On the Fairgrounds

What Each Document Carries

Five Horizons carries two lines for this night, a heading and a supporting line, and nothing else. No set list, no note, no figure and no link, where it gives a set and a note to the night before and to the night after. That is the reverse of the usual relation between them, a fact about the document rather than the evening. The Pearl Jam Concert Chronology prints seven songs and then a paragraph that is not about this night.

The paragraph says the singer's stunts made this era of the band's performances feel special, and that several were documented in print or on video. It then reports a recollection given to a magazine in 2001 by Nirvana's drummer: a climb up a lighting rig, and his fear that the singer was going to die. It was printed ten years after the night, and it is a memory, not a contemporary account. He names San Diego, which is the city Five Horizons prints and not the city the Pearl Jam Concert Chronology prints above his words.

The Performance

The set the Pearl Jam Concert Chronology prints is seven songs: "Once," "Even Flow," "Why Go," "Jeremy," "Alive," "Leash" and "Porch." Five Horizons prints none, so there is one printed order for this night and not two. Beyond that list neither chronology says anything about what was played, said or done in the room. What the contemporary documents fix is the shape of the night before it began, and the ticket and the newspaper do not agree. The ticket prints DOORS 5:30PM//SHOW 6:55PM, to the minute; the newspaper's listing box gives the hour as 7:30 p.m., thirty-five minutes later. Nothing in either document accounts for the difference.

The preview is a syndicated piece credited to a named writer and a named wire service, published as a document rather than a picture. Its listing box gives the three bands in billing order, the hour, the hall and fairgrounds, the tickets as sold out, and a telephone number. Its body is about the headliners: their album, the bands imitating them, and their singer, named with his age and quoted on those imitators and on how Nirvana came to be on the bill. The piece gives one band's singer a name, an age and two quotations, and gives this band two occurrences of its name, in the listing box and in the closing sentence. The photograph the chronology hangs under the date shows a dark hall with square columns, a bare-chested person carried face down on many raised hands, and a person in a yellow shirt marked 220 at a barrier. The image carries no printed text; the chronology's own markup captions it, and this book does not use the caption.

The Next Step

The night before, in Los Angeles, is told in Wristbands at Random. The next night is in Tempe, Arizona, where both chronologies print the same seven songs and name the hall differently. It is told in Entry 9.