The best live American band of 1992 proved that they are still the best live American band of 2010 Saturday night, as a fired up Pearl Jam played a nearly two and a half hour set at Hartford’s XL Center. Kicking things off with “Unknown Thought,” off of last year’s excellent album, Backspacer, the band rocked through their impressive, nearly two decade history, with some surprises thrown in there. Known for never playing the same set list twice, the band pleased their long time fans with classics such as “Evenflow,” “Jeremy,” and “Dissident,” and the hard core completists with non-album chestnuts “State of Love and Trust” and the Victoria Williams cover of “Crazy Mary.” Proving that they are far from a nostalgia act, though, the band’s set included nine songs off of their last two albums. The new material fit right in with their early-1990s material, proving their continued vitality as well as pleasing their newer, younger fans.
Throughout the entire night, the band carried on with the vibrancy and urgency of a bunch of young punks just stumbling out of the van. Perhaps feeding off of the passion of the loud, sold-out crowd, the band threw extended solos, jumps off of speakers and the drum riser, and a broken mic stand into the theatrics. The happiest surprise of the night was a rowdy cover of Van Halen’s “Ain’t Talking ’bout Love” (which lead singer Eddie Vedder informed the crowd they had never played before), dedicated to the UConn women’s basketball team. Clearly they knew their audience.
They followed their first set with two five-song encores. During the second and final encore, the house lights in the XL Center came up during the anthemic “Alive,” creating an raw intimacy in the cavernous civic center, that continued as the band slipped into the brooding “Indifference,” off of 1993’s album Vs. The night ended with a ripping cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.” As Vedder howled, “No reason to get excited …,” a crowd of thousands proved him entirely wrong.
