It was a whirlwind trip to Boston. After an 11-hour work shift threatened by a few computer system halts, I boarded the express to South Station. This was definitely an express trip, I was due back on board 24 hours after I arrived.
Got a little nap in at Chez Fitz -- of course, I was hanging with my Pearl Jam bud, Liam -- and then headed over to the hallowed ground of Fenway Park. Felt completely exhausted ... but if the delectable Sharon Gabet (best known as Raven Whitney on Edge of Night) tells you you're looking good, you go with it!
Loved our fan club seats, two sections over from Pesky Pole. We looked directly onto the stage in center field, more than I can say for the floor seats that seemed to be facing the right-field wall.
Encore 1: Strangest Tribe, Society, Just Breathe, Sleeping by Myself, Wasted Reprise/Life Wasted, State of Love and Trust, Comfortably Numb, Corduroy.
Encore 2: Draw the Line, Alive, I’ve Got a Feeling, Baba O’Riley.
We got two openers for the price of one -- "Release" and "Long Road." I immediately realized that this is a band tailor-made for sending their words and music into the open air ... and that it had been about 13 years since my last outdoor Pearl Jam show. (It wasn't until I made a chart for this blog that I realized I had never before gotten "Release" on one of my setlists.)
"Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town" made an early entry into the set. With a woman whose back was tattooed with more lyrics to the song than its elongated title in front of us, our section was emotionally engaged in the show pretty quickly. And "Low Light," "All Those Yesterdays" and "Faithfull" drove me completely mad -- they're tracks from my favorite Pearl Jam album, Yield, that I had never seen live before.
They scorched through the first set with the likes of "Given to Fly" and "Mind Your Manners" and "Even Flow" and "Porch." At one point, Stone and Matt cracked me up by starting "Grievance." But then they stopped to do "Faithfull," and went back to "pledge their grievance to the flag" after that -- apparently they jumped a song in the setlist.
Of course, we were awash in Boston references and baseball references and Boston baseball references. It's not like I didn't expect that, but it still brought me out of my reverie to some degree. Former Red Sox hurler and fashion plate Bronson Arroyo joined in for "Black," even singing the background do-do-do-do-do-do-dos from the old days.
Eddie elicited some boos from the crowd when he mentioned loving the Cubs, and he chastised the crowd for not remembering what it's like to not bring home a championship for a very long, long time. But he added that his favorite American League team was the Red Sox, and all was right in the land once again.
It was horribly cute when "Youk" -- Kevin Youkilis -- brought out Eddie's ukelele, it was what one might call a natural. Later, sports personality, and I use that term loosely, Peter Gammons took the stage ... and then left it. I guess he just wanted to say "hi" to Ed.
One of the show's highlights was a cover of Bob Dylan's "Masters of War." I've heard/seen Eddie perform this with Mike at "Bobfest" a number of years back, but the full band sound was truly something to behold. I got chills. Until I looked to the side and saw the number of people streaming for the exits, then I got annoyed.
They took it down a notch in level, albeit not, in quality to start the second set. "Strangest Tribe" is a soulful song that I hadn't previously experienced in concert, and the show marked only the second time Eddie's "Society" from Into the Wild was performed by the band. "Just Breathe" and "Sleeping by Myself" kept us pretty chilled out until they rocketed into "Life Wasted," complete with reprise, and "State of Love and Trust."
In compiling my setlist chart, I saw that ELEVEN of the songs they hadn't performed before "for me." Granted, a couple were covers -- like Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" and Aerosmith's "Draw the Line" -- and I'm saving the best for last, but that seemed like an awfully high number. To share my bounty with the rest of you, they were in order of appearance ... "Release," "Low Light," "All Those Yesterdays," "Faithfull," "Masters of War," "Strangest Tribe," "Society," "Sleeping by Myself," "Comfortably Numb," "Draw the Line" and the holy grail, something they haven't performed (except for one other time in Boston) since their earliest incarnations, "I've Got a Feeling."
Their Beatles song ("All Those Yesterdays") AND a Beatles cover? Let's just say my socks -- no, they weren't red -- were knocked off.
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