I'd been travelling round Eastern Europe on trains for about 5 weeks, and I ruched back to the Nether Regions for the Pearl Jam gig in Arnhem. I worked during the day, but squirmed about like I had beasties in my underwear... before long it was tiem to meet the troops at central station and get the train to Arnhem. Even though I saw them in April, and any gig this summer is unlikely to top that, I'm jumping about like a little kid. I'm really tired, I had no time to rest after my travels. My only night off was spent picking Mowgli up from the airport. I've had a Red Bull just to make sure I stay full of energy...
I'm literally flying to the station in a kilt.
As usual for Pearl jam concerts, we look like a crossbetween Mother love bone and the bay city rollers, decked out with Kilts, Saltires, Wristbands, Seattle T-shirts...
We arrive at the Geldedrome and I'm super super excited.... I need to meet a fellow Pearl jam fan I know from london to give him a ticket... but he's fallen asleep soemwhere, so by the time we get in it's super busy and wolfmnother are just going on. We spend a while trying to get to the front, but there's a second barrier we're not allowed through cos we're too late.
We enjoy wolfmother. I've had their album for months. It's very 70's and is a great rocking album. I don't pay too much attention to them , cos I know I'm seeing them 3 times, this week,a nd I still hold out that I can find someway to get into the front section. Alas it's not possible. Pearl Jam take to the stage!!!!
Release – tears and we head for the main area of the crowd. Give up on getting to the front…. Release is the opener for the Fox Theatre Atlanta Bootleg from April 1994. I always thought that this dirge was a such a brave opener… The tears roll down my face… what a start to a Pearl Jam summer. I couldn’t have thought of anything better.
Why go home, and we just go wild… It’s feels so rare to have this early 90’s staple, even though this is the second time I’ve heard it live. The solo is unbelievable and reminds me that we have a summer of mike solo’s in front of us.
Save you…..and the energy keeps going…some people poo poo riot act, but I think it’s one of the greatest albums in their career with such honesty and emotion, this is one of the foot to the floor rockers from this album… the crowd gets going when the song breaks down and start furious clapping to the beat… It’s F@CKING PEARL JAM, and the crowd is following.
Dutch crowds are usually stoned, so they are the most placid I’ve experienced, but even they are goin wild tonight… the warm cheer emanates from the 30,000 bodies around me… and you know you are with common souls….. We’re all feeling alive….
Eddie starts talking 3 songs in, which is pretty early compared to the Astoria… He seems to be genuinely touched that he can fill a 30,000 seat stadium after all these years. He also starts on the security and making sure everyone’s safe and helping each other out. Then they kick into corduroy – Stevie Wonder’s favourite colour!
Its one that I forgot I could play on the guitar, that I’ve been jamming about with while I was on trains in Eastern Europe. It’s a classic old rocker . It’s got everything, a riff, a catchy chorus and a bluesy bendy solo with enough twiddle to make you think “mike is the man!!”
Now we are into new territory. Severed hand. We heard it in the Astoria, when it was still new to the boys. Now we know it a bit better, and its starting to feel like and old friend like the rest of their canon. When the riff kicks in, we’re bouncing up and down as if it’s a song we’ve been listening to for 10 years. Matt really shines on the new stuff live!!! The toms sing, and he comes out to the forefront…. Sometimes I forget Matt is there, he’s so good. Mike makes the solo look effortless, there’s not letting up even on their new stuff.
Now we get the first surprise of the night… Eddie starts vamping along to a few chords and before he can sing the first line the audience are singing Bob Marley’s no woman no cry. It stops and makes way for betterman…. Eddie doesn’t sing betterman any more… he just strums the opening chords and lets the audience take over. It’s one of those moments where there’s all this commonality with you’re fellow concert goers. Betterman’s just played with a spotlight on eddie, so when they lights are launched and the whole band kicks in, I get major chills. I’m shouting at Luke Skyetrekker – “You see that?” “How cool was that?” The mood totally changes. The band are on fire, they seem to get more ferocious with every passing year. The band then breaks down and we return to a bit of no woman no cry….
The end to Bettermam is such a free for all that you feel something’s been achieved when it closes. I can close my mouth. I’m satisfied that I’m at a pearl jam concert and am just starting to get over the shock. Now the adrenalin can carry me through and I can start enjoying the concert.
World Wide Suicide, and despite not being at the front, we start our own little boogiespot. WWS is really dear to me. Not only was it the soundtrack to the excitement, but it was the theme song for our trip to the Astoria, and now, the boys are bring it back, slightly faster, slightly tighter as a pumping rocker for us to boogie to here in the middle of nowhere in The Netherlands…
The band kick into Insignificance. Binaural is considered to be Pearl jam’s worst album. I have no idea why, I love it’s muddy apprehensiveness, innocence and delicacy. I feel in love with this song when I learned it on the guitar. It’s a got a great riff, and the punky downstroke guitar make you want to go crazy….. yeah it’s inaccessible but so what!
From inaccessible, to the most accessible. Pearl jam didn’t play Jeremy and Alive for years because MTV had overplayed them to the point of saturation, but now Jeff can kick it with his 16 string bass again and give us all a wee sing along the takes us back to the early 90’s again, made even more special because it’s not been played that often. Although most people worship the bass in Jeremy, I think it’s stone that is the hero of this one for me, his rhythm just holds the whole thing together in a groove that I’ve known since I was 11 or 12. By the end the whole 30,000 are oo-ing and ahh-ing again, and eddie can take a break. I’m not sure whether to intonate it as the Ten recording or to do it like he does it at MTV unplugged. Half the audience go for Unplugged and half go for Ten – Pretty comical.
The boys are career-spanning tonight, so we kick straight into “do the evolution” from Yield. Eddie doesn’t care if he gets the words right or not, and stone takes the solo…… Brilliant….
We stick with Yield…. and start on Given to Fly…. A song that’s like the sea… It washes over you and builds up to a sing song chorus…. You can bounce along to it as well. It’s one of my most vivid memories from Glasgow when I saw them in 2000, bouncing along to the hippy strains of the “harder than it sounds” signature, which is a “Homage”, to Led Zeppelin’s Going to California….The energy of the song flows too…. The riff seems quiet, you can almost smell the sea air, but they never fail to fill the chorus with energy that gives you the hit to punch the air and sing along.
You know it’s coming, they play it nearly every night, but you still get superexcited when Evenflow kicks in… and you’re on tenterhooks wondering just how fast mike will be able to play when it comes to the solo, there’s hints sprinkled liberally through out the song, but you shake and become like a coiled spring waiting for the solo, and “move over red rover and let mike McCready take over” after some serious single note banding and drukms which are definitely kicking faster than they were in the verse, we get a great scattered, speed fest of notes, that lands on a bend that makes the hairs stand all along your spine… He’s enjoying himself, and stone picks up a little rhythmic groove that Mike takes on in the solo and it wooshes like water, and into some little triad progressions followed by super fast picking till we’re almost supersonic…… and the groove all comes together…. And fades away to be left with……..
…… Matt……
Our new feature of the tour seems to be that Matt’s doing a solo spot at the end of evenflow, and what a solo spot, the man who thumped the tubs to Jesus Christ Pose by Soundgarden finally starts to show off the amazing talent that I know he has…. I’m loving it… You can tell Matt’s listened to a few “Moby dick’s”. The spirit of Bonzo lives on,……so does evenflow, the band kick back in, after 15 years of playing the same song every night it’s still special and fresh. I don’t really understand… the outro groove is just wonderful, the band’s laughing and loving it as much as we are.
Eddie says as much. He rattles off the various Pearl jam concerts from the early days in the Tivoli, the Melkweg and the Vera, and says that Matt was with Soundgarden and that he’s glad to have him in the band…
From there he announces that they’re going to play a song they wrote with Neil Young. My heart explodes. I got Shit is one of my favourite Pearl Jam songs. It’s got a delicate start and a rousing chorus and is an example of everything Pearl jam are wonderful, the studio version has the added bonus of a Neil Young guitar solo… but we don’t need it tonight. Tears run down my face, I don’t even know what the words are, but the song always just seems so heart felt. This is what I love about Pearl jam its not the words, it’s the music, the chord progressions that the feeling is locked in.
After the emotion comes the humour, Ed announces that he’s dedicating the song to a Dutch woman who was kidnapped from Utrecht and is being held in America. Matt Lukin, the bass player from Mudhoney is the kidnapper.
LUKIN – The song named after the man. A burst of energy and ferocious singing that lasts less than 2 minutes, but its great and we go mental to it.
2 minutes clearly wasn’t enough cos they kick into spin the black circle, the first single form Vitalogy… as wild then as it is now. My world shook when that record came, gone were the safe MTV sounds of Ten and VS… this band was here to stay, and stay they have.
From here they tease us with a very slow rearviewmirror riff, which quickly builds into the full familiar groove. This is up there with all the other favourites. I predicted(or hoped) when we got even flow so early that we would get rearviewmirror, and luckily I was right. The last time I heard this song was when I was randomly flicking through Slovakian television and the Saturday Night Live Performance from 1994 came on. It was like an old friend when I was far away from what I knew…. and now I’m grooving to the real thing. The song is generally the same all the way through it starts with such a fast pace that the energy has to build from within the players rather than from within the notes.
This makes the energy that’s created really raw. We break it down to a few drum and bass notes and a lot of clapping and ed says “you’re fucking beautiful”, then the tortured climax comes… my spin is popping with energy… I can’t stop moving, every beat of every beat is stamped out and then we do our best to sing three vocal parts at once. Pearl jam are only doing 2!!!!! Then the outro beats along to my heart and create this storm of sound that has to be the heaviest ball of aural energy Pearl Jam can create…. Then we get the big finale……… but you know there’s so much more to come…. I’m crying tears of happiness…. The whole things just begun….. Now comes the encores…
We now have a cello, and a chair. It could be something special, I assume Daughter, Eddie comes out and starts ripping on America. All about being a superpower and not having to speak foreign languages, but we can teach our children to break the cycle.
Ed says he’s sure there’s some ugly fucking people up the back, but that the people down the front are fucking beautiful and healthy.
Turns out we’re getting Man of the Hour, the beautifully subtle arpegiatted song from Big Fish. It’s so sweet that you can play a stadium for 30,000 people and still look small and innocent and sound as if you need a hug. Their intimacy is astounding.
I was write, just premature, the cello is for daughter. It starts as a sing along, and soon breaks down to a groove, where you never know what ed’s gonna do. He usually tags a song onto the end. The people around me start singing another brick in the wall – one of the many tags, and we join in along to the groove. We stop when ed starts a very slow ramonesesque “Hey Ho Let’s go”
State of Love and Trust, wow….. how can a bunch of 40 year old have the same energy as they did in 1992… bizarrely they have… mike is on fire, and matt just fires out the notes…. I can’t remember if I’ve ever seen this live, but it feels as though I haven’t go wild with energy. The energy stays with me as they kick into comatose.
I immediately remember what Ed said at the Astoria after Comotose. He said that it fucks up his voice and that he can’t sing anything after it. Lets hope he’s learned to hold back a little. Afterwards it’s clear he has… Ed starts a very slow intro to Porch, which you just know is going to kick into “the” energy song from Ten. We’re not wrong. We are blessed tonight. 5 songs off Ten so far and SOLAT.
At some point in the proceedings, possibly now, ed does something that I've never seen before - He's an inventive little chap - He places the guitar on his head and looks up for a few minutes. No one quite knows what he's doing until you relaise, that he's reflecting the spot light off his scratch plate to be able to target it onto certain areas of the audience. It's pretty cool.
The groove in Porch is to the whole band what evenflow is to mike, and the energy rises a la Rearviewmirror… this meanders and builds until theres about four grooves winding together from different directions. It’s pretty reminiscent of the groove at the end of Reach Down by Temple of the dog… the original energy that started Pearl Jam… it breaks down and ed gives us something to sing along to….. The big note comes before the return to the Chorus, and we return to “bounce and sing” mode. I take a look around me and marvel at 30,000 like souls all bouncing to the same energy,.,,,, the place is on fire!!!! Encore 2 ends much like encore one did….
This time, I wonder for a few minutes whether they will come back on…. Yellow Ledbetter is the clichéd closer, but we’ve had throat stripping versions of Rearviewmirror and Porch….
….. this is no ordinary night, the band are back on, and a cheer goes up when someone come out in a spangley jacket and a bush mask.
The boys shelved Bu$hleager after they got an adverse reaction in the US, but it looks like it’s back. It’s so strange seeing humour from Ed, he comes across as this stern grumpy guy, but his humour is so dry and wonderful….
The crowd sings along… in mass anti Bu$h chants, and watch’s as ed sings to the bush mark, feeds it wine, stand on it… and then drop kicks it into the audience.
“If anything I’ve just done on stage seems violent, nothing is as violent as killing 100,000 innocent civilians. We need to take control of the earth from massive corporations”
Drop The Leash………I almost go into shock. It’s only been played a handful of times since about 1993. A group of fans constantly hold up signs for Leash, but Pearl jam rarely play it. Tonight they do…. And it’s brilliant… fresh… alive….
I’m still reeling from the fact they played live, when they hit into alive… Now we know we’re on the home stretch…. But what a nice home stretch a 30,000 strong mass sing along!
Ed calls for the house lights to go on, and I sing and dance, as I watch my cohorts have the time of their lives. The solo never fails to amaze… it’s starts pretty standard, but after all we’ve seen it, nice to get a little grooving solo rather than 1000 notes a second, this is bluesy instead… and as it tails out, the fist in the air “hey” to every beat, and for once the band is playing along with the audience instead of vice versa, and mike seems to channel a little bit of the energy from the audience down into his fingers…. For a little bit of Kiss inspired noodling….
They’re not finished, the last note of alive is the first note of Rockin in the freeworld…. Another I’ve not heard live…. Ed gets thrown tambourines from the side of the stage and starts rocking away… alive and rocking in the free world are boogie speed, and a little bit of Boom piano emphasises this.
We’re rocking out with nothing to go on but fumes. When the solo starts, the simplistic Neil Young groove sits so well that the solo seems new… even after 2 hours of solo… I love the versatility…It just makes you look back on the whole night…. I’m happy and assume that’s it….
But the show ain’t over till the little skinny man plays the little wing rip off!!!!
“Heel erg Bedankt” – Ed’s learned some Dutch!!
Yellow Ledbetter is just the moment to smile and look back at the gig, to know how great it was…. The band leave mike with his guitar, and he just goes to the zone…. Spends his little moment worshipping Jimi and all his memories. He’s like a little kid… it’s good to know that the person who plays music you get off on, gets off in the same way to something else…
After the show we trudge along to the train station and joina conveyer belt of people on buses and trains and taxis and finally crawl to bed at 4am... it's abeen about 7 weeks since I had a full nights sleep... about the same since I had a solid meal...but my heart is still pumping, my ears are still ringing, the adrenalin is stopping me sleeping and I'm going to do it all again tomorrow. Bring on the Pearl Jam summer~!!!!!!!!!(and maybe just one long lie)
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