Episodes Covering Pearl Jam Concerts in 2021

After a long year and a half battle of the world in a lockdown due to Covid-19, concerts were starting to slowly trickle back in by the end of 2021. Pearl Jam had missed their big opportunity to showcase Gigaton on a promotional tour in 2020, so when the opportunity to play four festival shows arose, with careful consideration they finally decided to kick off the new era. Three of the four shows took place at Eddie Vedder’s curated Ohana Festival, which was originally set for one date until a second weekend was added with Pearl Jam headlining both nights. The show we’re covering here is the final night of this run, which means it was a massive celebration with the band, the fans and all of the artists and friends that attended.

Celebration is the theme for this night as every song felt like it had an injection of fun and enthusiasm. There wasn’t a single low energy song featured on the set, and knowing it was the last night, they brought their a-game to create some memorable moments, especially Michael F. McCready (I’ll leave it to you to figure out what the “F” stands for). Songs like Even Flow and Black had explosive elements to them, even more so than usual, while some highlights came as a complete surprise. For those who know the personalities on this podcast, you may be aware that there is one song on the rarer side that has followed Randy around throughout the years – All Night. For those dying to hear an answer on this, you’ll be fulfilled and shocked by the conversation brought to the table. But the big highlight of the night came from Rockin’ In The Free World where the wildest cast of characters (Taylor Hawkins, Brandi Carlile, Sleater-Kinney, Kelly Slater, John McEnroe, Patti Smith, Tim Robbins, Randy Johnson among others) throw a big time party where not one person stays six feet away from another.

This week we invite our friend and Patron, Dakota Duvall, to the show to get his request fulfilled and tell his story about why he chose this show to get covered. And our Gear Guru segments for this week will focus on Quick Escape, Seven O’Clock and Life Wasted.

This is our 200th episode! After four years of this podcast journey, we’ve reached a wonderful milestone that we’d like to celebrate with you all, and we’re going to do that by covering the show that (finally) introduced us into the Gigaton era from the Sea.Hear.Now festival shortly after it’s one-year anniversary.

We’ll talk a lot about the podcast milestone and what it means to us and kind of tie a nice bow on it surrounding what happened at this show, which was the first show that we attending representing the pod when fully established. But it’s also about everything that led up to that weekend too. The lingering postponements carried over from 2020 left everyone asking a lot of questions – what kind of band would this be? How would the Gigaton songs translate live? What older songs will still be in the mix? The answers we received were a gateway into a new era of Pearl Jam where setlists would be constructed unlike anything we’ve seen before.

We’ll have a lot of discussion on the Gigaton songs, which will be tied into some things we’ve heard on this more recent tour run. But there are many memorable performances from this night including Present Tense, Wishlist with a Waiting On A Friend tag, Red Mosquito featuring Danny Clinch on harmonica, Better Man with a People Have The Power tag and a cover of Springsteen’s My City Of Ruins.