Vault #3 - Constitution Hall, 9-19-1998 (vinyl, cd, digital)

[warehouse]

church revivals

i feel like this is how most concerts should be, but im a fuckin weirdo

[evenslow]

yeesh. you guys are a tough crowd.

i can be just as critical as the next guy but i also like to have this thing in my life called unencumbered enjoyment. you boys should try it some time.

and ed's been flubbing lines for a long, long time now. i actually noticed it more in the mid to late 90s. but then i got over it and had a good time.

[McParadigm]

yeesh. you guys are a tough crowd.

i can be just as critical as the next guy but i also like to have this thing in my life called unencumbered enjoyment. you boys should try it some time.

and ed's been flubbing lines for a long, long time now. i actually noticed it more in the mid to late 90s. but then i got over it and had a good time.

For some reason, I have this image in my mind of your diary being filled literally to bursting point with the most incredibly surreal events and characters.

And all of them are treated with a total lack of surprise, concern, or confusion.

[evenslow]

yeesh. you guys are a tough crowd.

i can be just as critical as the next guy but i also like to have this thing in my life called unencumbered enjoyment. you boys should try it some time.

and ed's been flubbing lines for a long, long time now. i actually noticed it more in the mid to late 90s. but then i got over it and had a good time.

For some reason, I have this image in my mind of your diary being filled literally to bursting point with the most incredibly surreal events and characters.

And all of them are treated with a total lack of surprise, concern, or confusion.

well that's way off. my diary is filled with a billion little hearts, forever flowing around one word: mcparadigm.

[McParadigm]

yeesh. you guys are a tough crowd.

i can be just as critical as the next guy but i also like to have this thing in my life called unencumbered enjoyment. you boys should try it some time.

and ed's been flubbing lines for a long, long time now. i actually noticed it more in the mid to late 90s. but then i got over it and had a good time.

For some reason, I have this image in my mind of your diary being filled literally to bursting point with the most incredibly surreal events and characters.

And all of them are treated with a total lack of surprise, concern, or confusion.

well that's way off. my diary is filled with a billion little hearts, forever flowing around one word: mcparadigm.

No, that doesn't fit with what I've imagined, sorry.

I don't actually imagine it as a diary, either. More of a memoir, detailing things both great and horrible. Something like this:

Spoiler: show

evenslow's notes, Sep. 3rd of '12.
The night of the Democratic National Convention.

I did and could not follow the convention in the year of the dragon, as I had recently jumped the big blue and taken up with a pair of poorly-built German trapeze artists who shared some wildly exotic hair growth patterns. It was a pleasant time, in my recollection, marred only by an abundance of flavorless macaroni and thickly-mixed spittle.

Still, while I may have spoken pleasantly of my experiences at the time, passing weeks began to find me increasingly distracted for the absence of American news. The third day in September was a particularly low oven setting of a night, with just the kind of clutching humidity that I had assumed was unfamiliar to German culture. Maybe that’s what got me thinking about home in the first place…that overpowering stench of oily Germanic sweat. Or perhaps it was the mysterious growth that had recently begun to develop on my rectus femoris. Regardless of reason, I did opt on the night in question to leave my fully-sated and heavily-bruised flatmates to bask in their own collective reek, while I went wandering in search of another expatriate whom I could take up in conversation.

The streets of Hamburg are poorly lit by nearly any industrialized country's standard...or, they were at that time. Fortunately, I had called the city home for nearly as long as that most recent bout of hepatitis had resided within my abdomen, and I had no trouble navigating its cobblestone and syringe-lined avenues until such time that I located a promising-looking bar.

Ahh, the Kaiserkeller. The type of place distinguished only by its familiarity with blood-soaked truncheons and milk crate rock and roll stage performances. It would have taken several of its inhabitants to cull together a full set of adult teeth, I'll admit, but one would find it a quite reasonable place to go in search of fresh syphilis. I ordered warm milk, as was my habit of the time, and did my best to calculate the bust size of my drag queen waitress while scanning for foreigners...

[evenslow]

^^^ are there any cliffs notes for that? ^^^

like "evenslow is dumb"? even a will do. would be a great help as i have a very busy day ahead. thanks.

[VinylGuy]

what i really like about PJ is that their live eras are so different. 1998 was a great tour for their reasons, and 2013 is another great "tour" for another reasons.

I´ve been in 2 shows this year and they were incredible.

[Kevin Davis]

i can be just as critical as the next guy but i also like to have this thing in my life called unencumbered enjoyment. you boys should try it some time.

You obviously haven't been into the "Equestria Girls" thread, where friendship is magic and nopony ever forgets her lines.

[William Bloke]

That Long Road is a thing of beauty. I loooove the drums on this thing.

And I hear you 'slow, nothing wrong with the straightforward enjoyment of what you love.

[stip]

I also think those earlier shows were collective experiences as well, not just the band playing in the corner treating the audiences' concerns with irrelevance. I think it's just that they had a lot of different kinds of experiences in those older shows, usually transitioning from tour to tour. It could be darker or more celebratory. I think the feeling the shows have now is a great one, and I leave feeling elevated, but they really only do that one thing, or feel, now. 2003 feels like the last year where the shows, in addition to being fun as hell, had their own feel to them.

I'd agree with that

[stip]

pearl jam concerts are celebrations. They are not frat parties. They are closer to church revivals or political rallies.

I remember my wife specifically commenting after the STL show in 2010 how it felt like a frat party. Eddie spends the entire show getting progressively drunker, changes song lyrics to include dumb-assed drug references, and the audience is full of people only half paying attention and behaving like belligerent jackasses. When I saw Pearl Jam in 2000, they did their own thing onstage and involved the audience only to the degree that they cared to be involved; these days it sometimes seems like Ed is specifically catering to the obnoxious idiot who is ruining the show for everyone else, concerned less with his relationship to the music and more with getting him to scream really loud by any means necessary.

fair enough. I've never had that kind of show experience

[Norah]

These idiots at Ten Club fuck everything up.

Their vault releases are incomplete. AND, they picked shows that ALREADY have good recordings. F That. There are plenty of shows out there that do not have good recordings already and were great shows.

That's not exactly fair. It appears that the pre-2000 shows were recorded on a DAT format with one machine (or chain of machines). That means there is going to be missing stuff. I can't say if that's the case for the Beth thing and Ledbetter, but it's definitely the case for Push Me, Pull Me. There have also been songs missing from previous vault releases because of tape changes. Starting in 2000, they appear to have started using two staggered recorders to catch everything. However, you can fault the band for not being open to the idea of patching the vault shows with raw "backup" board tapes, if they exist. They did this in 2000 when the DAT machines malfunctioned in Tampa and again in 2006 in East Rutherford when there was a power failure in the venue and the main recording of the show up to that point had been lost (harddrive?).

And we had a good recording of DC, but not a soundboard. It's sort of silly to complain about a soundboard of such an excellent show.

This guy gets it.

[Norah]

They're really performing those songs and I'm sure having Matt learning on the job is a large part of that; they were forced to rethink how to play their entire catalogue (up to that point) all over again. There's a kind of unconscious second-nature quality to the way they tackle a lot of their most played material these days that, while in other bands might lead to a more carefree and adventurous approach, seems to result in a kind of thoughtless thrash to the finish line with these guys. I don't hear that same sense of engagement, the little flourishes that really make the songs push and pull where they need to.

This perfectly sums up everything that is wrong with (I want to say post-2006, but probably more accurately) post-2003 live PJ. The performance ended the second the frat-party began...

Exactly!

[Wendy Carlos's Twin]

I think the 2009 Philly debacle I witnessed defines current day Pearl Jam. The sound was fucking horrible - you couldn't hear shit. The whole band was drunk. Their performance was beyond poor. The audience was 98% frat boys, all of them looking at game scores on their cell phones (or even on TV's out in the lobby while the band performed). They even brought out a fucking SCORECARD GIRL to give the score between songs. Then balloons & confetti dropped from the ceiling and everybody high-fived each other. Worst concert I've ever attended.

So yes, Pearl Jam shows are big frat parties now. If you can't see that, then you must be part of it.

[warehouse]

I think the 2009 Philly debacle I witnessed defines current day Pearl Jam. The sound was fucking horrible - you couldn't hear shit. The whole band was drunk. Their performance was beyond poor. The audience was 98% frat boys, all of them looking at game scores on their cell phones (or even on TV's out in the lobby while the band performed). They even brought out a fucking SCORECARD GIRL to give the score between songs. Then balloons & confetti dropped from the ceiling and everybody high-fived each other. Worst concert I've ever attended.

So yes, Pearl Jam shows are big frat parties now. If you can't see that, then you must be part of it.

u know those were the last shows at the spectrum, right? and the scorecard girl was giving the score to the world series, being played across the street? weird post.

[Wendy Carlos's Twin]

So yes, Pearl Jam shows are big frat parties now. If you can't see that, then you must be part of it.
u know those were the last shows at the spectrum, right? and the scorecard girl was giving the score to the world series, being played across the street? weird post.

It wasn't a concert, it was a fucking sausage fest. You couldn't pay me to go to another PJ concert after that.

[Strat]

LOL @ East Coast bro's.

Thats what you get when you go to shows out there

[super nintendo chalmers]

I think the 2009 Philly debacle I witnessed defines current day Pearl Jam. The sound was fucking horrible - you couldn't hear shit. The whole band was drunk. Their performance was beyond poor. The audience was 98% frat boys, all of them looking at game scores on their cell phones (or even on TV's out in the lobby while the band performed). They even brought out a fucking SCORECARD GIRL to give the score between songs. Then balloons & confetti dropped from the ceiling and everybody high-fived each other. Worst concert I've ever attended.

So yes, Pearl Jam shows are big frat parties now. If you can't see that, then you must be part of it.

u know those were the last shows at the spectrum, right? and the scorecard girl was giving the score to the world series, being played across the street? weird post.

Exactly. It was the world series.

[ridleybradout]

what i really like about PJ is that their live eras are so different. 1998 was a great tour for their reasons, and 2013 is another great "tour" for another reasons.

I love this about PJ too - the Dave and Jack incarnations are like two almost completely different bands. Each Matt tour had it's own feel as well until about 2008, when they've since started to blur into one...

church revivals

i feel like this is how most concerts should be, but im a fuckin weirdo

I enjoy this vibe at a concert too, I just wish PJ could do it without rushing through on autopilot most of the time (though I can imagine it must be hard if not impossible to bring the same (any?) intensity/emotion to the old songs after all these years).

LOL @ East Coast bro's. Thats what you get when you go to shows out there

The Spectrum shows were probably the worst example of the 'frat-vibe' given the occasion, but it's not like that all the time. Different countries/cities and their audiences have their own unique culture, and the band often tries to cater to this (e.g. playing the hits at festivals, playing the Ramones in South America). If the band were to ever go back to Asia I'm sure we'd get some pretty unique shows...

[evenslow]

LOL @ East Coast bro's.

Thats what you get when you go to shows out there