20 Against 1 - My Tour Compilation

PearlJamaholic

Since I, like many of us, have seen a few PJ shows over the years, and each night is always unique, the other year I decided to make a compilation of all the shows I have seen and make one bootleg expanding that period. A Live on 2 Legs of the shows I have been to. I have seen 20 shows (when I started this project), and this project was far more time consuming than I thought it would be. I started off by making a compilation of each tour I saw, once that was done I took each of those tracks, and worked on finding what were the best moments or most memorable to me. What made this so time consuming was going through endless versions of Even Flow to decide which was the best for each tour, then find which tour had the best Even Flow, this happened with so many songs. I would listen to 2-4 versions of a song over and over to really listen to Mike's playing or whatever the song called for, then set that song aside then go through another batch of 2-4 versions just to weed out the best of the best. Sometimes I would put this job down for awhile because it lost its fun and became more of a chore to listen to Alive for the millionth time, and I was being more critical of the listening experience than I was enjoying it. I used a lot of averages as a guideline, how many songs from an album is played per show, songs per setlist, where in a set a song appears most often. I now have a messy Excel book with all my data from the shows I have seen. But after like 3 years It is complete. And this is what I came up with.

Release	College 03 (this was the opener to still my favorite show I have seen, this song will always be the best opener to any show)
Long Road	Philly I 13
Corduroy	Boston II 06
Mind Your Manners	Philly II 13 (I personally don't think much of this song, but I had to include 1 song from the album based on the averages I was working with, so this was it)
Spin The Black Circle	Philly 05
Small Town	Philly 03
Grievance	College 03
Given To Fly	Philly 05
Even Flow	Philly IV 09
Hold On	Philly III 09
Present Tense	St Johns 05
Light Years	Camden I 08
Off He Goes	Philly III 09
Do The Evolution	Philly 03
The Fixer	Philly I 09
Out Of My Mind	Philly IV 09 (Never thought I would hear this one live, always been one of my favorites since I first heard it on the Not For You single back in the 98 or 99)
Inside Job	Boston I 06
RVM	Philly III 09
Encore 1	College 03
All Those Yesterdays	Philly I 09
All or None	Philly II 16
Oceans	Philly I 16 (Took 19 shows, and 13 years but I finally heard my second favorite track from Ten)
Hard To Imagine	Philly 05
Bugs	Philly IV 09 (The Spectrum shows... anything was possible those nights, so I had to include this one)
Black	Boston II 06
Alive	Philly 05
Encore 2	College 03
Crazy Mary	Philly 03 (The opener to my 1st PJ show, not the biggest Crazy Mary fan, but this one is special anyways.)
Porch	College 03
State Of Love and Trust	Camden I 06
Indifference	Boston II 06
Leash	Boston II 06 (The return of Leash, I was so lucky to be part of this show)
Rockin In The Free World	Philly IV 09
Yellow Ledbetter	College 03 (State College had a feeling I have never experienced at another PJ show, and YL this night really brought everything together)

There are so many songs that didnt make the list, Push Me, Pull Me was a hard one not to include, Alone is another. In My Tree is one of my all time favorites, but I have yet to see a version that really captures the song live for me. Some shows didn't make the list at all. Hershey 03, though Immortality that night was very cool, Reading 04 had the debut of Sad, Camden II 06, Camden II 08 had a rare appearance of WMA, and nothing from night 2 of the Spectrum shows, which had Push Me, Pull Me and No Way, and that night I finally heard everything from Yield.

Well now this is done I can start on my 2018 shows. Maybe I can get this finished and updated before the 2020 shows. I can have something to listen to on my trip to Germany, a nice little retrospect of all the shows I have already seen.

And if anyone has done anything similar I would be interested in hearing about your experience, I found this far more daunting than I thought I would when I started.