Pearl Jam

After my friend Dan found out that Pearl Jam was coming to Amsterdam, he asked me if I’d like to join him at the concert. I’d always liked Pearl Jam songs played on the radio and in movies, I loved Eddie Vedder’s Into the Wild soundtrack, I like the band’s political stances and their policy toward Ticketmaster, and (perhaps least importantly), I appreciated Eddie Vedder’s work in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. And, perhaps most importantly, I thought it would be interesting to see how a Dutch crowd behaves during a rock concert.

The concert was at the Ziggo Dome, which had just opened and only hosted one (classical music) concert before Pearl Jam. Ziggo is adjacent to the Arena, the stadium where the Amsterdam Ajax (pronounced like eye-ax, with the emphasis on the first syllable) football (soccer) team plays. The weather gods were kind enough to provide us with 65 degree sunshine and little wind for the twenty five minute bike ride to the Ziggo.

Dan asked if I thought that the crowd would be much different than a U.S. crowd for a similar concert. I said no – the type of people who like a band (or at least go to a band’s concert) should be similar across wealthy, Western countries. Retrospectively, I think I lost that bet. I don’t see Pearl Jam’s fane base as particularly multi-cultural in the U.S. (though I could be wrong about that), but the concert in Amsterdam took racial homogeneity to the extreme. I don’t recall seeing a non-White person in the crowd. Much of the audience – perhaps most of those who were not on the floor near the stage – sat in their seats through the concert rather than stand. And, in one of my favorite moments of the concert, Eddie Vedder implied that Amsterdam is one of the coolest cities in the world because of its lax marijuana laws, and he implied that the band was touring with its children, who were looking forward to smoking weed during the visit. I imagine these types of comments would have drawn laughter and applause at a U.S. show; they drew tepid murmurs from the crowd of Dutch, who, despite global perceptions of Amsterdam as a marijuana mecca, largely seem to think that marijuana is for losers.

Outside of being a little more calm than what I would have expected and not laughing at marijuana jokes (as I would have expected had I known marijuana jokes were coming), the concert felt much like one in the U.S. would have. Eddie Vedder had great interactions with the crowd (including a popular attempt to speak some Dutch, below), he and the band climbed on and jumped off large speakers while playing, often with mid-air scissor kicks, and the quality of the music was high.

And one more choppy video, this of the first song of the first encore.