In 1996, Pearl Jam were on tour supporting their fourth record, No Code, an album that in many ways represented and reflected dynamic creative changes for the band.
Like many fans my age, I loved Pearl Jam’s first few records when I was in high school, just a few years prior. By 1996, though, I was away at college and feeling more than just geographically isolated. Worse than that, my dad was fighting the lymphatic cancer that would claim his life, less than a year later. I was 18, things felt dark, and I was hanging on desperately at the time to some of the things I loved most. Things like Pearl Jam’s music that, in many ways, offered me some solace. Looking back, I guess that’s why making it all the way down to Merriweather Post Pavilion outside of DC with a few friends to see them play for the first time felt so important to me, back then. Like a sort of pilgrimage I needed to make.
The No Code tour was during the height of Pearl Jam’s famed battle with Ticketmaster, a fight against ugly monopolistic ticket pricing practices and excessive surcharges that bassist Jeff Ament and guitarist Stone Gossard took all the way to Capitol Hill (and a fight that you might call a regular Old-Testament David-and-Goliath showdown, if not for the fact that Goliath won). A virtuous effort, sure, but at a practical level what that epic mid-nineties standoff translated to on that tour was inordinate frustration at venue entrances: the ticketing company with whom Pearl Jam partnered proved incapable of handling concerts of that scale, resulting in log jams. At Merriweather, on that September night, the band took the stage while hundreds of fans, including my friends and me, were stuck trying to get our tickets scanned. We listened anxiously while the band strummed the opening chords of “Long Road” – a beautiful ballad about loss and longing that bleeds midway through into blissful catharsis – and let it ring. They leaned on the throttle after that, launching into the inexorable riffage of rockers “Hail Hail,” “Animal,” and “Spin The Black Circle” before gate agents (and the gates themselves, if I recall) ultimately surrendered to the throng, and we rushed inside.
Pearl Jam | photo by Josh Pelta-Heller for WXPN
For the devoted, a Pearl Jam concert has become a sort of ritual, a curated culture complete with its own traditions. You can rely on a Pearl Jam show to invariably last for almost three hours, and sometimes even longer. You can rely on so much show-to-show setlist variation that each one becomes a sort of independent testimony to a unique event. You can rely on a festive finale featuring a few well-loved standards played with the vocal support of a full crowd, the folks up front vying to catch one of the several souvenir tambourines tossed. You can rely on the band to emerge from backstage to a deafening arena roar, as you begin to make out their familiar silhouettes in the darkness. And you can rely on frontman Eddie Vedder, a charismatic, natural showman, to carry with him onto the stage a personal notebook, and a bottle of wine – two items that for longtime fans have reached a sort of iconic status – and to place them at the base of the mic stand before the band opens with slow-burner to ease you into the evening.
On Saturday night at South Philly’s Wells Fargo Center, all of these traditions were observed, at what would be my 30th time seeing this band. Beyond just five songs the band picked to show off from their latest album Dark Matter, the entirety of yet another unique two-and-a-half-hour set was selected from their beloved first five records, with fan-favorite deep cuts featured especially from 1998’s Yield. They dug deep into their early days too, offering up their full triad from the soundtrack to Cameron Crowe’s love-letter-to-Seattle of a film, Singles: “State Of Love And Trust” and “Breath” were both played, alongside a cover of proto-Pearl-Jam band Mother Love Bone’s medley “Chloe Dancer/Crown Of Thorns.” And no one was caught outside at the gate, this time around, when the opening chords of “Long Road” rang, sounding as resonant as they did at that first show, 28 years ago.
Check out photos from Saturday night below. Pearl Jam returns to Wells Fargo Center tonight, information can be found at the WXPN Concert Calendar.