Note: I was trying to hold out for the “official bootleg” recording of the Pearl Jam show to make sure I got the details right, but the recording has been delayed for technical reasons, so I’m forced to rely on the setlist, a handful of YouTube clips, and my memory. Let’s see how that goes…
It’s no secret that Pearl Jam’s presence at Bonnaroo is what spurred Joker and me to finally break down and try the festival; we’re both longtime fans of the band—going back to their first album, released during the second half of our high-school careers—and, in fact, our early friendship was largely forged over shared Rolling Stone articles and Joker’s nth-generation dubbed copies of B-sides and live performances. This was to be the fifth Pearl Jam concert for each of us (in six attempts; a 2003 Cincinnati show for which we had tickets was cancelled due to flooding at the venue): we had attended three shows together in 1998, 2003, and 2006, and a separate show each on back-to-back tour dates in 2000. We were looking to Bonnaroo as an expected high point of a summer filled with music, and to Pearl Jam’s Saturday concert as the expected high point of Bonnaroo.
On Friday night, Metallica brought the house down with a (literally) explosive performance, prompting Joker (not much of a Metallica fan) to comment that Pearl Jam would have their work cut out for them to follow that show. By Saturday morning, we were really rooting for our preferred band to come up with a way to wow the crowd themselves.
As I said in a previous post, we decided in the mid-afternoon to check out the stage/field situation, and opted to go ahead and set up shop in an area as close to the stage as we could get without joining the impossible line for the front “pit” area. It was the right call, as the crowd continued to pack in all day, through performances by Ozomatli and B.B. King. After King’s performance, everyone in our area stood, most folks giving up their blanket-sized plots of land to squeeze forward; we’d be standing almost exclusively from 6:30pm until after 1:00am. During this time, waiting for the Jack Johnson show, we got to know a few of our neighbors, most all of whom were avid Pearl Jam fans from all over. The couple from Columbus, Ohio, in front of us had already been to the band’s opening-night show in West Palm Beach three days earlier, and were contemplating following them on to South Carolina on the coming Monday. We swapped stories with folks, sharing tales of concerts past and comparing Ten Club membership numbers (seniority is key for good seats at most PJ shows), and it helped to pass the time before Johnson’s set.
Johnson’s set was pleasant—and the guest appearance by Eddie Vedder was well-received—but there was a bit of anticipation and impatience as we waited for the main event. The crowd continued to pack in, and at the end of Johnson’s set, we managed to find a way to sit down: if our entire area of twenty or thirty people all tried to sit cross-legged at once, we could, as a mass, move the crowd back enough to get some tight sitting room. It didn’t take long for that to become uncomfortable, though, and most of us were on our feet well before Pearl Jam came to the stage.
By the time the floodlights in the field went out, we were primed. The band, who usually start their shows with something fairly low-key, began by playing the long-loved B-side “Hard to Imagine,” and as soon as the song began, some Bonnaroo veterans in the audience began the glow-stick showers. Thin straws (apparently, cut-up lengths of glow necklaces) aglow in multiple colors flew in bunches from fans in several areas down front. The arcs in which the sticks sprayed made them look almost like low-altitude fireworks. We’d seen the trick the night before, at the My Morning Jacket show, but only from afar; being down front this time, we could see what the glowing sticks were, and eventually could participate in the tossing, as several landed at our feet through the first few songs. Yes, it was silly; yes, it was juvenile. But there was something beautiful about it, and it was fun to share in it (and other moments throughout the night) with the Pearl Jam fans around us: the Farm Aid/Homegrown kids, the guy with the black backpack, the Notre Dame T-shirt guy, the Columbus couple, and, eventually, Cubs Hat Jill and Skinny Jeremy.
“Hard to Imagine” was followed by the upbeat rocker “Corduroy,” which has long held the second-song slot; it was probably good to get a more recognizable radio hit out there, since the crowd of 70,000-plus couldn’t all be B-side-loving diehards. But once the crowd was suitably roiled, PJ went for the change-up, breaking out the rarity “All Night,” which had never before been played live. From there, it was on to “Why Go,” the first chill-inducing classic song of the night; neither Joker nor I had seen it performed in concert, so to hear the Ten track for the first time was special, and on its own affirmed our decision to brave the world of campsite festivals.
Vedder slowed things down with “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town,” the now-fifteen-year-old acoustic hit. When the bulk of the crowd (at least to my ears, though I may be unduly influenced by being surrounded by PJ loyalists) shouted “Hello!” at the right place, it was moving, and a good sign that the band had the full audience on their side for the night. From there, they went back to the B-side well with “Down” and performed a rousing version of the 1996-vintage Eastern-influenced “Who You Are” before swinging up to 2006’s “Severed Hand,” which was the first song to really showcase their lighting rig, flashing strobes putting a man-made lightning storm on the stage during the song’s climax.
“1/2 Full,” from the not-so-bestselling 2002 album Riot Act, was its usual strong self, all political snarl (“Don’t see some men as half-empty/see them half-full of shit”) and sweet grooves, culminating in Vedder’s favorite stage trick—reflecting a spotlight off the front of his guitar and shining the resulting beam around the venue. I’m not sure how well it worked in the open field, though it is a cool effect when confined to arenas.
“Animal,” the song that once spent nearly two months teasing fans in anticipation of the 1993 album Vs. (the band performed it on MTV’s Video Music Awards before the album was released, and in absence of other videos, MTV played it in constant rotation), brought the crowd back up to full speed. I can’t tell you how many people I saw throwing Vedder’s familiar “One, two, three, four, five” hand gesture from the fifteen-year-old MTV performance, many of whom should have been too young to remember it; that was kind of surreal.
And then it was time for the first really big centerpiece of the show: “Even Flow,” the band’s second-ever hit. This is always a showcase for lead guitarist Mike McCready (my favorite guitarist of his generation, and possibly of all time), and he didn’t disappoint, beginning his solo with the guitar behind his head and rocking all the way up to Matt Cameron’s brief drum solo before finishing the song. But don’t take my word for it; see for yourself, from my trusty camera:
The band stayed in hits mode next, playing “Daughter” to a massive sing-along. Late in the song, during Jeff Ament’s jammy upright-bass breakdown, Vedder drifted off lyrically, eventually settling on snippets of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” After the song, he apologized for taking the happy night to such a dark place all of a sudden, but then used the opportunity to get a little darker, addressing politics directly for the first time. He stumbled a bit, trying to get across a point about gas prices before playing “Gone” (a 2006 song with the lyric “When the gas in my tank/feels like money in the bank”), but the speech fell maybe a little flat, especially when compared with Chris Rock’s jokes the night before: “Invade Iraq, and the price of oil goes up! That doesn’t make sense. I tell you what: If I invade IHOP, pancakes are gettin’ cheaper in my house!” The song, however, was well-received, and by the next tune, any awkwardness over Ed’s attempts to quote dollar figures was gone.
Why? Because the next song was Pearl Jam’s cover of The Who’s “Love, Reign O’er Me.” Now, most people who know me know I’m an unabashed Who fan—and that that fandom was spurred on largely on the recommendation of Eddie Vedder in a 1993 Rolling Stone article—so this was sonic heaven for me. But I could tell I wasn’t alone; the entire crowd seemed moved by the epic presentation of an already-epic song. This kind of high-profile cover was absolutely perfect for a night like this.
The high-energy one-two punch of “Do the Evolution” and “Rearviewmirror” closed out the main set, and left the fans clamoring for an encore. But then something unusual happened: the Bonnaroo videographers grabbed a shot of the tentative encore set list, displaying it on the jumbo screens for all to see. I don’t know what it was like out in the fields with the casual fans, but in our Ten Club-heavy corner, the excitement was palpable: “’Porch!’ Finally! Do you realize I’ve still never seen them do it live?” “I’ve never seen ‘Release!’” “Did that really say ‘W.M.A.?’” “Oh, ‘Crazy Mary’ is always good.” Pearl Jam encore sets are notoriously flexible; the 2006 Italian-tour video shows the band’s process of tooling it to the crowd’s mood during the break, so we were all skeptical we’d actually hear these songs. I warned Cubs Hat Jill—finally freed from her behind-some-tall-frat-guys hell, and standing next to us, among the real PJ fans—that I would be likely to tear up like a little girl if the “Release” tease became reality.
When the band returned to the stage, Vedder joked that he was amazed to find, in Tennessee, a place so like Amsterdam. “If you all told me to fuck off in Dutch right now, I wouldn’t be surprised.” He began playing a soft guitar line that seemed only mildly familiar. Perhaps the leaked set list was not to be. But when he opened his mouth to say “He won the lottery…,” the crowd (at least the PJ hardcores around us) went nuts. Cubs Hat Jill grabbed my arm and shouted, “The set list is right!” It was a reworked “W.M.A.,” the 1993 album track that hadn’t made a full-length concert appearance in thirteen years! It had been incorporated into the extended jams of other songs a great many times, but not since 1995 had the band played it as its own entity. Surprisingly, it worked really well, with its funky drum-and-bass foundation. “Better Man,” of course, went over well with the masses; as one of the band’s biggest commercial hits, it’s one everyone knows. Still, though, Vedder didn’t trust the festival audience to match the Pearl Jam tour audiences in being able to sing the first verse unassisted, so he waited until the chorus to turn over the microphone. The audience made him proud; the sea of lighters stretching into the distance was a thing of beauty. He remarked at the end of the song that until that moment, he hadn’t really been able to see just how far the crowd stretched, and so issued an additional thanks to the people in the farthest reaches of the field.
“Black” brought the sing-along element back again, and an energetic “Life Wasted” (as seen in Joker’s video clip when we first returned from Bonnaroo) saw Vedder treading the edge of the stage, looking for all the world like he’d be happy to return to his scaffold-climbing ways of 1992. “Crazy Mary” was a crowd-pleaser, though the audience vocal on “No L-O-I-T-E-R-I-N-G-A-llowed” wasn’t as pronounced as at a tour show, what with the mixed-interest festival crowd. The organ solo by Boom Gaspar and his duel with Mike McCready’s guitar were as energetic as ever:
And then came “Porch.” Somehow, in four tries, I’d managed to continually miss this live classic. The on-screen set list had shown “Porch (Short Middle),” but there was nothing short about this opus. There were two, maybe three guitar solos (both Stone Gossard and McCready had chances to shine), and finally a political speech from Vedder that far outshone his attempts earlier with the gasoline prices. This time he was eloquent and impassioned, acknowledging that “there is a time and place for all this, right? This kind of talk,” but that “This has to be the time. It can’t get any worse.” He stated that it is “stitched into the fabric of our flag, it is welded into our constitution” that citizens have the right and responsibility to make change with their voices and votes. I know a lot of people have a problem with politics creeping into their entertainment, but when it’s clearly as heartfelt as this, and in the presence of a likely receptive audience (not everyone there was political, but anti-Bush sentiment was everywhere, and social liberals were likely in the majority, so his talk was a safe bet). After the speech, the band brought the song to a high-intensity close, and left the stage once again. Well, just see for yourself:
Vedder returned alone to perform “No More,” an anti-war song that was (I believe) co-written by Tomas Young, an injured Iraq War veteran featured in the documentary Body of War. Young had recently taken a turn for the worse, slipping into a coma, and Vedder clearly meant every word he sang. By the end of the song, he had what appeared to be most of the audience in a sing-along of the chorus.
As the band returned, Vedder kept things on a down note, dedicating the next song to a friend whose father had recently passed. (Message-board posters on the Pearl Jam website have pointed out that the friend was named “Luke,” and this was likely a reference to journalist Tim Russert, who had died a day earlier, but I’m hesitant to say that’s absolute fact—though it is likely.) The song was “Release,” the Ten track about the death of Vedder’s father, and at the opening notes, Cubs Hat Jill held her arm out to me: “Goosebumps.” I turned to Joker, on my other side, and he held out his arm, too: “Goosebumps.” I managed to stay relatively calm at the onset, but once Vedder got to the belted-out lines, “I’ll ride the wave…where it TAAAAAKES ME/I’ll hold the pain…RELEASE ME!,” I was feeling the chills, too. The song was beautiful, and poignant, and in that moment I felt connected to Joker and Jill and Eddie Vedder and all of the fans around us (and, it seemed at the moment, everyone in that cow pasture), and if anyone asked me what the best five minutes of Bonnaroo were—what the best five minutes of 2008 have been so far—well, now you know. I wouldn’t trade the experience of hearing that song on that night for anything else in the world.
But that wasn’t the end, of course; the band still had to wow the crowd with an electrifying rendition of “Alive,” their first hit and the song that told me in 1992 that hairspray-and-fireworks party rock was no longer going to be enough (though it does have its place, to be fair). The guitar solos were blistering, the crowd chants were deafening, and Bonnaroo was ready to explode. What could possibly come next?
There was another brief encore break, as the band dashed backstage a moment. We debated: the set list had shown “Y.L./Indiff” as the last song, but did that mean we’d get “Yellow Ledbetter” and “Indifference,” or just one of the songs? Would “Indifference” be at all appropriate for a crowd of this energy level? Would “Yellow Ledbetter” end with McCready playing “The Star-Spangled Banner?” (I had my fingers crossed for that.)
When the band returned, they immediately launched into a heavy rocker—it was to be neither of the listed songs. At first, before really processing the chords, I just settled in to hear a rollicking rendition of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World”—the band’s most common uptempo closer—but then I realized that wasn’t the song. It was Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” being played for only the fifth time in Pearl Jam history; I had never heard of them doing it at all before, so I was floored by the cover. (Though, it got me thinking: is Eddie Vedder a Cylon?) (Okay, so only a handful of people will get that joke…but they’ll love it! Totally worth it.) It’s one of the all-time best bring-down-the-house rock songs, when done right, and they did it very, very right. It was absolutely the perfect capper to a monster night, nearly three hours of what I wasted no time in labeling “The Best Concert I’ve Ever Seen.” And those of you who know where I’ve been the last fifteen years know that that is high praise, indeed.
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