Saturday Night at Satyricon

At Satyricon

Two nights earlier the band had played the Town Pump in Vancouver, on a night one chronology lists and the other does not; that night is told in Back at the Town Pump. Portland it had played once before in either listing, at the Melody Ballroom on February 20, under the name Mookie Blaylock. The Pearl Jam Concert Chronology names the three opening acts; Five Horizons lists no bill.

The two entries begin their notes in the same words. It was an intense show, they say, as a fight spilled out of the nearby Roseland and someone was shot just before the start of Pearl Jam's show, which seemed, in their words, to affect Eddie Vedder quite a bit. That is all either entry says of it.

The Performance

The set, identical in both entries, was eleven songs: "Release," "Once," "Even Flow," "State of Love and Trust," "Porch," "Alive," then an improvisation, which the Pearl Jam Concert Chronology labels "Improv" and Five Horizons "Jam," then "Oceans," "Deep," "Garden," "Jeremy," and "Why Go." After "Oceans" both carry "Smells Like Teen Spirit," Nirvana's song, as a fragment rather than a song in the set: the Pearl Jam Concert Chronology in parentheses, its notation for a fragment, and Five Horizons inside a second jam. The first encore was "Black" and "Breath"; the second was "I've Got a Feeling," the Beatles song from the Vancouver list two nights before.

The list opens on "Release," which had opened the band's first show and had not opened a printed set in either chronology since February; counting the encores, it is the longest list either had yet printed for the band, fourteen songs where no list before it had run past twelve.

Both quote the same passage from the Portland Oregonian, in which "the whole house was going berserk, with a couple people stage-diving near the end. Humidity was 100 percent, and the temperature seemed to hit triple digits, but much of the mania was helped along by the wild antics and herky-jerky movements of everyone in the band, especially Vedder, who at various times swung from the lights above the drummer, or climbed atop a nearby speaker column, or toppled flat on his face."

Both note that the written set list carries prompts to the left of the song titles, which they read as reminders for the talk between songs, and that Vedder spoke of the Portland Trail Blazers and the Seattle SuperSonics; Five Horizons adds that the list was written on a handbill.

The Next Step

The next show in both listings was two nights later, on Monday, September 30, at the I-Beam in San Francisco; that night is told in Monday at the I-Beam.