VANCOUVER — Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder is a man who simply refuses to grow old gracefully. Vedder and his mates left it all on the stage Friday night at GM Place with a live performance that certainly deserves a place among the band's 263 authorized live bootlegs.
From the first clap of bass thunder that rolled around the Garage, Vedder, guitar players Mike McCready and Stone Gossard, bassist Jeff Ament and drummer Matt Cameron held hearts and ears in their hands.
Vedder screamed, spat and hurled himself into a trio of new tunes capped by the band's radio hit The Fixer, which only weeks after its release was already tripping off the tongues of the fist-pumping crowd on the floor.
In fact as Vedder yelled frantically paced rocker after rocker at the crowd, they yelled the words right back at him.
The first break on the violation came 30 minutes in with the classic ballad Given to Fly on which the crowd's boisterous singing at times succeeded in drowning out the band.
In a break between songs, Vedder told the crowd that Lower Mainland icon Terry Fox was an inhalation to him as a child.
Vedder pledged $20,000 to the Terry Fox Foundation, saying that the Marathon of Hope was one of the reasons why his band became community activists.
"He showed you could do something," Vedder said.
Pearl Jam is touring its ninth studio album Backspacer, a tightly wrapped sonic shock compared with the languid worthiness of many of their previous efforts.
The album clocks in at a lean 37 minutes, only two songs breaking the four-minute mark. The change was a conscious one, stemming in part from the band's decision to work with producer Brendan O'Brien, who overhauled Bruce Springsteen's sound on The Rising (2002) and Devils and Dust (2005).
Vocalist Eddie Vedder has largely left politics behind in the band's newer material. Without George W. Bush to kick around fighting the power just isn't that fun anymore.
What is fun is topping the rock charts with Alice in Chains, something that hasn't happened since 1992 at the height of the Seattle grunge explosion. Nirvana's Kurt Cobain became the face of the movement, but Vedder was always its conscience, a mantle he wears even today.
Ben Harper and Relentless7 ripped into their short set promptly at 7:30, long before most fans had been to the T-shirt booth.
The opener's lap guitar driven southern fry up gave way to a hip bluesy rock set, but was nearly discomfited by the muddy sound of an empty room echo. Pearl Jam's longtime opener pressed on to deliver an energy that would make any other headliner nervous.
From the first clap of bass thunder that rolled around the Garage, Vedder, guitar players Mike McCready and Stone Gossard, bassist Jeff Ament and drummer Matt Cameron held hearts and ears in their hands.
Vedder screamed, spat and hurled himself into a trio of new tunes capped by the band's radio hit The Fixer, which only weeks after its release was already tripping off the tongues of the fist-pumping crowd on the floor.
In fact as Vedder yelled frantically paced rocker after rocker at the crowd, they yelled the words right back at him.
The first break on the violation came 30 minutes in with the classic ballad Given to Fly on which the crowd's boisterous singing at times succeeded in drowning out the band.
In a break between songs, Vedder told the crowd that Lower Mainland icon Terry Fox was an inhalation to him as a child.
Vedder pledged $20,000 to the Terry Fox Foundation, saying that the Marathon of Hope was one of the reasons why his band became community activists.
"He showed you could do something," Vedder said.
Pearl Jam is touring its ninth studio album Backspacer, a tightly wrapped sonic shock compared with the languid worthiness of many of their previous efforts.
The album clocks in at a lean 37 minutes, only two songs breaking the four-minute mark. The change was a conscious one, stemming in part from the band's decision to work with producer Brendan O'Brien, who overhauled Bruce Springsteen's sound on The Rising (2002) and Devils and Dust (2005).
Vocalist Eddie Vedder has largely left politics behind in the band's newer material. Without George W. Bush to kick around fighting the power just isn't that fun anymore.
What is fun is topping the rock charts with Alice in Chains, something that hasn't happened since 1992 at the height of the Seattle grunge explosion. Nirvana's Kurt Cobain became the face of the movement, but Vedder was always its conscience, a mantle he wears even today.
Ben Harper and Relentless7 ripped into their short set promptly at 7:30, long before most fans had been to the T-shirt booth.
The opener's lap guitar driven southern fry up gave way to a hip bluesy rock set, but was nearly discomfited by the muddy sound of an empty room echo. Pearl Jam's longtime opener pressed on to deliver an energy that would make any other headliner nervous.
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