Thursday at Trees

At Trees

Four nights earlier the band had played the Hollywood Palladium; that night is told in A Year Ago Tomorrow. Between them the Pearl Jam Concert Chronology lists the Mason Jar in Phoenix on October 7 and the Back Room in Austin on October 9; the band's own tour book for the run, as the same chronology reproduces it, has Austin on the 9th, Dallas and Trees on the 10th, and Houston on the 11th.

Five Horizons' line for October 10 is elsewhere: the Troubadour in Hollywood, with a figure of 450, the figure it gives for October 2, and no notes. It has no Dallas entry in October; the set, the encore, and the notes that follow appear in it, nearly word for word and without the fragment, under a show at Trees it dates December 11, 1991. The Pearl Jam Concert Chronology also lists a Trees show on that December date, with no set list.

The Performance

The set as the Pearl Jam Concert Chronology gives it was eleven songs: "Wash," "Once," "Even Flow," "State of Love and Trust," then "Bad Mouth" in parentheses, its notation for a fragment, then "Alive," "Garden," "Deep," "Black," "Jeremy," "Why Go," and "Porch"; the encore was "Breath" and "I've Got a Feeling." The fragment is Fugazi's "Bad Mouth," of which, the entry says, Vedder sang some lines before "Alive"; how much, it does not say.

The eleven put back the four titles the Palladium list had dropped, "State of Love and Trust," "Garden," "Deep," and "Black," and are the Troubadour's eleven of October 2 with "Wash" at the top in place of "Release." The encore is the first the Pearl Jam Concert Chronology prints since the Cathouse on October 1, and "Breath" had not been on a printed list since the first encore at Satyricon on September 28.

It took a while, it says, for Vedder to warm up to the crowd, and then he got chatty, about how the band had stolen Dave from Dr. Tongue, and whether Tom Landry was there. The band Dr. Tongue, by Wikipedia's article on the drummer, was one Dave Abbruzzese had formed, a three-piece that played the Dallas and Denton area. Vedder spoke of Singles, the Cameron Crowe film whose wrap party the band had played in Seattle in May, and said the next song, "State of Love and Trust," was from it.

During "Alive" he climbed a speaker stack and jumped off, and later pulled off a shoe, looked at it, and said he was not getting enough air out of his Air Jordans. "Garden," in the entry's words, had full harmonies from Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard and a guitar solo from Mike McCready. Then Vedder asked again whether Tom Landry, the Dallas Cowboys' head coach from 1960 to 1988 by Wikipedia's account, was there that night, said he had been on the guest list, and dedicated "Deep" to fans of the Cowboys.

"Jeremy" had a jam in it, the entry says, and Vedder told the crowd the story behind the song, asking whether they knew where Richardson, Texas, was. The song, by Wikipedia's account, took its inspiration from a newspaper report of a boy, 15, of Richardson, an inner suburb of Dallas, who shot himself in front of his English class on January 8, 1991. Before "Black" he said that almost all of the band's titles were one word, and he counted off the lead-in to "Porch" while McCready was still untangling his guitar cord and trying to plug it in.

The Next Step

The next night, Friday, October 11, both list the band at the Vatican in Houston, with I Love You opening; that night is told in Half-Full at the Vatican.