The University of Montana’s three-concert series at Washington-Grizzly Stadium began on Thursday night, appropriately enough, with a band that's played there twice before. If you needed a reminder of which years, Pearl Jam had a special maroon letterman-style jacket made that lists the veteran rock group’s shows at this venue: 1998, 2018, and now 2024. There were jersey-style maroon tour shirts for sale, too.
The merchandise line at one point reached two blocks — the same length as the line to get into the stadium. Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder performs at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024.
Such is the novelty of having one of the most famous rock bands in the world curate a show specifically for the audience in a rural state. In about a week, Eddie Vedder will perform two nights in a row at Wrigley Field, capacity 41,000. Yet here he was in Missoula, giving shout-outs to a list of small towns to see how they were represented in the audience of 24,000: Havre, Billings, Butte, Belfry, Bigfork, Ekalaka, Rudyard.
“Lame Deer? How about Eureka?” he asked. “This one goes out Big Sandy, because that’s the one that produced my friend, Jeff,” he said, before launching into one of their acoustic classics, “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town.” Jeff, of course, is Jeff Ament, bassist and cofounder of the group.
He’s ensured the band has stopped here over the years, particularly when fellow Big Sandy product Jon Tester, a Democrat, has been running for Montana’s U.S. Senate seat.
The Treasure State was stitched not only into the merch but the visual design and song choices. An aerial view of a packed Washington-Grizzly Stadium as Pearl Jam performs in Missoula on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024.
They went big early with one of their soaring hits, “Given to Fly.” The three massive video displays on stage were filled edge to edge with high-definition drone footage of Hellgate Canyon and Mount Sentinel. They prominently featured songs Ament wrote, such as the darkly tinted “Nothing As It Seems,” and anthemic “Lowlight.
” The cameras zoomed in on his 12-string bass during “Jeremy,” for which he wrote the music. He wore a shirt that said “Thresher” in the logo of the skateboarding magazine “Thrasher,” to promote his nonprofit, Montana Pool Service, which builds professional-grade skate parks around the state. Vedder’s voice was in strong shape on that early hit, and likewise on tracks from their 12th studio album, “Dark Matter,” released earlier this spring.
His baritone sometimes felt the strongest when you were hearing him in a fresh context on wide, open songs like “Setting Sun” or “Wreckage.” Other new songs like “Scared of Fear” and “React, Respond” slotted in seamlessly along with their earlier, fast-paced numbers. Guitarist Mike McCready was given plenty of space to show off his Hendrix-informed style of emotive shredding.
Ament, rhythm guitarist Stone Gossard and drummer Matt Cameron kept the machinery of tunes like “Even Flow” churning so cleanly you rarely stopped to wonder about how the band is functionally still playing as hard as they ever did. Older songs like “Corduroy” arguably show musicians who are better now than they were in 1994 when it was released on “Vitalogy.” Zac, Owen and Amy Weinberg listen to Pearl Jam perform at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula on Thursday, Aug.
22, 2024. Vedder wore a fedora and a jersey with the number “34,” which happens to be the number of years the band has been around. Their longevity becomes more impressive when you start searching for comparisons.
Rock bands usually don't last this long, and rock musicians usually mellow out or try their hand at Americana. Pearl Jam, meanwhile, have held to the same volume and intensity level. At this phase in their career, the band has cultivated the kind of devotion you’d expect for a jam band, not a rock group.
Their fans follow them around on tour. Like a jam band, you can buy official bootlegs of most any concert. In Missoula, Vedder pointed to someone in a shirt dating back to their early gigs, and to people he’d seen on different legs of this tour.
He paused to thank the people up front who'd camped out the night before. Here in Missoula, they arranged a pre-show festival across from the Champions Center with enough fans in Pearl Jam shirts of all eras (Citizen Dick, anyone?) that you could curate a historical exhibit at the Montana Museum of Art and Culture across the street. Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder performs at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula on Thursday, Aug.
22, 2024. The fandom is attentive enough that you can log onto their website, select an album and a song, and you’ll see a list of concerts where it was performed. By Friday morning, “Given to Fly” had been updated to reflect its status as the Missoula opener.
There have been many, many articles and books dissecting the band and their appeal, but by this point you probably either get it or you don’t. Vedder summed up their niche fairly well in an off-the-cuff introduction to “Porch,” off their 1992 debut, “Ten." “This is a loud song about fragility," he said.
That particular combination still resonates, quite loudly. The penultimate song on Thursday was “Alive,” from their 1991 debut, “Ten.” While there are countless live versions available, seeing a full stadium crowd sing along to the chorus was startling, especially in a city that doesn’t have many concerts this size, where stadium hits are more often heard in the privacy of a car stereo.
It’s not the only chance fans here will have for the stadium experience, either. UM’s first-ever concert series at Washington-Grizzly continues on Saturday with Tyler Childers and Nathaniel Rateliff and closes out on Wednesday with Pink and Sheryl Crow. Politics wasn’t entirely absent from the show itself, although somewhat confined to a few segments.
The poster was Montana-style, too, with an image of Tester getting his signature flat-top haircut. The barber’s an homage to George Ament, Jeff’s father. They displayed a QR code for their “Pledge to Vote” program on the big screens and showed clips of audience members holding signs about what freedom means to them.
Pearl Jam lead guitarist Mike McCready performs at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024. Vedder made a joke about crowd size, noting that “a guy who thinks a lot about crowd size” spoke in Bozeman a little while back, but there were three times as many people in Washington-Grizzly Stadium.
The encores included an acoustic duet with guest Lukas Nelson, who happened to be passing through on his way to Wyoming. Vedder also invited back their opener Glen Hansard, an Irish busker with an appropriately big voice. He stepped in on “Smile,” a Neil Young-style song from their 1993 sleeper classic, “No Code.
” They closed with a proper Young song, “Rockin’ in the Free World,” after donning Tester T-shirts. Toward the end, Ament gave a heartfelt thank-you to family, friends, bandmates who’d helped make his life what it is, "all the people along the way that I think if I hadn’t met every single one of them, I think there’s no [expletive] chance I would be here right now." He’s known Tester since he was a kid, and promoted him as a homegrown politician in a state that’s elected a number of transplants to higher office.
As the giant screens panned in on him, you could see type on his shirt that read, “ Who Killed Society ," a punk band formed by Randy Pepprock, a peer of Ament’s, back in the early 1980s. Pepprock recorded an EP, now available again, with Hellgate High School graduate Steve Albini , who went on to engineer albums by Nirvana, the Pixies and more. It was subtle, maybe someone read the shirt and looked it up.
Regardless, it was another reminder of Montana’s niche in rock history. Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder performs at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024.
An aerial view of a packed Washington-Grizzly Stadium as Pearl Jam performs in Missoula on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024. Zac, Owen and Amy Weinberg listen to Pearl Jam perform at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula on Thursday, Aug.
22, 2024. Pearl Jam takes the stage at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024.
Fans listen to Pearl Jam perform at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024. Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder performs at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula on Thursday, Aug.
22, 2024. Pearl Jam lead guitarist Mike McCready performs at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024.
Pearl Jam lead man Eddie Vedder performs at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024. Pearl Jam lead man Eddie Vedder performs at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula on Thursday, Aug.
22, 2024. Pearl Jam lead man Eddie Vedder performs at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024.
Pearl Jam lead man Eddie Vedder performs at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024. Pearl Jam lead man Eddie Vedder performs at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula on Thursday, Aug.
22, 2024. Pearl Jam lead man Eddie Vedder performs at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024.
Pearl Jam lead man Eddie Vedder performs at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024. Pearl Jam lead man Eddie Vedder performs at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula on Thursday, Aug.
22, 2024. Pearl Jam lead man Eddie Vedder performs at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024.
Pearl Jam lead man Eddie Vedder performs at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024. Glen Hansard opens for Pearl Jam at Washington-Grizzly Stadium in Missoula on Thursday, Aug.
22, 2024. An aerial view of a packed Washington-Grizzly Stadium as Pearl Jam performs in Missoula on Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024.
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