Monday in Providence

At Club Babyhead

Two nights earlier the band had played its first New York City show, at the Marquee; that night is told in The Industry Handshake. Providence was the fourth show of the run, by the chronology's listings. Club Babyhead, at 73 Richmond Street, had been called Club Rocket before it took that name.

How the band came to the club is told in the Pearl Jam Concert Chronology by the promoter at Club Babyhead, in his own recollection. The band's agent at the time, the promoter recalled, was a young agent at Triad Artists whom he remembered as having "a knack for the next thing and a good ear for cool stuff." The agent knew that the promoter was a big supporter of Sub Pop and knew Mother Love Bone, the promoter said, and he was always glad to help the agent with what were then called baby bands. The day the agent called about Pearl Jam, the promoter said, it was "an easy yes." The guarantee, he recalled, was five hundred dollars.

On the night of the show, the promoter recalled, the band arrived early and got its soundcheck in earlier than usual. Its tour pass laminates, in the promoter's words, "were simply NBA Mookie Blaylock cards with their names written in sharpie on the back." Mookie Blaylock was the basketball player whose name the band had carried until that spring. After the soundcheck, he recalled, Eddie Vedder, Jeff Ament, and Stone Gossard asked whether there were outdoor courts nearby. The promoter took them to courts in Fox Point, at the top of Wickenden Street, for what he called a friendly but competitive pickup game with some of the band's road crew and a few of his friends from the club. The show itself, by the promoter's count, had sixty people paid at the door, at five dollars, and thirty or forty guests on radio and record-company lists.

The Performance

The set, as the Pearl Jam Concert Chronology gives it, was nine songs: "Wash," "Once," "State of Love and Trust," "Even Flow," "Garden," "Breath," "Porch," "Why Go," and "Alive." "Jeremy" was on the written set list but was not played, the same entry records.

Against the nine songs in New York two nights earlier, the list keeps eight, with "Breath" in for "Deep"; "State of Love and Trust" came third, ahead of "Even Flow," and the set ended on "Alive," which had closed none of the July shows before it. The promoter remembered the set as raw but great.

The Next Step

The Pearl Jam Concert Chronology lists a show at The Moon in New Haven, Connecticut, for the next night, marked as canceled. The band's next show in both chronologies was two nights later, on July 17, back in New York at Wetlands Preserve, which the Pearl Jam Concert Chronology calls the second show of the New Music Seminar, and where Five Horizons names Matt Chamberlain on drums.