The timeline moves ahead to 1993 this week, a massive year for Pearl Jam as their sophomore album Vs. was released with a ton of fanfare backing it. It can be argued that there's no year of this band's career where they were bigger. The record was a massive success, tickets to their shows became nearly impossible to attain, but as all of this was taking shape, the band was not comfortable with their role as the top artist in the world. Their focus was on writing, continuing to raise the bar for their live shows and as we see from this show in Mesa, Arizona, raising awareness for meaningful causes like protecting indigenous land Mt. Graham from (I kid you not) alien observation towers.

This show centers a little bit around preservation of Apache land, and we'll discuss how an incident with a crowd member is connected to that. But the moment that people are gonna remember the most from this show is that it marks the official live debut of Yellow Ledbetter. Having released it as a b-side a year prior, fans in the know began to gravitate towards it, and after some time had passed radio stations would put the song into heavy rotation. Being unlike the rest of the catalog at the time, Ledbetter stood out for it's moody Hendrix inspired guitar wailing from McCready and anthemic chorus build ups. We'll discuss whether or not the band had plans for this song to be incorporated into the rotation, or if it was the will of the fans that turned it into the end of show curtain call that it is today.

We'll also do a deep dive on the era and talk about the band's budding mentorship with Neil Young as well as massive performances of Once, Jeremy and... John Denver?

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