Results tagged “pearljam”

Pearl Jam returns to Toronto tonight for the first time since 2006, and to say it's a hot ticket would be severely understating things: the show was sold out as soon as it went on sale, and this morning StubHub is fetching as much as $280 for lawn tickets. Toronto loves its Pearl Jam—and the feeling, one suspects, is mutual. The band used the city as base camp for a third of its 2005 trek across Canada and launched its 2006 world tour with back-to-back nights at Air Canada Centre. Eddie Vedder, meanwhile, played a pair of white-hot solo shows at Massey Hall last summer. It's no surprise, then, that Pearl Jam picked Toronto as one of its few 2009 destinations.

It's been a quiet year for Pearl Jam. Apart from a brief excursion into the United States (which featured a stunning, career-defining performance at Bonnaroo), the band's been spending most of 2008 recording the follow-up to its 2006 release, variously known as Pearl Jam, self-titled, or Avocado (on account of its unusual cover art). The waiting (to quote one of the band's better-known songs) is driving Pearl Jam's legions of fans mad; bless Eddie Vedder, then, for using the hiatus as an excuse for his first real solo tour, which touched down at Massey Hall on Tuesday and Wednesday. We've seen Pearl Jam an embarrassing number of times, yet Wednesday night's concert revealed dimensions of our favourite singer that tend to get ignored. Namely, Vedder is a talented guitar player, an underrated songwriter and—this last point will be especially shocking if your image of Vedder was hewed in the early 90s—hysterically funny.

After the Toronto Blue Jays acquired a gimpy Scott Rolen in exchange for a gimpy Troy Glaus, the general consensus was that the two players cancelled each other out. One point, however, hasn't been discussed—possibly because it's utterly irrelevant to the game of baseball. Still, we feel it's worth mentioning that we'll no longer have to wince as Troy Glaus limps up to bat with "Crazy Train" blasting through the speakers. Instead, we'll apparently get to revel in watching Rolen strut to the plate to the melodious sounds of…wait for it…"Rollin'." Yes, the Limp Bizkit song.

Texas is thawing, the Northeast is freezing, and a sort of natural order seems almost restored to the Ist-A-Verse. Almost.

Let's just whip around the world to see what the other -ists are up to...