Ed Vedder’s solo jaunt down the West Coast

The Ten Club wasn’t lying when they promised an exciting 2008 for members. Just a few weeks after announcing that Pearl Jam will headline Bonnaroo, we members were notified yesterday afternoon that Eddie Vedder will be doing a solo tour down the West Coast in April. The venues are small, the tickets are unfortunately not cheap, and members will have a stab at presale on Monday. A friend of mine is combining the tour with some baseball park visits; the season is right, and dang that sounds like a lovely idea to me.

Liam Finn opens these shows.

EDDIE VEDDER SOLO TOUR
Apr-02 The Centre, Vancouver, BC
Apr-05 Civic Auditorium, Santa Cruz, CA
Apr-07 Zellerbach Theatre, Berkeley, CA
Apr-10 Arlington Theatre, Santa Barbara, CA
Apr-12 Wiltern Theatre, Los Angeles, CA
Apr-13 Wiltern Theatre, Los Angeles, CA
Apr-15 Spreckels Theater, San Diego, CA

Five special ticket packages per show will be auctioned off for the legal defense fund of the West Memphis Three. On-sale to the general public is Friday through (yes) Ticketmaster.

Bruce Springsteen will also be tracing a somewhat parallel journey to Vedder, notably with his Vancouver show March 31 and the Sacramento show April 4th. Following the reliable old adage that starting a rumor on the internet is obviously likely to yield actual results, maybe there will be some collaboration like these:

No Surrender (with Vedder, Meadowlands 10-13-04) – Bruce Springsteen
Betterman (with Vedder, Meadowlands 10-13-04) – Bruce Springsteen
My Hometown (with Vedder, Chicago 9-26-02) – Bruce Springsteen

For good measure we’ll throw these in too:

Growin’ Up (Springsteen cover, 7-14-03 New Jersey) – Pearl Jam
Atlantic City (Springsteen cover, 10-01-05, Borgata Casino) – Pearl Jam**
No Surrender (Springsteen cover, 09-30-05, Borgata Casino) – Pearl Jam**

**The encoding on those last two tracks is too low to stream right (Chipmunks!) but if you download them they do sound fine, and that recording No Surrender is one of my all-time favorite covers. If anyone has better quality mp3s, please send em my way.

[top photo credit Kerensa Wight]
[Vedder/Springsteen photo 10-13-04, taken by Paul Hawthorne]

Had to be good for Santa Claus: Pearl Jam 2007 Christmas single

In all my years of collecting the Pearl Jam Christmas singles, I can tell you for a fact that the annual 7″ has never arrived on Christmas Eve, in the purple twilight, with snow dancing all around me.

I stopped by my mailbox a few hours ago on the way back from last minute grocery shopping for the Christmas dinner I am making tomorrow. As I stood there shivering, fumbling the key with my frozen-in-two-seconds fingers, I got a fantastic Christmas present in plain brown wrapping, stamped “Ten Club” in the corner. As every year, my heart began to thump as I savored the slow unwrapping. Most years we use the term Christmas single loosely because it turns out to be a Presidents Day present or an Easter gift. But for 2007, Ten Club — your timing was impeccable.

Merry Christmas, guys.

Santa God – Pearl Jam
Jingle Bells – Pearl Jam

Thanks to DropTheLeash for the audio rip and SYM

Sooner or later your legs give way, you hit the ground

The original “Save It For Later” (by whom we call The English Beat over in these here parts, but were truly just called “The Beat”) hit the charts in 1982 and is part of the musical periphery of my childhood. As many times as I’ve heard it, it still strikes me from those opening notes as such a fantastic song.

Save It For Later – The (English) Beat

The Beat played Denver a few weeks ago, and while I was not in attendance, I did get updates from a friend who is a fellow Pearl Jam fan and knows that PJ does a wistful, spontaneous-feeling cover version of this song; I love the way it builds from a tentative start to a rocking, thrumming end. Ed clearly took his cues here from his hero, his idol, Pete Townshend and his version of the same song in Brixton in 1985.

A few years later, Townshend was on stage at a charity gig in Brixton, and performed “Save it For Later,” a recent hit from the Beat. Townshend sheared the song down to its skeleton, hanging the lyric on one repeated guitar figure. Singing in a harrowed but calm voice, Townshend lingers on the lyric’s odd phrases . . . infusing the line “your legs give way/you hit the ground” with weary resignation, and taking the lyric’s silly sex joke and turning it into a vulnerable plea.
[credit]

Save It For Later (live in Chicago 5/17/06) – Pearl Jam
Save It For Later (live in Brixton) – Pete Townshend

I also really dig the Harvey Danger cover that plays over the ending credits of the 1999 movie 200 Cigarettes . . . just listen to that rejuvenated beat, all cleaned up and sharpened and rad. And instead of bringing the string section in towards the end as the original does, it wends its way throughout:

Save It For Later – Harvey Danger

Fools rush in (where angels fear to tread)

During the hellishness of living in a war zone, what can music possibly bring to the equation? Through its primal power, can it be a hand to reach out and pull us away?

When the Bosnian War and the siege of the city of Sarajevo was unfolding in the early Nineties, I never could wrap my mind around the ethnic cleansing, the infighting, the murders of civilians under the auspices of war. It all seemed so very far removed from my world (despite my grandmother being full-blooded Yugoslavian).

After just finishing Bill Carter‘s book Fools Rush In, it still doesn’t make full sense to me what was causing the bombing and sniping and destruction between neighbors Serbs, Croatians, Bosnians, Bosnian-Serbs, Bosnian-Croats, Bosnian Muslims – like one of those spin-the-wheels color combination games — how many combos can we come up with that can kill each other? Then again I don’t know how much sense it made to anyone involved, inside the city or outside looking in (or outside ignoring it).

Bill Carter is a twenty-something from the West Coast who begins his journey into the Bosnia region as a man unmoored. From his earliest memories of abuse at the hands of a terrifying, nauseating, damaged father, he begins his book by telling of his lifelong gravitational pull to places half a world away. He remembers getting a map of the world in National Geographic magazine as a child growing up in California’s Central Valley:

“I stuck the world, measuring three feet by five, on the wall next to my bed with a few strips of tape. At night, on the top bunk, I would secretly stretch out across the world. If I extended fully I could put my toes in the jungles of Sumatra, my navel at the tip of Argentina and my head in the Indian Ocean. Most nights I would place an ear against the the map, my hot flushed cheek touching the imaginary cool deep waters of the Pacific Ocean. I think I was listening for the sound of breaking waves. Instead most nights sounded the same.”

When he reaches his early twenties, he finds a temporary harbor of amazing intensity in Santa Cruz in the arms of a girl named Corrina who fills exactly one year of his life with fervor and heat, understanding and laughter. His writing about his relationship with her held my nerve endings up against a white-hot flame, reminiscent of how Rob Sheffield wrote about Renee in Love Is A Mix Tape only with more grit and sexual honesty.

After losing Corrina, Carter’s trajectory spins him to a war zone on a humanitarian mission. I felt like he was searching to numb the pain inside of him by immersing himself in even greater pain around him. Life in the seven-mile-by-one-mile oval of land in the heart of Sarajevo is under siege — a killing zone from snipers in the hills and in the tall buildings, shooting at anything that dares to move. But Carter finds that people do dare to move; they dare to play blues music and rock ‘n’ roll in clubs where you have to duck your head and run from the incoming shrapnel to get in the dusty side door. They dare to hold art gallery openings and go dancing. They share meals in their homes (away from the vulnerability of the glass windows), they laugh, they make love — and live in the moment because tomorrow may actually never come.

As Carter says in an interview on Dutch television, “When I got there, it didn’t take very long for me to realize that this place was … timeless. When you entered Sarajevo, in that war, you entered a time zone. There was no past, no future. The past is gone, it’s obliterated. The future is how much longer I have to sit here with you before a bomb comes in the window. So what we have is right now. I was living right in the moment, which was a huge relief for me.”

Carter fills his days with distributing food through a French group called The Serious Road Trip, lives in a bombed-out office tower in the center of Sarajevo, and they occupy many nights sitting around drinking cheap Eastern European vodka mixed with powdered lemonade, trying to make some sense of what is going on all around them. Carter’s journey in this book is honest, and reeling, and confessional. All the foreigners in this story seem, to some degree, to be trying to find a home and a purpose and a community on the other side of the world.

Carter’s hesitation mixes with the brashness that we are so prone to in our twenties; the hubris pressed hot against the earnestness, with the passions all bleeding red into our uncertainty. One other Serious Road Trip member remarks to Carter one night, “I am beginning to believe the worst part of being here is knowing this might be the best thing I ever do in my life. I mean I’m only twenty-six. What am I supposed to do for the rest of it?“

Dealing with the death all around them, Carter appraises his own pale flesh in the mirror one night and writes, “Sometimes I think it is easy to forget we have blood in us until it starts to leak out.” He loses friends and acquaintances to the war, and in between his humanitarian work he photographs the people he meets and the horrors (and joys) that he sees each day.

Then one night he arrives upon a whim that can only be described as ludicrous, but that plays out into a surreal reality. Carter wants the world to know what is going on in this strip of land that seems to have been forgotten by the international community, rendered invisible by the political double-speak and the obscurity of another war, another country. Not my problem. For some reason he thinks of U2. He thinks that U2 might understand and sympathize with what is happening in Sarajevo because of the parallels between their own Irish history and their passion for social justice. And amazingly enough, Carter calls it right.

A big part of this story then also becomes the relationship he forms with U2 from the center of this bombed-out city, and the way he is ultimately able to connect the Sarajevans and their stories with hundreds of thousands of European concertgoers attending the ZooTV Tour in 1993 via live satellite. The Edge and then Bono relate with what Carter is experiencing and filming, and the result becomes the award-winning documentary Miss Sarajevo, for which U2 pens a song by the same name. The double-edged sword of pop celebrity here becomes an asset through which people begin to take notice of the slaughter, setting into motion a chain of awareness and events that seem to ultimately help quell the horror in Sarajevo through NATO action.

Carter’s book is about a quest for redemption; for a people, for a city, for himself. It’s a riveting read on so many levels, saturated with feelings and uncertainties that I could absolutely relate to even though I’ve never lived in something like he describes. I was encouraged how one confused, passionate, grieving, flawed twenty-something started a rumble about an injustice in this world, even as he struggled with so many things. He captures a rare joy in this story. And plus, the book mentions Pearl Jam two times, so you know, it’s clearly worth it for that alone. Pick it up here and read a U2-related excerpt here.

Sunday Bloody Sunday (live in Sarajevo) – U2
The Sarajevans invite U2 to play Sarajevo and Bono seems ready to go in immediately, but is reined in through the obvious security concerns. It takes four years, but they eventually come to Sarajevo in 1997 on the PopMart tour

Miss Sarajevo (live in Milano) – U2
Bono sings the Italian lyrics here instead of Pavarotti; a gorgeous song with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights read over the ending

Angel – Pearl Jam
This is just a Heather-addition, a song not mentioned anywhere in the book but one that fits this story as perfectly as if it were part of the official soundtrack, on so many levels. Listen to it as accompaniment to reading, and tell me I’m not crazy

[all photos credit Bill Carter]

11/12/1997 :: The Honking Seals play the Catalyst

November is a good month for all my uberdork Pearl Jam anniversary celebrating. Ten years ago tonight, I was in my own personal upper echelon of sublime, unbelievable, kept-pinching-myself heaven:

Pearl Jam was in the Bay Area to open for the Rolling Stones and decided to play a secret show at the garden-lovely Catalyst Club (capacity 600) in Santa Cruz, billing themselves as The Honking Seals. In the Fall of 1997, I had just started my freshman year of college. In those early days of the internet, I was on a PJ listserv called Long Road and first heard about the show upon returning back to my Graham Hall dorm room after my 11:45am Wednesday class. I clearly remember feeling my heart splash up into my throat as I read the posting about the rumored show taking place that night. I immediately grabbed my keys, cleared $200 from my meager savings account, and drove over Highway 17 to the club. There was already a day-old line outside when I got there in early afternoon, and it was sheer mayhem with media (I’m so mentioned here) and everyone drawn like moths to the flame of excitement in this fairly laid-back beach town.

I don’t think I have to specify that it was a fantastic show. Seriously – 600 people? How could it not be. I remember feeling shock and disbelief when I actually convinced some apathetic girl that she wanted to part with her ticket. Until that point, I had always felt with certainty that since I was pretty young when the band first formed that I would never get a chance to see them in a small club setting. I really did have to keep pinching myself all night.

The performance was crackling with energy from the band, radiating up from the audience. It was the first PJ show in almost a year, and three tunes from the yet-unreleased Yield were played for the first time that night. “Do The Evolution” peeled the crud off my soul with those blistering guitar riffs while Ed danced this little modster dance. I remember “Wishlist” as being so plaintive and wistful (with different lyrics in that early incarnation), but simple almost like a lullaby, and unlike any other song in their catalog. “Given To Fly” was nothing short of a religious experience when that line “a wave came crashing like a fist to the jaw . . .” broke for the first time, soaring over that tiny hot club.

Plus, November 12 is Neil Young’s birthday, so Ed called “Uncle Neil” on a big cell phone that he had up on stage, and we all sang happy birthday to him. At the end of the night, as I leaned forward from the front of the balcony, Ed wandered over to the side of the stage. He looked up directly at me, and in a moment of what can only be described as sheer suavity, I waved at him. He smiled at me, and waved back.

That was a good night.

Given To Fly (11/12/97 premiere)
Wishlist (11/12/97 premiere)
Do The Evolution (11/12/97 premiere)
Happy Birthday to Neil Young (11/12/97)

[this audio is okay, minus the a-hole talking about 5th grade over Wishlist, etc]

So by the way, tonight I am pretty much the antithesis of my devil-may-care “get me to the show” rockergirl personality from ten years ago; instead of heading up to the Hold Steady in Denver, I am trying to stop a nascent sore throat in its tracks by drowning it in Airborne, orange juice, tea, and those little mini probiotic yogurt shakes. Yeah. Rock on.

Don’t mean to push, but I’m being shoved :: Twelve years of live Pearl Jam

So it’s not like I light a candle or get a tear in my eye, but I do always smile when I write the date on November 4th because the dork in my brain will always remember that as the first time I saw Pearl Jam live in concert.

Nov 4th 1995 was the rescheduled make-up Bay Area date for the aborted Golden Gate Park show five months earlier where Vedder bailed after seven songs due to food poisoning and the remaining members played a scorching set with Neil Young, dubbed “Neil Jam.” As you can see above, this was their alternate ticketing tour using non-Ticketmaster venues. This translated into really cool [Ames Bros] ticket art.

It was my junior year of high school and I had been waiting for almost two years to see Pearl Jam live. The show was held at San Jose State’s Spartan Stadium, an outdoor amphitheater. I remember joining the front end of a snaking line around the venue with my friends early in the day for the 2pm show, after purchasing a Mr. Point t-shirt (that I still wear on rare occasion).

In the late morning, the garbled but powerful melody of a soundcheck chorus and thundering drums rose through the autumn air. Hence I’ll always remember that the first song I ever heard Pearl Jam do live was “I Got Id” during the soundcheck.

[photo credit]

We had arrived early enough to wedge ourselves right up in the front section, and settled in for some hours of waiting. Ed came on for the pre-show before The Fastbacks and Ben Harper, playing a hushed acoustic version of the then-unreleased song “Dead Man.” He wore a fedora and smiled at all of us wryly, remarking, “So these are the faces I would have seen if I could have lifted my head up in San Francisco.”

As for the show itself, I hung on for as long as I could in the roiling masses of circa-1995 PJ fans — as it turned out, my capacity was about six songs. Once “Not For You” kicked in, I thought I was going to die and had to get pulled out in favor of a spot a bit further back.

I know.

SELECTED TUNES, SAN JOSE 11/4/95

Release (live 11/4/95) – Pearl Jam
unexpectedly languid opening song for the main set, but hearing this even tonight I get little tingles and can feel the electric excitement in the air and the whole sea of people ebbing and churning against me

Corduroy (live 11/4/95) – Pearl Jam
I remember facing the cooling dusk air and singing along with my full lung capacity, especially for the opening lines, “The waiting drove me mad . . .”

I Got Id/Shit (live 11/4/95) – Pearl Jam
After hearing it a few hours before at soundcheck, I got the full treatment of this almost eerie, soaring song with some of those great visceral screams

Leaving Here (live 11/4/95) – Pearl Jam
still one of my favorite covers they do, a feisty feministic anthem with kick and (dare I say) sass. A Holland-Dozier-Holland tune from 1963, the PJ studio version was released two months after this performance, on the Home Alive benefit album

Porch (live 11/4/95) – Pearl Jam
memorable because this is an excoriating version, and Ed returned to 1992 form and climbed an enormous tower of scaffolding, hanging in a way to make me hold my breath a bit. There’s also a “Three Little Birds” tag thrown in here as well – every little things gonna be alright indeed

Indifference (live 11/4/95) – Pearl Jam
from the opening tambourine shakes and the near-mystic melody, this was the perfect final song in an exhilarating concert. My first of many PJ-induced exhausted/euphoric-bliss moments. When everyone chorused “I’ll swallow poison until I grow immune, I will scream my lungs out ’til it fills this room. . .” I was right there in the thick of that. As I walked out, I remember feeling urgently within my 16-year-old self that everything was going to be okay if that kind of connection existed in the world.

Looks like the whole show is available here
[and thanks jake for loaning me the CD!]

In other Pearl Jam news –

A new hardcover book was announced last week on the fantastic topic of Pearl Jam artwork: Pearl Jam vs. Ames Bros. PJ’s been blessed as a band to have longstanding partnerships with artists Ames Brothers (Jeff’s brother Barry Ament, and Coby Schultz — they actually designed the Mr. Point shirt & ticket stub above) and since 1999 with Denver-bred artist Brad Klausen. Collectively these guys have produced some of the most unique and energetic original posters of any other band I know.

The new book is 264 pages, and features commentary on individual posters from all five members of Pearl Jam and from the poster designers — offering insight into the inspiration, concepts and process of poster creation. There was a little excerpt of the new book in the most recent PJ magazine Deep, and it was fascinating even to me (a very-very-non-artist) to see the way that the poster concept develops and emerges, and reflects something of the music and the mood of the city. Your coffee table will be 86% cooler.

PREORDER:
PEARL JAM VS. AMES BROS

Odds & ends

On this lovely slow Saturday I am making up a big pot of Dill Turkey Chowder (recipe pretty much like this except I use garlic pepper) and the simmering smells are already fantastic. It’s been a week like that — a lot of interesting thoughts simmering in the back of my mind with no real time to write about them or enjoy. So since it’s Saturday, here’s what I’ve been noticing lately:

Ûž Nil Lara. I still get more comments on this guy, on the single post I wrote back for a previous World Music Wednesday, than almost any other ongoing topic. People across the world love this guy, miss his music, and wonder what he’s been up to. He’s been playing a series of monthly shows down in Florida, much to the joy of many fans, but the great news is that the Yanks get 2 doses of him next month!

Nil Lara has just announced two shows in New York City at The Bitter End in Greenwich Village, Nov 17th @ 8pm and Nov 19th @ 7:30pm. I’d love to see this guy; I’ll be in NYC a few weeks before that for the last weekend in October to see some best girlfriends, but I’ll miss this show unfortunately.

Ûž There’s a new audio interview with Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready from Tacoma, Washington’s News Tribune.

Listen to Mike talk about his reaction to the AT&T censoring of the Lollapalooza webcast, Italian fans and the new DVD, director Danny Clinch, and even some on The Scorpions & Iron Maiden. Rock on.

Ûž The Onion made me laugh with this fantastic “news brief”:

Google Launches ‘The Google’ For Older Adults
September 26, 2007
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—The popular search engine Google announced plans Friday to launch a new site, TheGoogle.com, to appeal to older adults not able to navigate the original website’s single text field and two clearly marked buttons.

Read the rest

Ûž The new Counting Crows album, Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings, will be delayed in its release until 2008. According to Adam Duritz’s blog:

Update 9/27/07 – “Town Hall, Old Memories, and New Delays”
Greenwich Village, New York City, 10am

. . . This will frustrate some of you I’m sure, and I apologize for that, but we’ve gone to Geffen and asked to push back the release date of Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings until sometime after the New Year.

It was just a crazy busy summer. Between all the touring and the traveling and the mixing and mastering of the new album and putting the together the package and writing all the essays for the August… reissue, we just let some little things fall through the cracks. The record itself is finished but we just did the photo shoot a few weeks ago, the art and packaging deadlines were last week, and, even putting in 20 hr days, it was just impossible to get it all done. There are videos and singles and so many things to decide on and finish and it’s just not the time in our career to be rushing important decisions. Actually, in my opinion, it’s never the right time to rush important decisions. We really try to make records that last forever. I don’t see the point in putting all the work in to do that and then not having the right cover or picking the wrong single or making the wrong video. They’re small things, I guess, but they matter to me and they’re just a few of many.

It’s a tough pill for our record company to swallow. Especially in this day and age, it’s not easy to ask them to postpone a Counting Crows album that would have been on sale for fall and through the Xmas season. Someone somewhere will not be happy with them. Luckily for us, the people we deal with at our label ARE music people and they know that our partnership with Geffen has been a marathon, not a sprint. We haven’t been around together all these years because we were worried about a few months.

Anyway, that’s THAT bit of news. I know it’s a bit of a disappointment but, like I said to all of you the other day, “Remind me never to put out two albums at the same time again.”

I recommend streaming the song that Adam has posted on his MySpace, called “Bleed.” Best as I can tell, it is a song written by Stew/The Negro Problem, and this is a live collaboration with Adam. The lyrics are pretty rich. I’d post it here, but . . . well, you know.

Ûž Finally, the Ike Reilly Assassination show was as mindblowing as I had hoped on Thursday night at the Larimer Lounge.

I voraciously dig the blistering rock songs with a punkish-retro edge, with some of the finest attention to lyrical detail and “flow” of any modern songwriter today. Johnny Hickman (founding member of Cracker) joined Ike for the gig, as Johnny is a local Coloradan now, and they were clearly enjoying themselves. I was particularly riveted by the performance of “The Mixture” (off 2005′s Junkie Faithful) — an incredible, soulful, brutal, unflinchingly introspective, raw tune that I am listening to on repeat these last two days. It goes deeper each time I hear it.

“Girl don’t like the mixture in me,
the liquid in me, the fiction it frees
the liquor in me, the Mick in me,
the fried-out lies for eyes she sees

Where were you?”

The Mixture – Ike Reilly Assassination

The picture above is by Denver photographer Doug Beam from his fine set taken at the show. Quite an unforgettable night.

I can feel the earth begin to move, I hear my needle hit the groove

[2003 Glastonbury photo credit]

Two nights ago I watched the 2003 Britpop documentary Live Forever (more on that later), which begins by laying a foundation of the music scene in Nineties England from the initial impact of the Stone Roses — so I smiled today when this fantastic cover version came up on a mix I’d made.

Yorn: “So like I said, this is hot shit for us to be over here at Glastonbury. We come from the U.S. of A and this is a very exotic festival that we love and we’re happy to be here and we’re huge fans of the music over here and blah blah blah . . . This is from Manchester, okay?“

She Bangs The Drums (Stone Roses cover, live at Glastonbury 2003) – Pete Yorn
(apparently this is encoded at a rate that streaming doesn’t agree with. Until I can fix it, if you download it, it sounds fine; if you click the blue arrow, you get Alvin & The Chipmunks singing the Stone Roses, which is actually a whole different kind of interesting)

Speaking of she bangs the drum, I could not stop my own personal rhythm section pattered out onto my legs last night at the screening of the Pearl Jam documentary. Seeing and hearing Immagine in Cornice on the big screen with all the glorious surround-sound was an immense experience of live PJ fabulousness. My personal highlights were the renditions of Blood (ugh, love that song), Come Back (sheerly absurdly gorgeous), and a compelling ending of Rockin’ In The Free World with every single Italian audience member’s hands raised in the air, clapping along in unison.

In addition to the beautifully-done cinematic treatment of their live shows, the documentary also offered some very interesting behind-the-scenes glimpses: the urgent reorganization of the encore setlist backstage while the crowd screams for more, Jeff skateboarding at some deserted Italian skatepark, Ed and his daughter Olivia talking on the tour bus (and how cute is she?), a bunch of Italian kids sitting on the street belting out a passionate acoustic rendition of Porch. Stone barely made an appearance (it’s all Stone’s fault) and not surprisingly I would have liked for it to be longer so they could have shown more of what goes on that we don’t see onstage. But overall, solid A. If I can’t see PJ live this year, heck I’ll settle for last night. Thanks to all who came out for an awesome experience, it was moltissimo fun.

Finally, the road to Denver will again be my buddy tonight as I head back up to see the Ike Reilly Assassination at the Larimer Lounge. Last time he was here it was acoustic and still mind-blowing, so I am very excited to get the full band baptism. I highly recommend this show if you can make it out.

Hot damn I did it! Theater screening in Denver of the new Pearl Jam movie: Immagine in Cornice

Well, this week is shaping up to be significantly better than last. I’m beyond thrilled to announce that I have actually arranged a big-screen showing of the new Pearl Jam concert movie, Immagine in Cornice, THIS Wednesday Sept 26th at the Denver Film Society/Starz FilmCenter theatre! That’s in downtown Denver near the Pepsi Center (off 9th and Auraria) and in keeping with our Italy theme, it’s very appropriately located in the Tivoli student union building. Couldn’t have planned it better if I tried.

Showtime is at 7pm on Wednesday, and it will be a fantastically FREE event. Watch an excerpt from the film here.

Like-minded fans can meet up with us before the showing (say 5:30pm) at Brooklyn’s across the street to get in a festive mood. They’ve got a good selection of beers, plus I think there are pool tables and your usual assortment of very healthy fried foods, also many loaded with cheese. If you think you will come to Brooklyn’s first, please email me so I can give them a rough count. This will allow them to have adequate staff there if we all descend en masse.

Come on out and bring friends who like any of the following things:
a) music
b) Pearl Jam
c) Europe
d) movies
e) free things

Here is a poster you can print and tack up to help get the word out on relatively short notice. If you are a student at a college in our area, or know somewhere that you could put some up, please do! Let’s make this ferociously awesome.

Rock on, and don’t let the bastards grind you down.

[photo credit Kerensa Wight]

Pearl Jam movies are so hot right now

[thanks to pearljamevolution for ripping/youtubing the video clips; that acoustic Lukin made me laugh out loud in its wonderfulness]

The new Pearl Jam tour DVD Immagine in Cornice which chronicles their scorchingly fabulous Italian shows from last summer (directed by Danny Clinch) will be released upon the salivating masses of PJ fans on Tuesday. My copy is somewhere in the mail in between Seattle and Colorado, according to the Ten Club, and I may try to attend what we fondly call a “dork gathering” of friends to watch this blessed film when it arrives in mailboxes all over the Colorado Springs/Denver/Boulder area.

However, for those unbelievably lucky saps living in “select cities” (Tulare but not Denver?) you get to go see an all-digital fancy schamncy movie theater premiere experience next week. I would love to see this movie on the big screen, since my speakers are just the built-in ones that came on the TV. I actually checked airfare to, like St. Louis and Vegas (but, uh, see previous post). For more information or to buy remaining tickets, see the D&E Entertainment page.

September 24
UK and Ireland Screenings
Covent Garden – Odeon
Surrey Quayes – Odeon
Manchester – Odeon Printworks
Dublin TBA

September 25
U.S. Screenings
Atlanta – Midtown
Austin – Highland
Berkeley – Elmwood
Boston – Kendall Square
Chicago – Lake Theatre
Chicago – Charlestowne 18
Detroit – Novi
Grand Rapids, MI – Celebration
Lansing, MI – Celebration
Las Vegas – Galaxy
Los Angeles – Plant 16
Memphis – Paradiso
New York – Zeigfeld
Philadelphia – Clearview
Riverbank, CA – Galaxy
St. Louis – Chesterfield
San Diego – UltraStar
San Francisco – Embarcadero
San Luis Obispo – Movie Experience
Santa Rosa – Lakeside
Seattle – Metro
Seattle – Galaxy
Tulare, CA – Galaxy

Also, the Into The Wild premiere was in L.A. last night, featuring a soundtrack by Ed Vedder (and is it just me or does Sean Penn look like he just fell off his barstool in that picture?). It opens ONLY in New York and L.A. this Friday, for those of you searching the movie listings fruitlessly. Apparently it will get wider release on October 12; I finally got the book from the library so I am preparing myself according to my philosophical principles (“always read the book before you see the movie”).