1998/09/11 Madison Square Garden, New York

Pearl Jam

Friday September 11th 1998

Madison Square Garden

New York City, NY

01 Intro

02 Release

03 Hail, Hail

04 Animal

05 Even Flow

06 Given To Fly

07 Corduroy

08 MFC

09 Habit

10 Ed Banter

11 Faithfull

12 Daughter

13 Wishlist

14 Ed Banter

15 Nothingman

16 Immortality

17 Rearviewmirror

18 Brain Of J.

19 Black

20 Do The Evolution

21 Encore Break

22 Breath

23 State Of Love And Trust

24 Off He Goes

25 Leatherman

26 Better Man

27 Mankind

28 Baba O'Riley

29 Encore Break

30 Indifference

31 Alive

Source info: Matrix Mix of: CSC > D100 and Schoeps MK4 > Dat (with fixes) and MarcSounds > DAT

Notes:

As Pearl Jam was not touring Europe in 1998 I made the trip across the Atlantic Ocean to catch the three Pearl Jam shows in the New York area. There was only one small little problem: I had no tickets. But it all worked out well. The first night at Meadowlands Arena I ended up with a ticket that was released the day of the show, and I ended up about 25 rows back dead center on the floor. The first night at MSG I scored an extra Fan Club ticket form a kind fan for face value, and i ended up in the lower seating area about halfway back. And as if two good tickets weren’t enough luck, I scored a front row ticket on the very far right side from the box office in the afternoon of the 2nd show at MSG! 

So much has been said and written about MSG II 1998. You can read Caryn’s review here:

http://www.fivehorizons.com/tour/98/east_leg/msg2.shtml, and read about the Breath campaign here: http://www.fivehorizons.com/tour/98/east_leg/breath.shtml. Also the show is rated the 7th best Pearl Jam show ever by Spin magazine https://www.spin.com/2020/03/pearl-jam-best-shows-ranked/, and it’s listed as one of the best Pearl Jam shows ever on the ticketmaster blog https://blog.ticketmaster.com/best-pearl-jam-shows-ever/ (with a link to a bootleg video!). And there is also an almost 3h long  podcast about this show: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-23-msg-night-2-9-11-98/id1435677788?i=1000429935828.

There is another side to this concert that is not so much talked about, and that’s the collective ill fate tapers had that night. As the fan club did not sell any tickets for this show it was not easy at all to even get tickets. And as a consequence of that, the few experienced tapers that were able to get into this show ended up in less than perfect taping locations. As if that wasn’t enough, the most legendary taper present who normally always walks out with a pristine tape had troubles with his cables, and therefore his recording has quite a few rough spots. So yes, there are a few fan made tapes of this show, but sonically they are not among the best audience tapes ever.

I did tape this show with my first DAT recorder that I bought a few weeks before the show in the summer of 1998. And I only taped one or two shows with it before flying over to New York. I had a small hiccup with security during the first night at Meadowlands Arena and therefore there is some talking on the tape. The first night at MSG went reasonably well, but there are better tapes out there. And all seemed to go very well during the 2nd show at MSG, and I was able to tape Ben Harper and Pearl Jam standing directly in front of a massive speaker (with toilet paper in my ears as it was very LOUD). But listening back to the tape back at the hotel was a huge disappointment. My recording was brickwall-distorted, and especially Ed’s voice was affected badly. It was a very hard lesson learned, and a mistake that never happened to me again. Sadly, it seems that all the luck I had for night two was used on the front row ticket.

But I have never given up on this recording. A couple of years ago I started to play around with it and try different ways to fix it with all the new software that came out in the many years since the show happen. I came up with a version that sounded reasonably good to me, and I sent it out to a couple of friends on cassette tape. Then last Christmas I got a pair of great sounding monitor speakers as a gift from my wonderful wife, and I started to play around with that old MSG II recording again. This second attempt sounds a little bit better IMHO, and it's also the first time that the opening set of Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals is shared from this recording. I find it important to point out that for Pearl Jam two other sources are mixed with the primary head-in-stack recording for completeness and room ambiance. I hope you will enjoy this recording. It is far from perfect, but I think the magic of that night comes across reasonably well. 

by Fans for Fans - Please do not sell

ThinAir Archive Release 01 (Revision 1.0)