In 1991 my college roommate had a girlfriend in the record industry that handed us Pearl Jam's "10" just before the release of the album. It ended up playing continuously in our apartment day and night for months. Without disclosing my age, I'll just say that although that album captured our attention throughout college I thought I had grown out of Pearl Jam's music. That's what surprised me so much about their recent Lexington show: how it brought me back to what I loved about Pearl Jam. Despite their legendary status, the band walked out with the house lights still on, picked up their instruments and proceeded to blow the doors off Rupp Arena with raw emotion and talent. It was a packed house.
As they have on other tour stops, they played two encores totaling up to 33 songs including covers of "Comfortably Numb" (Gilmour, Waters), "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" (Lennon, McCartney), "Baba O'Reilly" (Townshend) with a few others. On a humorous note lead singer, Eddie Vedder, remarked that the next song, "Education" was for all the intellectuals in the audience since it was a university arena. He asked if anybody in the band graduated from university? No affirmatives came from his band mates and Vedder continued: "don’t tell our kids, we are gonna try and keep that lie going for a while.”
All photos by Glenn Hirsch
