MissAdventures in Pittsburgh: 59 Concerts and Counting: Why I Won’t Stop Taking My Mom to See Pearl Jam

Ready to see Pearl Jam with my mom in Montreal.

We are alive in a sea of voices and light.

Just four years after the pandemic replaced live music with isolation, my mom and I joined 14,000 euphoric fans for a concert. Not just any concert. A Pearl Jam show — my 59th, with my mom’s tally not far behind.

Spotlights drench us in red and purple and green. The music swells, curling and crashing inside our chests. Eddie Vedder’s baritone floods the arena as he sings the words to Daughter:

“She will … rise above!”

My mom and I sing, grab each other’s hands, and hoist them up, as all around us, people reach for the sky.

Our hearts are bursting.

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Ready to see Pearl Jam with my mom in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Pearl Jam? From the 1990s? Yes. That’s when this started. I was 12 and in love. With the lyrics, so painfully poetic. The blistering guitar parts. The booming drums. Eddie Vedder’s voice and storytelling hit a raw nerve in me. The characters in his songs battled abuse, mental health, homelessness, grief, gun violence, and heartbreak. It made me want to experience the world — and make it better.

But I was just a kid. So I let Pearl Jam lead me to charitable causes, books, and new friends. Still, I couldn’t get close enough — to the music, the band, or my enormous longing.

And then, the band announced a benefit concert in Washington, DC. That’s when Pearl Jam, ever the do-gooders, were battling TicketMaster’s monopoly and circumvented the system by selling concert tickets via raffle, then donating the proceeds. There was a postcard drawing to see the band, live and in the flesh — 5 hours and 230 miles from my home.

My mom looked amused as I handwrote stacks of entries, cashing in my baby-sitting money for postcards and stamps and rewriting my contact info until my hand ached.

The turnaround was quick. Entries were due. The band’s team would call and notify the winners to get to DC that very weekend.

The day the winners were to be contacted, I guarded my parents’ phone, forbidding them to pick it up lest Pearl Jam call and get a busy signal. I was stunned when bedtime came, but my call hadn’t.

Then suddenly, me in my pajamas, the phone rang. I ran to my mom’s side as she picked it up. Her eyes were wide. She looked at me. We got the call. We were going to see Pearl Jam — in two days.

It was 1995 and I was 14 years old. I couldn’t drive, let alone book a trip. Expedia wasn’t a thing. But my heart was set. I packed my flannel while my mom … went to AAA? I’m not sure. I just got in the car and she drove us to DC to see Pearl Jam’s explosive, heart-wrenching performance.

I was hooked. And after that, so was she.

Mom ready to see Pearl Jam in Philadephia.

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Today, I like to say that since my mom took me to my first Pearl Jam concert, I’ll take her to any show she wants.

But my mom doesn’t need me to take her anywhere. Not even when we followed Eddie Vedder (for one of his solo shows, of which we’ve seen 11, on top of that Pearl Jam total) to Chicago, and she was on crutches. My tough-as-nails mom hobbled around the city on one good leg, hitting every single one of our favorite spots. We foodies ate cupcakes on the swings at Molly’s Cupcakes, dined on coconut rice and watermelon sashimi (called “fruishi”) at Orange, and feasted at our favorite French restaurant, Mon Ami Gabi. After the concert, we waited, breathless, outside Eddie’s bus, waving as he slipped into the night.

Mom, with crutches, outside Eddie Vedder's tour bus in Chicago.

But we would see him again soon — like in Montreal, where I discovered my mom’s knack for figuring out cryptic public rail and transportation systems. Mom consulted the signs and had us zipping around on the Metro, despite not knowing a word of French.

Mom and I caught the better part of the 2011 Canadian Pearl Jam tour, driving a rental car from city to city. Along the way, we used detective skills to track down an old friend with no online presence. I knew him best as the man who drove my mom to the hospital when she went into labor with me 30 years earlier. Against all odds, we found him and met up with him in Edmonton — still psyched and sweaty from that night’s Pearl Jam’s show.

Music — and this enormous, shared love – became the impetus for us to go on adventures together. Each new Pearl Jam tour brings the surprise of where we’re going next. To a benefit rally in Little Rock, Arkansas. The desert. The ocean. We trust that no matter what, we’ll have the time of our lives, because we’ll get to see Pearl Jam, and we’ll get to be together.

Wherever Pearl Jam goes, we find new foods and new favorite things. Not every trip goes without a hitch. In 2013, lightning delayed a show at Wrigley Field for hours. The band made it up to us by performing into the middle of the night. My mom and I stood bleary-eyed in the stands, then bussed, exhausted, back to the hotel just in time to collect our bags for our early flight home.

Exhausted after the 2013 rain delay at Wrigley Field.

After so many years, some of the shows blend together. I don’t remember the setlists. But I remember being with my mom. Chatting and laughing for hours in lines outside the arenas, nearly bored but mostly excited for our chance to be up front. I remember Mother’s Day 2010 in Cleveland, when my mom and I danced extra hard to make up for the lackluster crowd around us. Eddie Vedder spotted us, crouched low to point us out, and grinned his approval. Mom and I beamed.

When the last few years took concerts away, I thought we might never get our Pearl Jam tours back. It seemed impossible that we’d ever packed ourselves in with so many strangers. But since then, my mom and I have hopped on the 2023 and 2024 tours, returning to some of our favorite spots.

Those concerts, like all the ones before, came with morning coffee runs, afternoons spent exploring, nights spent singing, and tired, happy trips home, where Mom and I filled a journal with every trip highlight we could recall. I still have every one of these journals, detailing all our meals, jokes, and memories.

And many blank pages yet to fill.