Show Notes
The timeline moves ahead to 1993 this week, a massive year for Pearl Jam as their sophomore album Vs. was released with a ton of fanfare backing it. It can be argued that there's no year of this band's career where they were bigger. The record was a massive success, tickets to their shows became nearly impossible to attain, but as all of this was taking shape, the band was not comfortable with their role as the top artist in the world. Their focus was on writing, continuing to raise the bar for their live shows and as we see from this show in Mesa, Arizona, raising awareness for meaningful causes like protecting indigenous land Mt. Graham from (I kid you not) alien observation towers.
This show centers a little bit around preservation of Apache land, and we'll discuss how an incident with a crowd member is connected to that. But the moment that people are gonna remember the most from this show is that it marks the official live debut of Yellow Ledbetter. Having released it as a b-side a year prior, fans in the know began to gravitate towards it, and after some time had passed radio stations would put the song into heavy rotation. Being unlike the rest of the catalog at the time, Ledbetter stood out for it's moody Hendrix inspired guitar wailing from McCready and anthemic chorus build ups. We'll discuss whether or not the band had plans for this song to be incorporated into the rotation, or if it was the will of the fans that turned it into the end of show curtain call that it is today.
We'll also do a deep dive on the era and talk about the band's budding mentorship with Neil Young as well as massive performances of Once, Jeremy and... John Denver?
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More from Live On 4 Legs: Pearl Jam Podcast
To celebrate an album birthday, this week we are going back to 1993 on the Vs. tour to talk about a show in Dallas that happened at the prime of their popularity. This show takes place a month after the release of Vs., which was a massive hit selling a then record 950,378 copies in its first week. While everyone wanted a piece of this band, they chose to keep things simple while going on tour to promote the album. Instead of selling out massive basketball arenas, they stuck to smaller venues including many on college campuses so that they could keep prices affordable for their young fanbase.
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After much anticipation over who was going to be behind the kit for Pearl Jam for the first time since Matt Cameron left last summer, we have finally found our answer... or so we think. Abe Laboriel Jr., who has made a name for himself as the drummer for Paul McCartney, was revealed as the guy holding it down for the band as they played for the first time since May of 2025. We'll have plenty of reaction to how Abe approached these songs and what kind of chemistry he had with the band that led to the festival being a big success. But there is also the fallout after Ohana with some added speculation on whether or not Abe is fully a part of Pearl Jam's future. We'll address comments from the band and try to make sense of the next steps involving their future.
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