Local fans petitioned to make this show happen, and Pearl Jam responded with an instant classic. It’s fashionable to use Even Flow as a bathroom break amongst hardcore fans, but McCready goes to Mars on this one. Opening with a shocking, stunning Long Road/rearviewmirror combo, it never lets up from there, becoming a strong contender for the best first set in Pearl Jam history. This set became infamous for the moment when Pearl Jam got booed and heckled by their own fans after they played anti-George W Bush protest song Bus$hleaguer, but it’s led to the show’s magical first half has being tragically forgotten in the controversy. Guitar HighlightĪ scorching, searing take on Glorified G 15. This set was notable for the generous helping of rarities – playing Fatal for just the third time live, while Dirty Frank made its seventh and still most recent appearance in concert – but in truth it didn’t matter what they were playing that night, what’s special about this show is how lean and aggressive the band sounds throughout. McCready’s dissonant squalls in Parting Ways that end the Binaural portion of the set. But even if you stopped caring after Vs, this evening found the band on fire. Leave it to Pearl Jam to kick off a two-night arena stand by playing Binaural, their dark and neglected sixth album, in its entirety. One of the best Black solos Mike McCready has ever played. Plus: features the only appearance of Breath that year. Heading back to nearly the beginning and with good reason – from the tip-toed opening riff in Sometimes to the Ozzy Osbourne tag on Yellow Ledbetter, everything just cooks here. This performance is a little heavy on the covers, but you should never skip a show that features the triple whammy of Footsteps, Brain of J and Fuckin’ Up Guitar Highlight Stone Gossard’s crunchy tone in the first Daughter bridge at 1:05. Frontman Eddie Vedder is in fine form all night. The band paint here with many colors, moving gracefully between their most breakneck and their most stately. Taken together, they offer a scrapbook of the band’s travels and transformations over the last two decades. Instead, these are the 20 best cohesive listening experiences out of some 400-plus in circulation (less the ones that your correspondent personally attended as it’s hard to be objective if you were there!).

Some great tours, meanwhile, suffered from subpar recording quality (2005) and some songs got their definitive versions during shows that were otherwise average. These are not strictly the band’s 20 greatest shows in that regard, as for the sake of consistency we’ve excluded everything pre-2000 as well as the non-bootleg Vault releases like Chicago 2007.

To mark the 20th anniversary of this unprecedented endeavor, here’s our ranking of the series’ 20 best offerings. Would it be feasible? Would there be demand? Wouldn’t some shows just suck – embarrassing the band if preserved?īut the bootlegs kept coming, and continued far beyond that original 2000 tour – they now document (almost) every subsequent Pearl Jam gig. No one knew whether this Official Bootleg series, as the band labeled it, would stick. They would release full-length, professionally recorded live albums capturing all 72 shows on their 2000 Binaural tour. Twenty years ago, Pearl Jam made an absurd announcement.

All pearl jam albums ranked