With wine bottle in hand, Eddie Vedder wasted little time in professing his love for Telluride, a southwest Colorado gem of a town that must have felt like a jilted lover since Pearl Jam began enjoying worldwide acclaim.
There were no hard feelings Saturday (July 9), though, at The Ride Festival between the town and the band formed in 1990 in Seattle that also includes Mike McCready (guitars), Stone Gossard (rhythm guitar), Jeff Ament (bass), Matt Cameron (drums) and Boom Gaspar (B-3, keyboards.)
Their headlining show, after a full day of music in Town Park that began with Matthew Curry at 11 a.m., was their first in the beautiful mountain town nestled in the San Juan Mountains at an elevation of 8,750 feet.
"Cheers everybody here for the concert," Vedder said after strolling onto the stage with a smile and look of wonderment, taking a sip from the bottle before grabbing an acoustic guitar and opening with low-key, sit-down performances of "Nothingman" and "Pendulum."
"I think we've got time tonight, so we can kind of ease into our songs here," Vedder told a Telluride crowd that roared with approval after waiting what might seem like forever to see these legends live.
It only took eight minutes into the set for Telluride to feel loved and appreciated. Here's just a little taste of what steady Eddie brought to the stage in the early going.
"I hope you've have a beautiful day out here, and how could you not. There's an author named Kurt Vonnegut and he used to, when he found himself in places like this with others, he'd look around and say, 'It doesn't get better than this.' And this is one of those times.
Holding up a sticker with a KOTO Radio sticker,
Eddie Vedder explains how he came to know Telluride.
"So I was gonna share a story with you because the first time this group ever played in this state, it was a place nowhere near as beautiful as this. But I was given a sticker of a radio station and I put it in my ... it looked like this (holding up a notebook with a KOTO Radio station sticker). Remember that old case I used to carry around, I've had a few but it was the first one, it was like a briefcase and it had lyric books and tape machines and rolling papers and things.
"And I put the sticker inside the opening and back then we would find ourselves playing lots of urban atmospheres. And it might be Cleveland, it might be Nuremberg, but it was ... there was a lot of cities ... and this was back in the PDH days, this is Pre-Decent-Hotels. So I found myself either in the van or Jeff (Ament) and I shared a room and we'd be in these little rooms playing romantic music for each other, lighting some incense. (The crowd chants "Jeff, Jeff, Jeff.") Anything to -- (to Ament) see, they love you, too. And you had to light the incense because these kind of hotels, they didn't really clean after the guests.
"But I'd open this case and this sticker, it was actually like, it became like a window. It was like looking out the window at these mountains. And it had a word called Telluride, which I didn't even know what that meant. So now today, 20-plus years later, and it's not just a sticker, it's real life. So we're very happy. It's a destination. It's an accomplishment. So here's to the thin air."
With that, they eased into "Thin Air" while the evening was still young and let the crowd experience a beautiful sunset and over two more hours of music that will be encapsulated later this week in a wrap-up with more photos of Pearl Jam and other bands from The Ride Festival.
Here are other performers who graced the main stage Saturday on Day 1 of the fifth Ride Festival, in chronological order:
After Gordy Quist brought attention to recent events and "divisiveness" plaguing America, the Band of Heathens began "Carry Your Love" with the opening chords to "The Star-Spangled Banner."
Banging on the drum all through Little Hurricane's early afternoon set, Celeste "C.C." Spina got a well-deserved shout-out later
in the night from Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder.
Lead guitarist of Tom Petty's Heartbreakers, Mike Campbell brought old-school riffs to the festival as "Gator," his designated nickname
in an explosive side project called the Dirty Knobs.
Highly Suspect lead singer and guitarist Johnny Stevens brought a load of tattoos and charisma to the stage with some R-rated material that
may have offended parents of kiddies not wearing earplugs.
Festival photos by Michael Bialas.