Pearl Jam - “All or None”
Live in Seattle, Aug. 10, 2018. I can’t believe this is coming up on being five years ago. I had such a good time exploring around that city on my own during the day, then seeing these guys kill it at night. And it feels very current.
Apparently, this song was featured in the show that everyone else is watching, so it’s getting some renewed attention. And I’m good with whatever shines a light on this era for the band. I estimated that I listened to Riot Act 70 times in the first two weeks it was out in November 2002, basically listening to it five times a day every day. I’d have it on in my stereo, then put it into my discman, plug that into the car’s tape deck, then put headphones in the same thing and walk over to class, and repeat, on and on and on.
A nice thing about keeping an album on repeat is you discover the way it can kind of create a continuous cycle. Listen to the closing “All or None” float back into our introductory “Can’t Keep” and it becomes easier to understand why I just kept listening to it over and over.
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Additionally, here are some random things that crossed my path over four days in Seattle, walking through Seattle Center, getting coffee, watching yet more music on the day between Pearl Jam shows, and so on.
Man, two years ago I was wandering around Seattle, watching Pearl Jam and doing all kinds of cool shit, half on my own and half with some excellent people. I thought today’s date rang a bell, and that’s why.
Pearl Jam - “Crown of Thorns”
In honor of recent weirdo Seattle dreams, here’s Pearl Jam keeping Mother Love Bone alive on Aug. 10, 2018 at Safeco Field in Seattle.
Dreams: Seattle edition
Last night, I had a dream that I was in Seattle at the University of Washington, attending some kind of Pearl Jam seminar hosted by a professor, like on the philosophy of their music or something. I walked in, not knowing if I could actually be there, but then I was led to a seat that had been reserved for me in my name.
I was sitting there in the lecture hall with a program and a notebook, following along for about an hour or 45 minutes, before the seminar broke and people filed out to a kind of wine/cocktail hour that a lot of these types of things end on. But I didn’t stay there. I wandered out into the city, ducking through little streets that may or may not actually exist, poking my head in bars and Mexican restaurants — a lot of them were missing a wall, the way a doll house does, so I could slip in and out of all of them pretty quickly. At one point, I very much felt like going to Pioneer Square but knew that I was a very long walk away from it.
I went to one place I seemed to remember as being a nice coffee shop, but when I went inside, it had converted into a kind of tourist information area, with someone working behind a counter giving people maps. I pretty disappointed in that.
When I woke up, I was convinced that I had gone to this thing for real, and that I had made my way to the airport, gotten on a red-eye flight back to Boston, come home, gone back to sleep, and now was waking up. And then I remembered that it’s been a year and a couple of weeks since I took my solo trip to Seattle, so maybe that had something to do with it.
Stereo Embers - “Wagon”
I was listening to their Astronaut Handshake EP on my walk home and, seriously, this is my favorite song of the past year. I first heard it when they blew my face off live at the Tractor Tavern in Seattle last August, and it’s basically been burned into my brain ever since. It’s a classic.
Look at that: I thought I’d hit my image limit earlier, but that’s not the case. So here are some more sights and imagined sounds from Seattle last week.
Additionally, here are some random things that crossed my path over four days in Seattle, walking through Seattle Center, getting coffee, watching yet more music on the day between Pearl Jam shows, and so on.
All right. So last week I went to Seattle to see Pearl Jam twice at Safeco Field, and it was pretty much everything I wanted it to be and even more things I didn’t realize it was going to be.
I have a very long review of it here, but if you just want to look at pictures, these are some of the better ones I got.
Stereo Embers - “Wagon”
I’m going to have a lot more to say soon about my trip to Seattle last week. In the meantime, please enjoy this track by the Stereo Embers, who I tore the shit out of the Tractor Tavern in Ballard on the night between Pearl Jam shows. I keep getting goosebumps thinking about how good they were.
(Source: Spotify)
