Pearl Jam, March 26, 1994 -- a concert I'll never forget (Part 1)
Lou Pickney
March 11, 2002
Early 1994 was an exciting time to be a junior in high school. Some of the bands who will be fondly remembered as the great ones of my generation were reaching their creative peak, and their anthems were played by young people across the nation.
When word came out that Pearl Jam was coming to town... well there was excitement. That was the hot ticket to land.. if you were lucky. They booked a show at the Murphy Center in Murfreesboro, TN, a town east of Nashville. But with tremendous demand, landing tickets was something easier said than done.
Nowadays, camping out for tickets isn't so common, as many ticket outlets have established a lottery system to avoid having masses of people waiting days and days to land primo tickets. But in February 1994, that hadn't come to the forefront. So people wanting those great Pearl Jam tickets had a tough decision on how to get tickets.
I went to Harding Mall to get my tickets. The line at Castner-Knott was crazy, spiraling through the store in a corkscrew that had to make shopping anything but easy for the people who made the decision to do some early Saturday morning buying.
I waited in line for about 2 and a half to 3 hours.... and the payoff was worth it. Two tickets to the hottest concert of my high school career. I was one of the lucky ones, though. Some friends of mine down south of Nashville actually camped out overnight outside a Turtle's Music store in Columbia, TN. They were fifth in line... and they DIDN'T GET TICKETS! Still to this day I don't know how that happened, but I give the Castner-Knott staff credit for gobbling up enough tickets off the bat to ensure that I landed my pair. There are people who missed that show because of ticket sellouts who are still bitter about it to this day. And understandably so, I might add.
When March 26, 1994 rolled around, there was an electric atmosphere in the air...
(to be continued)
Pearl Jam -- Murfreesboro, TN
March 26, 1994
Opening act: King's X
Set list: Rearviewmirror, Whipping, Go, Even Flow, Dissident, Deep, Jeremy, Animal, Glorified G, Daughter/(It's Better not to be Sane improv)/(WMA), Blood, Not for You, Elderly Woman, Alive, Porch/(Monkey Gone to Heaven)
Encore list: Dock of the Bay, Rockin' in the Free World, Indifference
Thanks to fivehorizons.com for set list information that somewhat slipped my mind over the past 8 or so years...
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