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| September 1992
Lollapalooza continued throughout September. On September 3rd, Mike fell and broke his leg. Jim Rose became the hero, hot-writing one of the golf carts that were on hand for use of the festival crew and helpfully squiring Mike around it. After the other artists saw Rose and Mike tooling around, they all started hijacking the carts, stranding the crew members who needed them to quickly get around the sprawling Lollapalooza grounds. During their stage appearance at the Starplex Amphitheater in Dallas on September 6th, Pearl Jam performed for the first time 'Sonic Reducer', a Dead Boys tune. On September 7th the guys went to L.A. to rehearse 'Jeremy' for the MTV Video Music Awards at the Pauley Pavilion (UCLA). They had been nominated in the Best Alternative Video category for 'Alive'.
09/01/92 - Lakewood Amphitheater: Atlanta, GA (Lollapalooza II)
09/04/92 - UNO Soccer Field: New Orleans, LA (Lollapalooza II)
09/05/92 - Fort Bend County Fairgrounds (Rosenberg): Houston, TX (Lollapalooza II) 09/06/92 - Starplex Amphitheater: Dallas, TX (Lollapalooza II)
09/07/92 - Pauley Pavilion, UCLA: Westwood, CA, MTV Video Music Awards (Rehearsals) Soundcheck: Jeremy
After the rehearsal at the Pauley Pavilion, Pearl Jam returned to Arizona to play at the Desert Sky Pavilion in Phoenix. During Ice Cube's set, 'Hunger Strike' was heard coming from the Lollapalooza side stage, where Eddie and Chris Cornell were jamming to a crowd. "There was a second stage at Lollapalooza, so Eddie and me worked up an acoustic set and got some space on the second stage for the middle of the day. We got a golf cart and drove through the crowd to the stage, and it was like the Beatles. There were, like, a hundred people running and screaming and chasing the golf cart. It was the first time I realized what was happening with his band", Chris Cornell.
09/08/92 - Desert Sky
Pavilion: Phoenix, AZ (Lollapalooza II)
"MTV wielded a lot of power, I don't remember who finally talked us into it, but all of a sudden, we were doing "Jeremy", Eddie was pissed, and everybody was frustrated", Dave Abbruzzese. "It doesn't matter John, it doesn't matter, there really isn't a way to judge these things. Hopefully, you make a good piece of art, and the fact that you show it, that's something to be said. I mean, that's like winning. Then people can see it. That's all that counts", Eddie Vedder's comments after the performance about the Jeremy video that couldn't make the cut to that year's nominations. "When "Jeremy" happened and they played at the MTV Video Music Awards, [Sony Music CEO Tommy] Mottola was at the Sony after-party saying, "You have to release 'Black.'" And the band was saying, "No. Enough. This is big enough", Kelly Curtis (Pearl Jam manager). "Black" was kind of a sore subject; a lot of other people in the company really wanted "Black" as the next single", Michael Goldstone.
09/09/92 - Pauley Pavilion, UCLA: Westwood, CA, MTV Video Music Awards
Toward the end of the MTV Awards, as Eddie stood backstage watching Eric Clapton's performance of 'Tears in Heaven', Courtney Love appeared and drew Eddie into an embrace, leading him in a slow dance. After a few moments Kurt Cobain walked over and cut in. He looked directly into Eddie's eyes. "I want you to know that I think you're a respectable human. I still think your band sucks, but after watching you perform, I realize that you're a person who has some passion", Kurt Cobain. "There was a lot of stuff that got said, but none of it really matters, and I like to think he may have had second thoughts about some of the things he said, you know... I mean there's a person we both knew, who told me that Kurt asked about me a lot, like picked their brains about me, this person who knew us both. And I thought that was cool. That made me feel good, you know. Because so much bullshit was getting written about us. And we talked, we talked a couple of times. And this one time, he told me flat-out, just delivered me a whole paragraph on the respect he had for what I did, and he realized it was pure.This was at the MTV Awards. 'Tears of Heaven' was playing in the background, we were slow dancing. I remember going out surfing the next morning and remembering how good that moment felt and thinking, Fuck, man, if only we hadn't been so afraid of each other...' Because we were going though so much of the same shit. If only we'd talked, maybe we could have helped each other", Eddie Vedder. "I remember that at the MTV Awards in '92, Eddie and Kurt kind of made up. I almost remember them underneath the stage, grabbing each other. Clapton was playing "Tears in Heaven," I think, and they embraced under the stage. Kind of a magic moment", Rick Krim (MTV/VH1 Producer). "Yeah, some kind of fucking summit. It was so ridiculous; it had blown so out of proportion. I remember the two of them smiling and hugging each other—[sarcastically] and then, all of a sudden, Seattle was okay!", Dave Grohl (ex-Nirvana drummer).
"If a girl breaks up with you, you hate her. Mark Arm in particular was
bitter about us leaving Green River. Then I heard what he was saying about us.
That's kind of what started the whole "Jeff, in particular, and Stone,
being careerists" thing. The fact of the matter is, in Green River I was
the only guy who had a job. Those other guys, they had trust funds, were getting
financial help from their parents. I was the one who was hungry to have my rent
paid for. With Kurt Cobain, that's what got misconstrued. Maybe I was the one
who wasn't going to get bailed out by anyone if I was 30 years old and still
working in a restaurant. I was paying back student loans. Those things that Mark,
or Kurt said, they hurt quite a bit initially. It was almost portrayed like at a
young age I decided I was going to be a rock star. And that definitely wasn't
the case. I made several attempts to talk to Kurt and he would put his head down
and walk away. I'm sure some of it was based on them getting asked about us. We
were getting asked about them a lot, and you get sick of it", Jeff
Ament.
"I went hat in hand and begged them to do the show. It's so vivid just the way my stomach ached begging those guys - who were friends of mine and who had been struggling six months earlier and were now the biggest band in the World. They eventually said yes, and we got the movie released. But it was painful", Cameron Crowe. "To me, it makes more sense logically to think that every city is capable of having a "Seattle." It's just a matter of having the individuals in the city that choose to set examples of what they do and to set examples of uniqueness or to set examples of free thinking that will eventually lead other people to think the same way, which is to NOT think the same way...which is to think for themselves, you know? So either way, I could believe anyone...if somebody came up and showed how the music, the source of all these great bands, was traveling around the United States in a crazy eight pattern, or something like that, you know... Who knows? Maybe there's some higher power, some alien intervention that's occurring. [laughs]", Stone Gossard.
Setlist: State of Love and Trust, Baba O'Riley, Rockin' in the Free World Notes: The only reason they bothered to show up for the Singles premiere party at all was because they'd promised Crowe. Eddie arrived with a gang of surfer friends, and a couple cases of beer. He was pretty drunk. He even picked a fight with a security guard, which was promptly broken up by the usually aggressive Al Jourgensen of Ministry. During the performance Eddie intentionally fucked up 'Solat' injecting a line from Mudhoney's "Overblown" at the beginning "Everynody Loves us...Everybody Loves us".
"The whole reason Eddie got so drunk was because he was frustrated. Iniatially, we were told that this was going to be a small, intimate party for Cameron, and then we get there and there's all these MTV cameras everywhere and it's this huge MTV production. We weren't ready for that, and it just got a little out of hand", Dave Abbruzzese. "Singles was in the can for a year before it came out. But the success of the so-called "Seattle sound" got it released. Warner Bros. said, "If you can get Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam to play the MTV party that we can use to publicize the movie, we'll put it out." So I painfully had to try and talk the bands into doing it. Pearl Jam said that they'd do it as a favor to me. So the taping happened, and it was...a disaster. It was populated mostly by studio executives and their children, who wanted to see the Seattle Sound", Cameron Crowe (Singles Director). "Eddie was hanging with a bunch of his surfer friends from San Diego. I remember fire marshals onstage, Eddie yelling at security guys. They had to shut it down. We had to get Eddie out before they arrested him", Krim (Producer MTV/VH1). "They were playing covers, and somebody got into a fight, and Chris Cornell got into it, and I think [Soundgarden's] Kim Thayil got into it. I remember Eddie yelling, "Fuuuck! What the fuck is this?' and studio executives grabbing their kids and streaming out. I was seeing this whole thing to get the movie released going down the tubes. But Singles came out, and the show aired twice, heavily edited. To anybody who taped it off the air, it's a real collectible. Later, we made up t-shirts to commemorate the party and they said on the front "Singles Premiere Party" and on the back it said, 'Nobody Died", Cameron Crowe (Singles Director).
The last 3 shows of the Lollapalooza tour took place at Irvine Meadows in California. During the second show on September 12th, "Ain't no need to go nowhere if you are here ... only the strong survive ... Let's say about two years ago you're about ready to kill yourself ... maybe its two weeks ago....maybe it was yesterday, but aren't you glad you didn't when you get a day like this?"
09/11/92 - Irvine Meadows: Irvine, CA (Lollapalooza II)
09/12/92 - Irvine Meadows: Irvine, CA (Lollapalooza II)
Notes: "anybody know one of our songs ... you wanna sing it for me ... this guy right here, all right. He knows the chords to 'Breath and a Scream.' You want him to play it?" , after 'Jeremy'. 'Breath' ended and Eddie said "I've been in love with losers all of my life ... hoping someday someone will love a loser like me, like Stone. Stone you're not much of a loser, you're a handsome guy". Eddie introduced 'Sonic Reducer' as "a song Jeremy would like," and dedicated it to two pits in the crowd. After 'Sonic Reducer', Stone started playing some riffs of Hard to Imagine with Eddie improvising "Children our way someday ... teenagers fucked up in the head ... some things I hear everyday people don't need to say. Oh, it's hard to feel different ...Don't want a future ... give it away". "I can't believe this is it ... only one more day. I predict every band that is going to play here today is going to kick ass cause they know it's ending." This led into 'Porch.' Afterwards Eddie asked, "Did anybody see Rage Against the Machine on the small stage before we went on?" Mike asked, "Did anybody else see Nirvana ... Kurt Cobain on guitar over there?" Eddie said, "Kurt Cobain and I made up the other night ... he was right here." 'RitFW' "The United States ain't a free place" and "Feels so good to just get it out ... we all need to get it out ... vote and get it out ... drop ACID and get it out."
By the time Lollapalooza'92 was drawing to close, Seattle Mania was at it's peak, the Mark Pellington-directed 'Jeremy' video was in heavy rotation on MTV, and Pearl Jam had the distinction of having played on three of Billboard's top twenty albums. 'Ten' had climbed to nº2 in late August. The soundtrack for Cameron Crowe's 'Singles', featuring tracks by Pearl Jam, Mother Love Bone, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Mudhoney and Screaming Trees and released by Epic well before the film saw the light of day, was hovering in the high teens. 'Temple of the Dog', which had sold less than a hundred thousand copies after it's initial release in 1991, had been reissued by A&M in June to capitalize on the resurgence of interest, and thanks in part to an old video for 'Hunger Strike', shot in 1991 at Seattle's Discovery Park and featuring members of Pearl Jam, the album was now nº 8 and had gone platinum. MTV had studiously ignored the clip when it was originally submitted, but now they were playing it constantly. The way the reissued Temple was being hyped by the label, the press, and MTV, with an emphasis on Pearl Jam's envolvement, was a sore point for everyone involved. Polygram, meanwhile, was gearing up to snag it's own piece of the Pearl Jam pie, with the re-release of Mother Love Bone's Apple and Shine - along with an alternate version of 'Capricorn Sister' and the previously unreleased 'Lady Godiva Blues' - on a two cd set titled Mother Love Bone. This, too, Pearl Jam saw as annoyingly exploitative. "I'm proud of the music, and I'm proud that people are hearing it, and I'm proud that it's doing well, but I wish that "doing well" wasn't selling records, you know what I mean? 'Cause it could be doing well in my opinion and I'd be just as proud of it-if a thousand people were hearing it, or 10,000 people. Even 100,000 would be nice. That would guarantee us making another record, pretty much. The fact is, if it sells a million records, you can't even grasp that; so I can't say that I'm proud of it, because it doesn't affect my general life. I still live in an apartment that's $500 a month with another person, a roommate. It doesn't change your general living. I guess that if a check comes it could change it, and I don't want it to. That's even more to avoid. It becomes a problem", Eddie Vedder. "The whole thing was kind of embarrassing, it was hard for everyone. I think the guys in Pearl Jam were already realizing that they no longer held the reins over who they were. It was funny, because it went from being 'The Chris Cornell Project' to being 'The Pearl Jam Project'. That was the strange and almost humurous aspect of it. It was still the same songs, the same mixes, the same packaging, it hadn't changed at all. Just everybody else changed", Chris Cornell. "Re-hyping something that's three years old doesn't seem right or fair to the fans who were there at the time. The one positive thing about this is that Andy made some amazing music, and it's cool that people are getting to hear it. My advice? tape it from a friend, or buy the original versions, or steal it!", Jeff Ament. "If the band had it's druthers, they might not want it out. The guys are well beyond Mother Love Bone, and that band doesn't exist anymore. Pearl Jam won't be performing any Mother Love Bone songs", Kelly Curtis (Pearl Jam Manager).
09/13/92 - Irvine Meadows: Irvine, CA (Lollapalooza)
Notes: "You'd all better vote to keep it a fuckin' free world, I hate to inform you boys but I've seen quite a few of these and this ain't no pit." Eddie jumps in the pit during a manic version of "Porch," "That's not a pit, boys. I been in a few pits, and that is not a pit." Members of the Jesus and Mary Chain, Lush, Ministry join them for 'Rockin In The Free World' "Is there anyone else left back there to play?" Eddie asked. "Oh, there is someone," as Chris Cornell strolled onstage and the crowd erupted. "So, do you guys deserve this?" Cornell asked. "Well, I think you probably do, and if you don't at least we do. So we're gonna do this anyway... This is a song we haven't played too many times in our lives and so we're probably gonna trainwreck it and totally fuck it up. But you might recognize it, it's called 'Reach Down'... I think... is that what we're playing? No, we're not gonna play that, we're gonna do a cover, we're gonna do an MTV song instead." Matt Cameron replaceed Dave Abbruzzese. Chris began, Eddie standed to the side clapping. "Hey, can I tell everybody something," asked Eddie. "I think it'll be two years - two years ago October? When did you play Gathering of the Tribes?".
On September 18th, 'Singles', the movie by Cameron Crowe was released. On September 20th, Eddie stood onstage at Seattle's Magnuson Park, addressing the thirty thousand fans who'd turned up for "Drop in the Park", the rescheduled free concert authorities had scuttled back in May 20th. Eddie was jubilant over the band's finnaly keeping its promise to Seattle. And from the sound of the cheers, so was Seattle. This show was rescheduled for Sep. 6th, but it finnaly happened on Sep. 20th. The reason it was postponed the second time was because Ticketmaster refused to distribute the tickets for free even though PJ was playing for free. When they'd begun planning the rescheduled concert, city officials had informed Pearl Jam that although the show was free, they needed to distribute tickets for security reasons, to limit the size of the crowd. The band had asked Ticketmaster to distribute tickets, only to come away fuming when the corporation refused to do the honors for less than a $1.50 service charge per ticket. The band sidestepped Ticketmaster, making their own arrangements to have the tickets printed and enlisting the help of local radio stations to direct fans to a distribution site at the Seattle Center Coliseum. Rock the Vote registered nearly 25,000 voters at the concert, a record for a single event. "It's interesting how difficult they make it [to register to vote] in some cities, especially college towns. I've learned all this stuff about how they don't make it that convenient...and what that says to me is that they really do consider the youth voting crowd a strong public", Eddie Vedder. "Our first record coming out was like being swept up by a tornado, it was so fucking crazy for a while", Mike McCready.
09/20/92 - Warren G. Magnuson Park: Seattle, WA (Free Festival)
Setlist: Even Flow, Once, State of Love and Trust, (Angie riffs) Why Go, Deep, Jeremy, Black, Alive, Garden, (Walkaway)/Porch/(Tearing), Sonic Reducer, Rockin' in the Free World Notes: "I can't believe we did it! This is like the OK Hotel times one million. We're like a fucking rash on Seattle that they never thought they´d catch". Eddie during 'Why Go' dived into the crowd and when he returned he apologized for the stage dive asking if everyone was okay. "Heroin got me where I am today, don't forget to vote because if you don't vote you can't complain about the outcome." During Porch Eddie repeatedly tossed his mic up into the scaffolding until it got hang up. He climbed up to retrieve it and then slided down the cord back to the stage, where he swinged back and forth on the cord, finally letting go to land in the crowd. During Rockin' in the Free World the drummer from Ministry and Bruce Fairweather (Mother Love Bone) joined Pearl Jam on stage.
09/25/92 - BBC: England (intv. with Ed) At the end of September, pearl jam finally got a chance to step off the treadmill, the band members, the crew, and kelly Curtis treating themselves to a working vacation in Hawaii. There they played a few shows and shot another video with Josh Taft – a grainy, black-and-white postcard for the ten track oceans. Mostly scenes of the band having fun being themselves. Shots of Eddie surfing, Stone driving, people swimming and running, small planes flying overhead etc. Concert clips appear between the scenes. The whole thing is in black and white. The ending is particularly striking, with an image of Eddie doing an amazing stage dive into an audience superimposed over a shot of crashing ocean waves. The concert clips were taken from the last Hawaii show in Maui. That video would be released only in Europe and more recently on the Pearl Jam "Touring Band DVD" from the 2k tour.
09/25/92 - Andrews Amphitheater: Honolulu, Hawaii
09/26/92 - Andrews Amphitheater: Honolulu, Hawaii
09/27/92 - Baldwin High School Gymnasium: Maui, Hawaii Soundcheck: Jeremy, Little Wing, Breath
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On September 9th, Pearl Jam performed at the MTV Video Music Awards. They
were the center of a controversy at the MTV awards show, when they announced
they intended playing a cover of the Dead Boys' "Sonic
Reducer,"
turning the proverbial wheel full circle (Green River's debut single, of course,
also boasted a Dead Boys' cover). MTV, of course, demanded they play the more
familiar "Jeremy," which they eventually did. 
On September
10th, the night after the Video Music
Awards, Pearl Jam showed up at the Park Plaza hotel ballroom in Los Angeles for
an invitation-only party celebrating the premiere of 'Singles', the highlights
from which would air a week later as an MTV special called "MTV´s Singles
Scene". 
Tad Doyle, Chris Cornell, and Sub Pop's
Bruce Pavitt in cameos, and Soundgarden and Alice in Chains in performance
scenes - Eddie, Stone and Jeff had little more than bit parts. As members of
Citizen Dick, the fictional band led by Matt Dillon's character, Cliff Poncier,
they first appear in a rehearsal room segment, Eddie behind the drums, Stone
noodling on a guitar, and Jeff complaining to Poncier that his vehicle needs to
be moved "Hey Cliff...While we're young?". Another scene finds Eddie
and Jeff comically engrossed in a TV nature show about bees, their eyes glued to
the screen. They rack the most screen time in a scene filmed at Seattle's OK
Hotel (the 'Java Stop' in the movie) where they're shown poring over a newspaper
review of their band. When they begin reading the review aloud and the
ego-driven Poncier warns them that he doesn't want to hear anything negative,
they're forced to read him only the last line, which praises their skill as a
backup band. Eddie delivers his most substancial piece of dialogue "a
compliment for us, is a compliment for you". Back in July Warner Bros.
informed Crowe that 'Singles' would not be released in theaters unless Pearl Jam
agreed to promote it on MTV. Crowe knew how this was going to fly with Pearl Jam
- Eddie already told him that "if anyone at Warner Bros. made too much of
the Seattle scene, I would go buy a gun".
Sep. 13th, Lollapalooza last stop,
Irvine Meadows in California. 