Music (Concert): Pearl Jam at the United Center; Chicago, IL
From pearljam.com:
Set 1 Release, World Wide Suicide, Life Wasted, Severed Hand, Comatose, Given To Fly, Low Light, Corduroy, I'm Open, I Got Id, Even Flow, Unemployable, Daughter/(W.M.A.), Present Tense, Do The Evolution, Jeremy, Save You, Porch
Encore 1 You've Got To Hide Your Love Away, Better Man, Come Back, State Of Love And Trust, Black, Alive
Encore 2 Go, Blood/(Atomic Dog), Indifference, Baba O'Riley, Yellow Ledbetter
I’ve seen a lot of concerts in my day. All sorts of rock, country, blues, etc. Big venues, small venues, indoor and outdoor venues. I’ve never been to any show quite like the Pearl Jam concert I attended with Zimm three weeks ago.
You may wonder how I remember a concert well enough to review it 3 ½ weeks after the fact. The answer lies in the best idea conceived since live music and the internet came together. Pearl Jam, in case you haven’t heard, makes every single one of their concerts available for download a couple of days after the show. I don’t know who thought of this, but it’s absolute genius. There are always moments at good concerts that you remember fondly, but after a while you don’t remember them quite as clearly. Not so here, for obvious reasons. So let’s get into why this concert was so awesome.
If you’ve ever read anything I’ve written, you know I tend to throw around adjectives. I’ve called more than a few things “awesome” (see above). However, I don’t throw around phrases like “emotional experience” very often. That’s what the Pearl Jam concert was. I don’t mean it changed my life or something; I just mean that in a musical sense, the crowd at the United Center that night (and most nights at a Pearl Jam concert, I imagine) were taken on a ride, and Eddie Vedder was the driver.
It goes without saying that the supporting players in Pearl Jam are stellar artists. Mike McCready is seldom mentioned when people talk about great guitarists of today, and that’s a gross oversight. It’s a fact that Matt Cameron is makes extremely complicated drumming look easy. But you don’t hear about these guys because Eddie Vedder is the one who garners the attention for the band, and that’s a good thing. Vedder pours everything he has into every song, every time they play, and it shows. From the opening strains of ‘Release” to the end of “Yellow Ledbetter”, the audience was enraptured with everything Ed was telling us. I think another reason for that is passion of the fans themselves.
If you don’t know the lyrics to a lot of the songs, I can’t imagine it would be the same kind of experience. So much of what Pearl Jam is about comes across not only in the intensity of the music itself, but in the lyrics. And the fans know all the words to almost every song. During the first song, when we all cried out “Release me!” together, we were all on the same page with Eddie and the band. That’s a major difference between Pearl Jam and a lot of other bands I’ve seen. Pearl Jam seems to perform with the fans in addition to for them. We were as much a part of the show as anyone else. Off the top of my head, we sang by ourselves on eight songs. Some of those were at least a chorus, and sometimes more. And whereas other bands stop playing when the crowd sings so that the crowd can hear themselves, Pearl Jam kept playing with us, as if we were a many-voiced lead singer, and enough people were singing that we were easily heard. It’s an unreal feeling to have that happen. And it wasn’t always with words. In “Jeremy”, for example, one of the most intense moments of the whole concert for me was the end of the song, where the crowd did the telltale screaming that closes the song out.
The first set had a lot of great songs, and had it ended with the new alternate version of “Porch”, that would have been a great evening of music. As it was, it was almost like the set was just a warm up for the encores. Eddie Vedder came out alone with an acoustic guitar to lead us in Beatles cover “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”, after which we sang “Better Man” (a chorus by ourselves, which also happened on the preceding song and “Even Flow”). This first encore contained songs that, whatever they were inspired by, are very intense and personal, and Vedder plays them accordingly. I’m referring to “Better Man”, “Black”, and “Alive”. All three of these songs were unbelievable. Vedder ended “Black” with the heartbreaking “we belong together” tag, which I haven’t heard for a long time. And from the heartbreaking to the heartbreakingly inspirational (a weird combination of words, but I think it describes the song well), they transitioned into “Alive”. We sang along with every word, and then during the final guitar solo, we started pumping our fists and chanting “Yeah!” on the downbeat. I know fist-pumping is totally 1995, but maybe you had to be there, alright? It was surreal. Maybe something like that happens every time they play this particular song, but it was one of those concert moments that’s stuck with me and I see it vividly every time I listen to that version of the song.
When they came out for the second encore and rattled off two of their hardest-hitting songs from the Vs. album in “Go” and “Blood”, it was like they infused adrenaline straight into the veins of an exhausted crowd that had been on its feet for the better part of two hours straight. Then, of course, it was straight into the mellow, introspective “Indifference” (also from Vs.). Of course, even though that particular song was considerably slower than the first two, everyone knew the part was coming where we would all yell out the lyric “I will scream my lungs out/till it fills this room”. And of course, what’s a Pearl Jam show without the rousing Who cover “Baba O’Riley” and “Yellow Ledbetter” with the house lights up to finish the nigh?
So all in all, it was a concert I won’t soon forget, and you can now count me among the Pearl Jam faithful. This is a unique band that puts on an unbelievable and powerful live show. If you ever have the chance, go see them. You won’t regret it. Just make sure you study up on the lyrics first, so that you can get the full effect.
Final Score: 5 cents.
Set 1 Release, World Wide Suicide, Life Wasted, Severed Hand, Comatose, Given To Fly, Low Light, Corduroy, I'm Open, I Got Id, Even Flow, Unemployable, Daughter/(W.M.A.), Present Tense, Do The Evolution, Jeremy, Save You, Porch
Encore 1 You've Got To Hide Your Love Away, Better Man, Come Back, State Of Love And Trust, Black, Alive
Encore 2 Go, Blood/(Atomic Dog), Indifference, Baba O'Riley, Yellow Ledbetter
I’ve seen a lot of concerts in my day. All sorts of rock, country, blues, etc. Big venues, small venues, indoor and outdoor venues. I’ve never been to any show quite like the Pearl Jam concert I attended with Zimm three weeks ago.
You may wonder how I remember a concert well enough to review it 3 ½ weeks after the fact. The answer lies in the best idea conceived since live music and the internet came together. Pearl Jam, in case you haven’t heard, makes every single one of their concerts available for download a couple of days after the show. I don’t know who thought of this, but it’s absolute genius. There are always moments at good concerts that you remember fondly, but after a while you don’t remember them quite as clearly. Not so here, for obvious reasons. So let’s get into why this concert was so awesome.
If you’ve ever read anything I’ve written, you know I tend to throw around adjectives. I’ve called more than a few things “awesome” (see above). However, I don’t throw around phrases like “emotional experience” very often. That’s what the Pearl Jam concert was. I don’t mean it changed my life or something; I just mean that in a musical sense, the crowd at the United Center that night (and most nights at a Pearl Jam concert, I imagine) were taken on a ride, and Eddie Vedder was the driver.
It goes without saying that the supporting players in Pearl Jam are stellar artists. Mike McCready is seldom mentioned when people talk about great guitarists of today, and that’s a gross oversight. It’s a fact that Matt Cameron is makes extremely complicated drumming look easy. But you don’t hear about these guys because Eddie Vedder is the one who garners the attention for the band, and that’s a good thing. Vedder pours everything he has into every song, every time they play, and it shows. From the opening strains of ‘Release” to the end of “Yellow Ledbetter”, the audience was enraptured with everything Ed was telling us. I think another reason for that is passion of the fans themselves.
If you don’t know the lyrics to a lot of the songs, I can’t imagine it would be the same kind of experience. So much of what Pearl Jam is about comes across not only in the intensity of the music itself, but in the lyrics. And the fans know all the words to almost every song. During the first song, when we all cried out “Release me!” together, we were all on the same page with Eddie and the band. That’s a major difference between Pearl Jam and a lot of other bands I’ve seen. Pearl Jam seems to perform with the fans in addition to for them. We were as much a part of the show as anyone else. Off the top of my head, we sang by ourselves on eight songs. Some of those were at least a chorus, and sometimes more. And whereas other bands stop playing when the crowd sings so that the crowd can hear themselves, Pearl Jam kept playing with us, as if we were a many-voiced lead singer, and enough people were singing that we were easily heard. It’s an unreal feeling to have that happen. And it wasn’t always with words. In “Jeremy”, for example, one of the most intense moments of the whole concert for me was the end of the song, where the crowd did the telltale screaming that closes the song out.
The first set had a lot of great songs, and had it ended with the new alternate version of “Porch”, that would have been a great evening of music. As it was, it was almost like the set was just a warm up for the encores. Eddie Vedder came out alone with an acoustic guitar to lead us in Beatles cover “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”, after which we sang “Better Man” (a chorus by ourselves, which also happened on the preceding song and “Even Flow”). This first encore contained songs that, whatever they were inspired by, are very intense and personal, and Vedder plays them accordingly. I’m referring to “Better Man”, “Black”, and “Alive”. All three of these songs were unbelievable. Vedder ended “Black” with the heartbreaking “we belong together” tag, which I haven’t heard for a long time. And from the heartbreaking to the heartbreakingly inspirational (a weird combination of words, but I think it describes the song well), they transitioned into “Alive”. We sang along with every word, and then during the final guitar solo, we started pumping our fists and chanting “Yeah!” on the downbeat. I know fist-pumping is totally 1995, but maybe you had to be there, alright? It was surreal. Maybe something like that happens every time they play this particular song, but it was one of those concert moments that’s stuck with me and I see it vividly every time I listen to that version of the song.
When they came out for the second encore and rattled off two of their hardest-hitting songs from the Vs. album in “Go” and “Blood”, it was like they infused adrenaline straight into the veins of an exhausted crowd that had been on its feet for the better part of two hours straight. Then, of course, it was straight into the mellow, introspective “Indifference” (also from Vs.). Of course, even though that particular song was considerably slower than the first two, everyone knew the part was coming where we would all yell out the lyric “I will scream my lungs out/till it fills this room”. And of course, what’s a Pearl Jam show without the rousing Who cover “Baba O’Riley” and “Yellow Ledbetter” with the house lights up to finish the nigh?
So all in all, it was a concert I won’t soon forget, and you can now count me among the Pearl Jam faithful. This is a unique band that puts on an unbelievable and powerful live show. If you ever have the chance, go see them. You won’t regret it. Just make sure you study up on the lyrics first, so that you can get the full effect.
Final Score: 5 cents.
Tha Docta's two cents. | 10:18 PM
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