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On Thursday morning, you find out that a friend's roommate is giving away tickets for the Pearl Jam concert. How could you not go? Personally, I would never have spent 60, 70 euros to hear them again. I still vividly remember their 2006 concert at what was then the DatchForum. If I stop to think, I can still feel the thousands of voices around me singing in unison "Alive," "Jeremy," and the other classic choruses.
Friday night was wonderful. Not the concert, but the evening itself. I honestly can't recall such a pleasant and comfortable summer live event. The climate played a part, pleasantly cooling down the temperature with a light breeze, and the solstice period, with a very long sunset framing the stage for at least half of the concert. And next to it, the tree of life with its flashy light displays. We arrived late, around 8:45 PM; it was impossible to get close to the stage, so we positioned ourselves halfway between the bar and the pit area. A delightful evening, in short, marked by medium beers, big smiles, running to the bathroom to get back at the right moment when "Black" started. Photos and laughs with Giulia, trekking kilometers along the Decumano of what was Expo, returning to downtown Milan with the metro of hope, and dining at 2 AM.
The concert itself wasn't bad, but I had a strong feeling of it being a routine performance. Sure, Eddie Vedder had laryngitis a few days before, and you can somewhat tell, he missed a few notes. The setlist was good but definitely shorter than usual; a few days later in Padua, they really went all out with some precious tracks like "Not for You" and "Indifference." In Milan, there were a few gems too, like "Immortality" and "Release," but all in all, one might have expected a bit more. Meaning, if usually you play 27 tracks and tonight you decide to stop at 20 (understandable, it's a festival), maybe don't cut "Animal," "Better Man," and "Rearviewmirror." Cut the fairly useless tracks from the latest albums. Yet they played those anyway, not even the best ones in my opinion, allowing us to take a break to grab beers without too much remorse.
Musically, I realized that they're no longer for me, and in fact, I haven't listened to them in years. As a teenager, I didn't perceive the classicism that risks becoming routine in so many solos and rhythms. Today I realized it a bit more, like the average caliber of McCready, who has some tricks up his sleeve, but several times seems more like he's just filling the minutes with some aimless noodling. In short, they didn't ruin the adolescent memory I have of them because the songs are and remain very beautiful, especially up until "Yield," but they didn't make me want to start listening to them again either. I probably didn't catch them on their best night. They remain respectable rock dinosaurs.
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