After three successful albums and becoming a world wide phenomenon, Pearl Jam entered 1996 ready to put out a new album and shift the dynamics of their song writing in a direction that perhaps the world wasn't ready for. To the wayside went some of the aggression and raw power that dominated Vitalogy opting for a more self reflective approach for No Code. The live shows were still without Ticketmaster, but continued to evolve, and this became the first year where we got to see marathon performances reaching nearly three hours and over 30 songs featured on the set. The 1996 representative for our Chronology Series is a show from Buffalo, New York that had everything you'd want from this era - flawless performances and an energized crowd.

We invite our good friend, Steve Bennett, back to the podcast this week to talk about this show being his first of nearly 100 that he's attended. And the stories here are can't miss. From failing to get tickets through an 800 number to dealing with brokers through the newspaper as a fifteen year old, it is the classic story of how far a high school student was willing to go in order to experience this band. And for it to be life changing once stepping inside the arena makes all the difference. This show marks the first non-VIP event in the building that's housed the Sabres for 30 years, and Pearl Jam would go on to play there three more times in following tours.

Steve's stories will dominate the conversation, but we'll also dig into the next step that this band took to develop a more mature sound in their music. We'll spend some time talking about how Present Tense marked massive changes for the band's mentality, and how even a song like Better Man was greatly improved upon since the following tour in 1995.

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Moving ahead in our series to Pearl Jam's highly regarded 1995 tour covering the first of two nights from Milwaukee's Summerfest. This year saw many changes for the band including a new drummer with Jack Irons, no Ticketmaster venues played or corporate sponsorships promoted and a change within their sound to fit what they were evolving into. This Milwaukee show comes at a time that was pretty controversial - it was the first show in two weeks since Ed was stricken with food poisoning at their Polo Fields show in San Francisco. The incident was seen as a turning point for the band that was dealing with their own internal struggles. It was either get on the same page as a team, or come to terms with the reality of a possible break up.

This show allows us to dig into some topics about what the band's future looked like and how they were about to overcome the challenges laid ahead for them. Three days after would be the famed Soldier Field show, so the turnaround in order to get on the same page happens quick. This show will deal with a little bit of ring rust, but after a speech where Ed addresses media spreading rumors about him and the band, the show is kicked into the gear that we love from 1995 performances. Not For You, Alive and Blood are the headlining moments, but the show stealer comes from a duo named Lightning And Thunder well known throughout the upper midwest for covering Neil Diamond songs. With the movie Song Sung Blue having recently come out featuring Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson that chronicles their journey, a big part of it included this moment where they sang Forever In Blue Jeans with Ed in front of a crowd of 30,000.

We'll also dig into Ed's vocals at the time and how mentors of his encouraged him to limit his screaming in order to preserve longevity. We discuss whether it would've been wise to take advice from either Neil Young or Roger Daltrey, and perhaps share a baseball analogy along with it. As a matter of fact, there are many baseball analogies featured in this episode!

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The chronology takes us to 1994 in this episode during a time where there were no act in the world bigger than Pearl Jam... outside of maybe Ace Of Base. Coming off of the release of Vs., the band continued to struggle with their rising stardom. Tickets for their shows were in such high demand, yet the band wasn't quite ready to take on bigger venues to hold the capacity crowds that wanted to experience them. This episode focuses on a show from Miami where the capacity issues reach a boiling point and led to fences being broken down, fans rushing the stage and arrests being made. For an 8,000 seat venue, an alleged 24,000 got through to see the show. On top of that, the band was unhappy because the venue featured corporate sponsorship signs that they demanded be covered up.

It took the band an hour before they took the stage, which could have added to some of the commotion going on outside the gates, but when they started playing, you could sense a real anger and frustration in their tone. There's a moment where they needed to have a fan kicked out for being too dangerous in the pit. That emotion is what motivated them throughout the night as songs like Blood, Deep, Porch, Not For You and State Of Love And Trust brought intensity to what was already a tumultuous evening.

We'll also talk about the beginning of their battle against Ticketmaster service fees and how maybe our only hope in our current environment is... Kid Rock... kill me.

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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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For the first time in our nearly eight years of being a podcast, we are presenting you coverage of a full length episode entirely on our YouTube Channel! This week is week two of our episodic series following every Pearl Jam tour year in chronological order, which means we're covering one of the most important years in their history - 1992. After a year of playing small venues and opening up for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam's popularity was growing in 1992 mainly due to radio and music video networks playing Alive and Even Flow. But the band truly saw their fame escalate once their MTV Unplugged performance aired and the Jeremy music video hit rotation, the former of which happening two nights before this show in San Francisco.

We'll get into deep discussion over how good the band sounded this night and Ed's on stage mannerisms featuring clips from the entire show. We'll also talk about some discoveries made when listening to this bootleg, including a Paul Simon song that was tagged, and perhaps the first hint at Yellow Ledbetter live. Massive versions of Black, Porch, Alive, Once and all of the favorites from the Ten era will dominate the conversation as well, and we pay tribute to a man deeply connected with San Francisco who we lost this past week, Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead.

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It's a brand new year, and a brand new season of the podcast will feature a brand new series where each week we will cover every single Pearl Jam tour year in chronological order! The kick off starts here with 1991 as we cover a show that's only the second known bootleg from back when they were still billed as Mookie Blaylock at Florentine Gardens in Los Angeles. This was the beginning of their first tour - an 11-show west coast swing opening up for the surging Alice In Chains.

This show is like an artifact dug up from underground and showcased to a group of people interested in studying the past, but the bootleg for this show had been available in the 90s, yet not widely circulated. For a show that has the live debuts of Garden and Brother, and the only performance for 18 years of the latter, you would think that there would be interest from nerdy fans who wanted their hands on everything. Well, that was not the case. We invite Patrick and Brian from our Hallucinogenic Recipe podcast to talk about why this show wasn't as massed produced as it could have been. Was it due to audio quality? Was it due to popularity of shows in the mid-90s garnering more attention? They'll break down all of the reasons, and the reasons why it needs to be heard today.

As we'll do with every show during this series, we'll give a synopsis of the entire tour year and some statistical analysis of what went down. The episode is much longer than the actual show that clocks in at 40 minutes, but don't worry, because we get to tell the tale of our friend "taper dude" and how excited he was to witness the former Mother Love Bone in their new formation.

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Our final show for 2025 is the #1 Pearl Jam show of the year voted on by the listeners, and of course it can't be anything other than the tour closer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Unbeknownst to us, this would be the final show of Matt Cameron's 27-year tenure in Pearl Jam, and although it wasn't announced until two months later, there are enough subtle hints in this show that are clearer from hindsight's perspective - the champagne toast, the hugs and even t-shirts worn by Mike and Jeff are some signals that you can tell the band knows what's going on. But there is also references to this show being the end of the Dark Matter run that only got one full calendar year of touring.

While Matt Cameron is the storyline that we didn't know at the time, it was his former Soundgarden bandmate, Chris Cornell, that was the major storyline heading into this show. May 18th this year was the anniversary of Cornell's death, something that the band has been hesitant to address at shows due to the nature of the subject. Going back to that date last year, there was a show in Vegas that did not reference him outside of a shirt that Cameron wore. After telling a story about him at Fenway Park last year and performing Hunger Strike in Australia, it seemed that the band was ready to pay tribute to the man they called a bandmate and brother. We'll talk about the first ever appearance of Comes Then Goes in a setlist, as well as Hunger Strike being played for the final time with Cameron.

Thank you for checking out this podcast all year! after 350 episodes, we can't wait to show you what's all in store for 2026!

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We're down to two episodes left on the year, and the show voted as the #2 Pearl Jam show of the year comes to you from their first night in Pittsburgh. It had been 12 years since they last appeared in the Steel City, and the anticipation for these shows was high due to it being the final stops. What we didn't know then is that there would be more of a finality to these shows than we would've wanted as these will go down as the final shows of Matt Cameron's 27 year tenure with the band. As Ed would say at this show, it was about to be the end of an era, but we all thought that it was just the Dark Matter era that was coming to a close...

While we'll get into hints of Cameron's departure in this episode, the talking points center more around storytelling. We've invite Jeremy Rasmussen onto the show to talk about his travels on this tour through the lens of his taco truck called Taco Jam! Taco Jam became a massive hit as Jeremy drove around from venue to venue with the idea in mind to cook delicious tacos for all of the fans hanging out in merch lines, GA or at pre-parties. He'll share stories of mishaps on the road and how he got engrained into our community meeting dozens of wonderful new friends, including us.

We'll also invite another guest on as Noa Shaindlinger will join us to discuss her moment when she requested Grievance thanks to Ed selecting her at this show. We'll talk about the Hand Trilogy, Bruce Springsteen and Binaural's 25th anniversary in the penultimate episode of the year!

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You guys voted, and we're delivering on democracy. The Pearl Jam show that was voted the #3 show of the year is the second night in Nashville! This was a show that streamed live on Sirius XM, which means that the band had plans for a special evening. One of the top moments of the year came early in the set when they invited the legendary Peter Frampton on stage to perform Black. We'll talk about what it meant for him to be up there and how his performance on the song impacted the show.

Javier attended this one and has many stories to share, including his journey during the off day finding guitar stores and record shops just to be greeted by a couple of familiar faces. Approaching Third Man Records, Javi finds Eddie inside, and it leads to a massive group photo and a huge piece to an unforgettable day. Javi and friends also got to meet Josh Klinghoffer at a minor league baseball game, so he'll share all of those great memories prior to breaking down the setlist.

Tune in to check out that full breakdown, including why perhaps the set wasn't capitalized on after the big Peter Frampton moment.

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Coming in at number 4 on our list of the Top 5 Pearl Jam shows of the 2025 tour is the second night from Raleigh, North Carolina! The night one crowd was treated to a sampling of songs that are almost never played at a Pearl Jam show, so night two needed to step it up a notch and it did. From the massive surprise of opening the show with Setting Sun, to a version of Untitled paying homage to the local fans in attendance, there are no lack of big time moments to celebrate from this one.

Joining the podcast this week are two friends who have unique stories from attending this show. We invite Lori Jernberg and Steve Bennett to the pod this week. Steve will talk about the importance of taking in a show together with family, and he'll rave about Rocky Marciano's undefeated streak that was no match for Wreckage, which was not played for the first time after 45-straight shows. Lori's story is about how the loss of a close friend made this night emotional for her, but it's also about how she managed to get Eddie's attention and came home with the ultimate gift you can get from a Pearl Jam show. Randy was also there at this show taking it in with Lori in GA, and he'll speak of his own experiences with family and loss, and perhaps other reasons why this show made an impact on him.

It's a jam packed episode with incredible stories as well as the normal setlist breakdown. Keep tuning in to find out what show is dubbed #1 for the year!

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