Pearl Jam just wrapped up their spring tour with two great nights at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto, ON, and the group had a very special guest in the audience: Geddy Lee. The Canadian vocalist and bassist of Rush got the royal treatment during the show, as Eddie Vedder took a moment to pay tribute.
Right after playing “Cropduster” during the main set, and Vedder picked out the song lyric “Let the fluency set it down,” which apparently comes from an Italian misunderstanding of an American colloquialism. Then he started talking about worldwide cities and their monuments, which he compared to erections, and somehow went from monuments to the monumental musical contributions of Rush.
From there, members of the band teased a handful of Rush covers in the downtime between songs, including “Fly By Night” and “Cygnus X-1.” Vedder then proceeded to say, “we have been a band for twenty five years, but if we wanted to play a Rush song we would probably have to play for another twenty five.”
Vedder continued, “they have XYZ (sic) we are more like LMNOP. Getting back to monuments and erections we have the Space Needle and you have the CN tower. This next song was written underneath the Space Needle.” The band then launched into “Evenflow” and continued rocking through the set!
Watch it all go down here:
Next up for Pearl Jam is a headlining set at Bonnaroo. Check out the setlist below: