With a worn out voice and a bandaged hand, that’s how Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder showed up to Tower Records in Yonkers 35 years ago.
On November 14, 1991, Pearl Jam set up on a small stage in the record store to perform for a modest audience. They performed five songs from their album Ten, which had released less than three months prior, and when they finished, they sat down and signed albums.
By mid November, Pearl Jam had been on the road promoting Ten for weeks, but changed plans. Partway through their own headlining tour, the band scrapped the remaining dates to instead open for the Red Hot Chili Peppers on their Blood Sugar Sex Magik tour. The slot came together after Jack Irons, the Chili Peppers’ former drummer and friend of Vedder’s, asked if Pearl Jam could join. The Smashing Pumpkins were also on the bill, and by the end of December, Nirvana would join the tour for a short run of West Coast dates.
Pearl Jam was all over New York that week. They played a solo show at CBGB on November 8 and joined the Red Hot Chili Peppers at Roseland Ballroom on the 11th and 12th. On the afternoon of the 14th came Yonkers, followed by a second in-store performance at a New Jersey Mall that evening. The next night they were back at Roseland, the Midtown ballroom that closed in 2014.
Tower Records, whose last U.S stores shut down in December 2006, was a natural place for a young band to be seen. Pearl Jam had played a similar acoustic set at a Tower Records in Rockville, Maryland, five days earlier. In Yonkers, a small stage went up among the racks and the band played to an audience close enough to have conversations with. Part of this shows legacy is the surviving footage which captures the entire set and fan encounters afterwards.
Setlist: Wash, Black, Alive, Oceans, Porch
“Wash” was a B-side at the time, which would later be collected on the 2003 rarities set Lost Dogs. Despite the short set, the songs they performed effectively showcase the sonic range of the band, from the slow-building ache of “Black,” to the anthemic sweep of “Alive,” to the cathartic closer “Porch.”
“Even Flow” and “Jeremy” are notably missing from this setlist, despite being on their electric sets from prior shows. Neither had yet to become the radio and MTV staples they would be in 1992.
What makes the Yonkers footage special is how it captures the unusually unguarded setting. Before the set begins, Eddie Vedder addresses the audience asking if anyone had been at their Tuesday performance at Roseland. “I’ll always remember Tuesday night, cause there’s a little smile on my hand- there’s a little scar,” Vedder jokes to the audience, pointing to his bandaged hand. He describes later in the set that he had banged it on the drummers cymbals at that performance.
As the band prepares to play their first song, Vedder is seen defiantly kicking the mic stand over and earning a laugh from the crowd. He sings most of “Wash” with the microphone before putting it down for the third verse and singing the rest of the song un-amplified.
They immediately propel into “Black,” earning a few exclamations of “yeah!” and “I was waiting for this one” from the crowd. Vedder once again performs most of the song with the microphone until the climactic bridge.
Vedder begins “Alive” without the microphone until the bridge where he ad-libs a lyric: “Is something wrong she said / of course there is yeah / I have no voice he said,” which gets a laugh from the audience. Despite his lost voice after non-stop shows, Vedder gives a powerful vocal performance without the microphone for the rest of the set.
Between songs, audience members shout out to the band, and Vedder chats with the crowd as the band tunes their instruments to play the audience request: “Oceans.” Before launching into their final song, the band briefly plays the opening riff to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which had been released the previous month. The performance ends on the fast-paced and visceral “Porch.”
When the set ended, the band sat down at a table, signed albums for the patient crowd, and posed for a group photo.
Archival footage like this earns its value in the details. The band’s body language, the proximity of the crowd, the scale of the room, and Vedder’s raw, un-amplified voice provide immense documentation into the spirit of this band just months into their public career.
Pearl Jam’s place on the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s tour worked in their favor, and by the end of 1991, MTV had put “Alive” into heavy rotation on the network. Pearl Jam went on to sell more than 100 million albums worldwide and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017.
History is most revealing when it catches artists before they understand their own historical significance. Thirty-five years later, the footage of Pearl Jam’s 1991 Tower Records performance captures a special moment in time before the band knew that Ten would reshape rock radio and mark the era forever.
Watch the footage from the performance here.
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