No Cameras or Recorders
A Sunday in a convention hall left an advertisement, one numbered ticket and one column by a critic who found both opening acts dull. The tour book the chronology reproduces planned a third Detroit night for Pearl Jam that day, not Indianapolis.
Setlist
Pearl Jam Concert Chronology
No separate printed encore line; this does not prove no encore occurred. Any inline encore description remains in its printed position.
setlist
- Wash
- Once
- Even Flow
- Alive
- Jeremy
- Why Go
- Porch
On Sunday, November 24, 1991, Pearl Jam played the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis, supporting the Red Hot Chili Peppers, with the Smashing Pumpkins also on the bill. Neither chronology gives an attendance and neither has a note; the Pearl Jam Concert Chronology prints seven songs, and Five Horizons prints none and shortens the room to Convention Center. What the night left behind is three pieces of paper.
The show
At the Convention Center
The night before, the band had finished a pair of sold-out theatre nights in Detroit; the second is told in The Shows Are Sold Out. The building is named four ways in four documents: Indiana Convention Center in the Pearl Jam Concert Chronology, Convention Center in Five Horizons, Indianapolis Convention Center on the advertisement, and INDPLS CONVENTION CENTER on the ticket.
The advertisement is the Coors Light Concert Series welcoming the headliners in concert, with special guests the Smashing Pumpkins and Pearl Jam, on Sunday, November 24. The hour is 8:00 P.M., with tickets at Ticketmaster locations including Karma and L.S. Ayres. The ticket is a numbered main-floor seat, section F-3, row J, seat 15, at nineteen dollars in its admission field, with a promoter line reading Sunshine and Casablanca and, in the ticket's own capitals, the condition no cameras or recorders. Pearl Jam is not named on it.
The book the band carried for the run, as the chronology reproduces it, does not have them in Indianapolis on the Sunday at all. Its rows keep a third Detroit night that day, mark the Monday a day off in Indianapolis, and give the Tuesday an Indianapolis date with the venue column left blank. The hall itself, by Wikipedia's account, is a convention centre in downtown Indianapolis whose original structure was completed in 1972.
The Performance
The set, the Pearl Jam Concert Chronology's alone, was seven songs: "Wash," "Once," "Even Flow," "Alive," "Jeremy," "Why Go," and "Porch." Five Horizons has no list for the night. The same seven titles, in the same order, stand in the Pearl Jam Concert Chronology's lists for the Hollywood Palladium on October 6 and for the first Roseland night on November 11. Neither chronology has a note, so nothing of what happened on the stage survives except in one newspaper column.
The Next Step
The next entry in both is Tuesday, November 26, at Braden Auditorium in Normal, Illinois; it is told in Primed the Crowd.
Recording & sound
What the Record Preserves
The one account by somebody in the room is an On Music column headed "Bass hot in Chili Peppers' mix," by Mike Redmond, in a clipping filed as from The Indianapolis News. Nothing on the clipping gives a masthead or a date, though the column dates the performance itself, calling it Sunday night's show. It disposes of both opening acts in a word, and of this one in a sentence: Pearl Jam, Redmond wrote, "stayed more to the rock side of the funk-rock line, but it wasn't particularly exciting or interesting."
Five nights later two writers in Chicago picked out the singer; that night is told in A Sea of Helpful Hands.
What is particular to this night is how little of it anybody set down: a column that spent its length on the headliners' bass player and gave the openers a sentence and a word. Around that there is an advertisement with no year on it, a numbered seat on the main floor at nineteen dollars, and, by the chronology's list, seven songs.
Other Media (0)
Other accounts
No further accounts of this show have been added.
Sources & thanks (7)
- Pearl Jam Concert Chronology — 1991 page
- Five Horizons — Concert chronology 1990–91, entries for 11/23/91, 11/24/91 and 11/26/91
- Pearl Jam Concert Chronology — Newspaper advertisement for the Indianapolis date (image linked from the November 24, 1991 entry, captioned Ad)
- Pearl Jam Concert Chronology — Ticket for November 24, 1991 (image linked from the November 24, 1991 entry, captioned Ticket)
- Pearl Jam Concert Chronology — On Music column, Bass hot in Chili Peppers' mix, by Mike Redmond (scan linked from the November 24, 1991 entry; no masthead and no date on the clipping, which is filed under the name of The Indianapolis News)
- Pearl Jam Concert Chronology — Pearl Jam tour book for the Red Hot Chili Peppers run, fall 1991 (scanned pages linked from the Red Hot Chili Peppers tour heading)
- Wikipedia — Indiana Convention Center (general reference, September 2026)