Pearl Jam

Tonight, Pearl Jam played the Gorge the first time in 12 years. Needless to say the concert sold out an hour after the tickets went on sale. 9 000 alone were sold in pre-sale and th epast few weeks, single tickets have been going for as much as $400 on Ebay. Hell, I'm being paid to go to this show, nothing gets better than that!
The show was amazing. It went on for 3 1/2 hours (with intermissions, so about 3 hours total music) and was divided thusly: they played a 45 minute semi-accoustic set followed by an 1 1/2 hour loud rocking set, a 30 minute encore, a 20 2nd minute encore and finally a 10 minute 3rd encore.
It was fun, Eddie Vedder announced that Tom Petty is staying in a hotel up the river and that he could hear us, so we shoudl do everything possible to keep him up. This included Eddie leading the crowd in several chants of "Hello Tom, come down Tom!" throughout the night.In fact, he started off the encore with the announcement that "Tom called and asked us to turn it down" which spawned another round of "Hello Tom, Come down Tom!"
During the second encore, he then screwed up in the middle of "Better Man", tried to rebound but couldn't, so he stopped and proclaimed "this would never happen to Tom Petty, he's a professional, he practices" before he resumed the song. During loud out I ended up finding one of Jeff Ament's bass picks (used from the show) and that started my collection for this weekend (Frank, one of the veteran stagehands here made off with a full set of drumheads they were gonna throw out) I am also very happy that instead of selling the bootlegs of the shows at the venues themselves this time around, Pearl Jam have decided that their fans can download the entire shows for $9.99 a pop at www.pearjam.com and can then burn them to cd as often as they want. If I can get the money together I might even get the whole Tour, who knows!? But for now I am definately downloading this show as soon as I get home next week!