Tonight It Lives

At the Concert Hall

Four nights earlier the band had played Cleveland; that night is told in This Is Seattle. The next night, Sunday, October 27, was the Rochester Auditorium Center in Rochester, New York, the tour book's Auditorium Theater; both chronologies say, in the same words, that Eddie Vedder jumped off a speaker stack and hurt his ankle, and neither prints a list. The club run had planned that Sunday for Minneapolis: First Avenue's all-ages calendar lists Pearl Jam, I Love You, and Next of Kin at its 7th St Entry on October 27, reproduced by the Pearl Jam Concert Chronology under its Fall Tour heading as a canceled date, credited to a contributor.

Monday, October 28, is the tour book's day off in Toronto. For the first night at the Concert Hall, Tuesday, October 29, the Pearl Jam Concert Chronology gives 1,200, sold out, and no set list; Five Horizons names the Smashing Pumpkins alone on its supporting line and prints one title, "Alive," after a row of dots, marking its list incomplete. An ad the first reproduces names the Red Hot Chili Peppers with special guest the Smashing Pumpkins for Tuesday, October 29, and does not name Pearl Jam. The two figures, 1,200 for the 29th and 450 for the 30th in the same hall, stand as the first's, and neither entry explains them.

For the 29th the same chronology prints a recollection by a fan, also credited for that night's ticket. He stopped a stranger at the show, he says, to ask who the band was, and resolved, once told, not to forget the name. At the end of the set, as he recalls it, Vedder took off the Red Hot Chili Peppers boxer shorts he had worn through the show, threw them into the crowd, said goodbye, and left.

The ticket reproduced for the second night, from the same source, prints the Concert Hall at 888 Yonge Street, Wednesday, October 30, 1991, at 8 PM, general admission at $29.25, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers' name alone; the hall, by Wikipedia's account, is the old Masonic Temple at Davenport Road and Yonge Street, a rock room since the late 1960s.

The Performance

Before "Oceans," the Pearl Jam Concert Chronology says, Vedder told the crowd: "Last night everybody got crazy a little early, we're gonna start it off kinda slow tonight."

The set, the same in both entries, was seven songs: "Oceans," "Even Flow," "Why Go," "Jeremy," "Alive," "Once," and "Porch." Against Cleveland four nights before, "Oceans" stands at the top in place of "Wash," and "Porch" closes again. "Oceans" had not been on a list the same source prints since Satyricon in Portland on September 28, and every printed list of the run before this one had opened with "Wash" or "Release." Two earlier nights of the run, Rochester and the first Toronto night, have no list in either chronology.

"Alive," the same entry says, was dedicated to a T-shirt: "So tonight I break out my favorite Butthole Surfers t-shirt. The last time I wore it was in Chicago and I jumped in the crowd and they tore it to pieces." The rest of the line, as the entry prints it, says this had made him angry, that he had got the shirt back, and that tonight it lived.

The Next Step

After the tour book's day off on Thursday, October 31, the next entry in both is Friday, November 1, at the Walter Brown Arena in Boston, with no set list in either; the night after, Saturday, November 2, at the Memorial Auditorium in Burlington, Vermont, is told in Grapes for My Good Friends.