Friday, May 12, 2006

Pearl Jam

Last week was a big Pearl Jam week. Their album was released on Tuesday and they played a number of shows in New York City. The first show they played was on 5/4, and through my membership in the Ten Club, I tried to get free tickets, but was unsuccessful (there were only about 175 pairs of tickets available).

Then suddenly, it was announced that they would play a show on 5/5 at Irving Plaza. How do you get tickets? Buy the new album on 5/2 at Tower Records on 4th and Broadway. I decided to camp out and get tickets. We arrived at 8am and waited until midnight to get the tickets.

When we arrived at 8am we were told we were about #200 in line. Rumor was they would have about 400 tickets, so we thought we were in pretty good shape. Around 11am they handed out wristbands and it allowed us to relax a little more that we were going to end up with tickets. All in all, I didn't expect the waiting to be so tough. My allergies were going haywire from all the dirt on the street, and fortunately we were pretty much able to go back and forth from the line fairly regularly, otherwise it would have been really awful. I brought a ton of stuff to read but it was pretty draining to just sit around and wait. Frankly, I should have realized waiting on the street would have been that dirty!

Here's a picture of where we were waiting:


Around 11pm, the line started moving. Clive Davis, founder of J records came and handed out doughnuts to the crowd. Nobody really knew who he was, but thanks to my LG VX9800, I noticed on wikipedia that he had signed big music names like Pink Floyd, Janis Joplin, Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel. Pretty cool, here's a blurry picture of him:



We finally got our ticket and the album.


I noticed that the retail version of the album differed from the Ten Club (fan club) pre-order version.


The fan club version (top) was more like a little book, while the retail version was similar to the other albums (I believe it's called, digipak). The CD art was different too. Sort of a nice touch to pre-ordering.

The concert was great. Here are some blurry photos of the band. Unfortunately, I didn't learn how to zoom my camera phone until after the concert, so we're a bit far away from everyone. We were really close to the band. They played a great 2 hr set that included Garden for the first time in 6 years, 5 songs off of Ten, and we got to choose between "campfire Betterman" and State of Love and Trust. We chose SofL&T. There was a huge 90's flashback when a guy with a Rodney Hampton Giants jersey climbed onto a raised platform and jumped into the crowd. There were at least 3 crowd surfers (who all got removed by security). A lot of celebrities were in the balcony, including Eddie Vedder's wife and kid, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins and their child, Flea from RHCP, the Strokes lead singer (and supposedly Drew Barrymore), supermodel Giselle Bundchen and Mary Kate Olsen (who was dancing as if she was listening to the song, Aquarius and at a hippie concert).

Set:
World Wide Suicide, Life Wasted, Severed Hand, Marker In The Sand, Come Back, Garden, Even Flow, Insignificance, Given To Fly, Army Reserve, Gone, Why Go, Present Tense, Do The Evolution, Comatose
Encore 1: Man Of The Hour, Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town, State Of Love And Trust, Porch
Encore 2: Alive, Yellow Ledbetter

Blurry photos, the red arrow of this top photo is pointing to blurry Mary Kate.







An awesome concert. I noticed the guy standing next to me text his friend before the show "I am at the concert of a lifetime."

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