remnants: Talk About A Dream - Ed Vedder with the E Street Band, CAA, E. Rutherford, NJ, October 13, 2004
"hello everyone, hello New Jersey. Bruce asked me to do this song, and since he’s the boss and I’m the employee, here it is.”
Twenty years ago I spent a week driving around watching the Vote for Change tour, going from Philadelphia to Cleveland to Detroit and then heading to St. Louis to see Pearl Jam, instead of heading to St. Paul with E Street. That was a bad call, because that was the night Neil Young showed up, but I didn't know that at the time everything got announced! I didn't go to DC for the finale, but then they added this show in NJ at the last minute. So, for subscribers, here's a walk down memory lane that I wrote and published somewhere, but have zero recollection where that was.
Many regular readers already know that back in 1996, I co-founded, co-edited, and wrote for a web site called Five Horizons, which focused on Pearl Jam. There were other fans doing archival work, but doing it poorly, and it drove me bonkers. I had just learned HTML and thought that if I had a website it might give me a chance to write about music, a thing I had always wanted to do but had not actively pursued for a variety of reasons. We built what people called "5H" by hand, in notepad. We were one of the first fan websites to use mp3's, anyone who has a concert chronology copied our format (it was a running joke between myself and my website co-conspirator, we liked that the nickname 'CC' could be 'Chris Cornell'). 5H was the place where I road-tested so much of the historical and archival work and methodology that's at the core of everything I do now. And I love that to this day, a mention of this project online will get at least a handful of "omg that was you? I spent my entire college career reading the concert chronology" responses.
