pearl jam
Pearl Jam Honor Taylor Hawkins With Foo Fighters Cover
Pearl Jam paid tribute to late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins last night (May 7) in Los Angeles, performing the Hawkins-sung Foos song “Cold Day in the Sun” during their second of two shows at the Kia Forum. Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron, Hawkins’ friend and collaborator in Nighttime Boogie Association, took the mic and also played guitar during the performance. Cameron collaborator Mark Guiliana played drums and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith chipped in on tambourine. [embedded content][embedded content] “Cold Day in the Sun” was Hawkins’ most well-known lead vocal with the Foos and a staple of the band’s live shows. The musician died suddenly on March 25 in Bogota while on tour with the band in support of its Grammy-winning album Medicine at Midnight. “It’s never easy whe...
Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament on Bill Simmons’ Podcast: 5 Things We Learned
Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament was a guest today (May 6) on The Bill Simmons Podcast, where he discussed the band’s long-awaited return to touring, his enduring NBA fandom, how he hopes the experience of recording the score for the new FX on Hulu show Under the Banner of Heaven will rub off on Pearl Jam and much more. Here are five things we learned from the conversation, which was taped the day after Pearl Jam’s tour-opening performance in San Diego on Tuesday. The band is back on stage tonight and tomorrow at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles in support of its 2020 album, Gigaton. Ament wants Pearl Jam to make shorter records and release them more frequently: Riffing on a Simmons question about how to keep an audience’s attention in the age of ephemeral TikTok memes, Ament said he and his bandm...
Pearl Jam Salutes Friends, Family, Taylor Hawkins at Gigaton Tour Opener
Pearl Jam was in a reflective mood last night (May 3) at San Diego’s Viejas Arena for the oft-postponed opener of its North American tour in support of the 2020 album Gigaton. Performing in a city where both frontman Eddie Vedder and drummer Matt Cameron have long-standing roots, the band saluted a host of friends and family in the audience, as well as Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, who died suddenly in March. Vedder revealed early in the show that Pearl Jam had chosen songs that had “something to do with the ocean, even if they don’t mention it in the words. Half of them were written in the ocean anyway.” Indeed, beyond opener “Oceans,” “Amongst the Waves” and “Given to Fly,” the band also played its famed “Mamasan” trilogy of “Alive,” “Once” and “Footsteps” (albeit in reverse order...
Josh Klinghoffer Goes Back to the Future in Latest Pluralone Video
Josh Klinghoffer utilizes a deserted concrete bunker as an unexpected performance space in the new video for “Offend,” drawn from his latest album under the Pluralone moniker, This Is the Show. Klinghoffer strums a red, white and blue acoustic guitar in the Stephi Duckula-directed clip and is eventually accompanied by a doppelganger of himself on drums, before he climbs back out of the giant structure and wanders off into the surrounding desert. [embedded content][embedded content] “Once upon a time, this video we did looked rather like the future,” Klinghoffer says. “I’m thinking I’d like to go back to that future and look around, for the one that lies ahead seems a bit scary.” The former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist/current Pearl Jam touring multi-instrumentalist told SPIN earlier thi...
Arcade Fire Dedicate Songs to Ukraine and Pearl Jam During Surprise Coachella Set
Arcade Fire took the stage at the Mojave Tent last night, just a day after announcing their addition to the Coachella lineup. After briefly halting their performance to direct medical attention to the crowd, the band dove into a 13-song set that included fan favorites as well as a few songs from their upcoming album WE. The group had to re-start “Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)” so frontman Win Butler could re-compose himself. “It’s been a hard couple fucking years,” he said through tears. “We tell ourselves so much poison.” Earlier in the set, Butler dedicated “The Suburbs” to the people of Ukraine. “Everyone in a punk rock band in the Ukraine right now,” he said. “I’m thinking about everybody who is dealing with the war right now.” He also gave a shout out to Coachella co-founde...
Pearl Jam, Jack White, Chris Stapleton Lead Stacked Bourbon & Beyond Lineup
Pearl Jam, Jack White, Chris Stapleton, Kings of Leon, Alanis Morissette and Brandi Carlile will headline a stacked lineup for the Bourbon & Beyond festival, which will be held Sept. 15-18 at Louisville’s Highland Festival Grounds at the Kentucky Expo Center. The event is returning after a two-year pause due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Other acts on the bill include Father John Misty, Japanese Breakfast, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, Courtney Barnett, St. Vincent, Crowded House, The Doobie Brothers, Yola, Shakey Graves and Marcus King, among many others. True to its name, the event will feature a host of bourbon tasting experiences from local purveyors and distillers, including Louisville’s beloved Silver Dollar and the Kentucky Distillers’ Association. Area chefs will also be on hand f...
Josh Klinghoffer Gets on With ‘The Show’ on New Pluralone Album
When it comes to Josh Klinghoffer’s musical output, it helps to have Google and Wikipedia handy to keep track of his voluminous work on dozens of projects by everyone from PJ Harvey and Gnarls Barkley to his own bands Dot Hacker and Pluralone. Of course, the 42-year-old Los Angeles native is best known for his 10-year stint playing guitar in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which ended in 2019. Since then, he joined Pearl Jam as a touring member and wrote and recorded with Eddie Vedder on his latest solo album, Earthling. And in tandem with Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith and producer/guitarist Andrew Watt, Klinghoffer just wrapped a short U.S. tour with Vedder in support of the project, during which he was forced to miss a Chicago show after contracting COVID-19 on the road. Klinghoffer had pl...
Pearl Jam Reschedule Gigaton Tour, Plan to Continue Work on New Album
More than two years after becoming the first major artist to postpone a tour at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Pearl Jam has rescheduled North American shows in support of their 2020 album Gigaton as part of a two-leg trek, the first of which will begin May 3 in San Diego and wrap May 20 in Las Vegas. A fall leg kicks off Sept. 1 in Quebec City, Quebec, and closes Sept. 22 in Denver. The planned Baltimore show from the original routing has been canceled due to renovations at Royal Farms Arena, but new California dates have been added in Fresno and Sacramento, Las Vegas and Camden, N.J. As was on tap for the 2020 tour, new Pearl Jam touring member Josh Klinghoffer will open each night with his solo project Pluralone, whose latest album, This Is the Show, arrives March 17 through ORG M...
Nikki Sixx Hits Back at Pearl Jam After Eddie Vedder’s Criticism of Mötley Crüe: ‘They’re One of the Most Boring Bands in History’
There hasn’t been a good rock band spat in…forever? Well, that has certainly changed! Eddie Vedder gave a lengthy interview to the New York Times last weekend (which was very interesting and wide-ranging) ahead of his new solo album, Earthling. In the interview, Vedder described working at a club in San Diego during the late ’80s where he’d load in band’s gear. “I’d end up being at shows that I wouldn’t have chosen to go to — bands that monopolized late-’80s MTV,” Vedder said. “The metal bands that — I’m trying to be nice — I despised. ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’ and Mötley Crüe: Fuck you. I hated it. I hated how it made the fellas look. I hated how it made the women look. It felt so vacuous.” Now, Nikki Sixx has hit back. In a tweet, Sixx expressed his displeasure and mocked Vedder an...
Watch Eddie Vedder Dust Off Pearl Jam Deep Cut ‘Dirty Frank’ During Solo Show
Eddie Vedder and the Earthlings are only two dates into their intimate U.S. tour, and they’ve already managed to pack their setlists full of gems. After treating fans to Beatles and Bob Dylan covers, along with Pearl Jam classics, on opening night at New York’s Beacon Theater, Vedder and his band performed a collection of different songs during the second night at the venue. While they did play some of the same songs both nights, including songs off Earthling, covers of REM‘s “Drive,” Tom Petty‘s “Room at the Top,” and George Harrison‘s “Isn’t It a Pity,” Vedder switched up his Pearl Jam selections and dusted off “Dirty Frank” — a Ten deep cut that the band hadn’t played live since 2009. The song was a fitting selection though. Pearl Jam wrote it during their 1991 tour supporting...
Classic Reviews: Pearl Jam, Yield
This article originally appeared in the March 1998 issue of SPIN. Angels are God’s designated hitters. They’re represented in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, among many other religions; they pretty much show up anyplace people put out a punch bowl and a turntable. Messengers of supreme beings, keepers of the gate, angels are the ones who feel the full weight of responsibility. “Just call me an angel,” Eddie Vedder seems to groan over the fadeout of a new song on Pearl Jam‘s fifth album. And he’s got plenty of company. Angels are all over Yield: “Given to Fly” is about a seraph who breaks free; there are references to angels in the dirt; and “Do the Evolution” even features a choir singing hallelujahs. Angels have become Vedder’s nervy way of talking about himself these days—he’s a m...
The 90 Greatest Albums of the ’90s
This article originally appeared in the September 1999 issue of SPIN. “You must be high.” We heard that a lot during the time we spent preparing this issue. Which is understandable. Pronouncing the 90 greatest albums of the ’90s is a somewhat presumptuous thing to do. When you’re measuring the music this decade is offering to history—the sounds we partied with, copulated to, fought about, and wept over—everyone has an opinion. That ours should be more valid than yours is debatable. But hey—it’s our magazine. What, then, you ask, constitutes “greatest”? Don’t even start. Suffice it to say that, after much heated discussion and countless veiled insults, it came down to the factors of both remarkable artistry and cultural shock value. Sometimes a record’s knock-you-off-your-Skechers impa...
