this episode is a great example of a Canadian small town that never hosted Pearl Jam before this tour attempt, and the crowd ended up delivering big time.

At the newly built arena that would later become the home of the reformed Winnipeg Jets, Pearl Jam happened to draw the largest capacity audience for the one year since it had been built. From the bootleg, you can tell that there isn’t a single seat empty in the building. That led the band to pull out some surprises that you almost never get to see at normal shows, such as Better Man opening the night, Blood closing encore 1 after Alive, and Indifference opening the second encore. With plenty of Neil Young references and a wonderful moment where a fan got her request for Smile granted, nearly every song has their moment in the sun at this show. Lest we forget, a little flip phone call during Daughter that leads to a fun moment.

Not only will we dig into the strength of the crowd here, but we’ll have the Gear Guru step in and do a little breakdown on Stone during Not For You and Do The Evolution, and he’ll also breakdown why Mike’s modem was running at the end of Blood.

It’s been quite a long time since we’ve covered something from down in South America, but thankfully we rectify our mistake in this episode. We’re going down to São Paulo, Brazil to cover a show from Pearl Jam’s first tour in the continent that took place back in 2005. This was a Patreon requested episode from Mike Radtke, and we’ll tell his story about how he came across this when collecting official boots and why it’s stuck with him ever since.

As it goes for shows in Brazil, the crowd is the big highlight. Now the crowd wasn’t fully developed into the traditional Brazilian crowds where everybody sings along to the melody of a verse or chorus, but they certainly did their part to stand out. Crazy Mary is a full fledge sing-along, Black has a powerful moment that leaves Ed mesmerized, and during Daughter the crowd takes it open themselves to start an It’s OK tag. All of this from the very active crowd, along with an incident dealt with by security during Alive.

In our question of the week, we asked our Facebook and Twitter followers how often they go back to South American bootlegs, we run through every answer before taking a dive into the set!

It’s the final week of tour preparation as Pearl Jam finishes up the last of the Canadian dates, and I guess because the 2022 Hamilton show took place a day before this was released, it’s not quite a part of the preparation? But as you’ll hear many times in this spectacular Hamilton show from 2005, there is a lot to celebrate with this one.

We couldn’t do another Canadian show and not talk about 2005. This was the first time that the band got to experience Canada from end to end, hitting up all of the big towns like Toronto and Montreal, but also making pit stops in places like Thunder Bay, Kitchener and Halifax. The band expresses their admiration for the country, and they do it by raising a toast nearly every time that Ed speaks. It’ll be a running theme that all culminates in Go sounding like he did one too many.

This setlist on paper is mind blowing, and on stage it absolutely meets that expectation. We get the very rare appearance of Porch as the opening song in the set that kicks off some of the craziness, then an injection of Lost Dogs such as Sad and U. But there are so many show stealers in this that it’s hard to pick just one from Present Tense, Untitled/MFC, Harvest Moon and a hybrid of the normal and alternative takes from In My Tree.

To finish our Vault series, we turn to the final Vault on our list – the Missoula 2005 show. This comes at an unfortunately opportune time a week after Jeff tested positive for Covid-19 forcing Pearl Jam to cancel the rest of their tour, but also we take the time to honor him and send our best wishes while covering a show in his home state. This was the first of a few Montana shows that doubled up as a campaign for US Senator John Tester, who in 2005 was looking to win the seat. This was the first show of the 2005 tour featuring legs in Canada and South America, so it could be seen as kind of a tune up in a way. But this was also a good indicator for some things that would happen during that tour year. There were some rarities broken out on this night that hadn’t been played since the mid-90’s. Bee Girl made an appearance for the first time since 1994 thanks to Jeff’s song writing prowess on it, and Black, Red, Yellow is played for the first time since 1996 thanks to Phil Jackson being in the crowd. This show also gets highly political with the climax happening in Daughter getting some aggression out against Fox News.

The 2022 season kicks off with a Patreon request straight from the 2005 Canadian tour leg. We go to Canada’s biggest city in Toronto to cover a show with a clear narrative from top to bottom that had the ultimate payoff at the end. Pearl Jam arrived into town as U2 completed a four-night stay to kick off the third leg of their Vertigo Tour, which meant an opportunity that allowed for Ed to appear on stage with them opened the door for Bono to make a guest appearance during this show. Make no bones about it, we let it be known our thoughts and feelings of U2 and Bono as a whole. You may share them or you may not, but ultimately a night packed with deep cut tributes to the pioneering arena rock titans is going to be memorable for many. But after about 83 or so U2 references weaved in and out of songs and speeches, it had to end with Bono blathering in some sort of self-inspired religious tongues during Rockin’ In The Free World. Would you expect it any other way? When U2 isn’t the forefront of conversation, we’ll get to talk about a strong show of mainly hits that features a special performance of Harvest Moon in the encore. And for all of you Jeff Ament fans, we kick off our year with a lovefest to the greatest bass player around.