Pearl Jam kicked off the first leg of their 2025 Dark Matter Tour on Thursday (4/24) at the Hard Rock Live in Hollywood, Florida in a career-spanning performance with fairly predictable covers.
Trading in the Chicago Bears jersey he donned last year for a t-shirt under a Hawaiian aloha shirt, frontman Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam combined songs from last year's Dark Matter with fan favorites in a two-hour set that included some scorching guitar leads.
The gig was in front of a far more intimate 7,000 fans, compared to their last show of 2024 which was for 24,000 at ENGIE Stadium in Sydney, Australia.
The show opened with a bit of a surprise with “Oceans,” a rare but welcome choice from their 1991 debut Ten.
In the last 30 years Pearl Jam has played the tune more than 4 times in a year just twice. So fans who get to experience it live should feel lucky.
The selection of songs were dominated by bookends, in a way. Both the band's first LP and their most recent one got the most play with six songs each.
Of their dozen studio albums, the band pulled from seven of them and performed four covers.
Although it's always touching when Vedder performs the Tom Petty smash "I Won't Back Down," a semi-surprise came when the veteran grunge rockers pulled out "So You Want To Be A Rock And Roll Star."
The Byrds single is a song Pearl Jam had covered seven times previously. It may have been Florida native Petty's performances of the number that inspired the Seattle: TP and the Heartbreakers did it 111 times through their career.
The tune was followed by another cover, this one by Victoria Williams: "Crazy Mary."
The twisted, quirky song was recommended to the band to play on a benefit album for Williams who had contracted MS. After hearing the tune, they fell in love with it and have played it 172 times since.
"The song was picked out for us. Lou Reed is married and his wife gave us the tape and suggested that song," Vedder said on the radio interview show Rockline in 1993.
"As soon as I turned on the tape -- I remember I was on an airplane I think I was coming back from that Bob Dylan fest -- and as soon as I heard her voice, I knew we had just seen her so to hear that she was stricken with Multiple Sclerosis and her life was in the balance, etc.
"Those are one of the moments you stop taking for granted that fact that you are living and have the use of all your limbs, etc., etc. Something that no one should take for granted and if all we had to do was record a song to help her out—record a great song—then I think we'll do that," he said.
The hits kept coming as Pearl Jam then played "Alive" and then covered the rock staple, "Baba O'Riley."
While on paper it doesn't seem like anyone should cover that iconic anthem that is so tied to The Who, nearly 250 artists have taken it on, and Pearl Jam has now done it a whopping 189 times.
The group is scheduled for another show at the Hard Rock, a venue with the enormous illuminated guitar, tomorrow and then go back to arenas in Atlanta, New Orleans, Nashville, Pittsburgh and others.
Get your tickets on the Pearl Jam website as they head to your town.
