Pearl Jam Plan Birthday Blowout With Strokes, Queens of Stone Age

Barry Brecheisen/WireImage

After months of anticipation, Pearl Jam have announced the details of their 20th anniversary concert celebration. The band will host and headline a Labor Day weekend festival at Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, Wisconsin with special guests the Strokes, Queens of the Stone Age, Mudhoney, Joseph Arthur, Liam Finn, Glen Hansard and John Doe of  X. Tickets for the event will go on sale May 23rd for fan club members and June 4th for the general public. Pearl Jam have pledged to donate $2 from each ticket to their Vitalogy Foundation, which grants funds to nonprofit organizations selected by members of the band.

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After the anniversary festival, the band will hit the road for a Canadian tour that will include arena gigs in most of the nation's major cities. That tour will kick off with a show at the Bell Centre in Montreal on September 7th and wrap up in Vancouver at the Pacific Coliseum on September 25th.

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As previously announced, Pearl Jam's anniversary celebration will also include Cameron Crowe's retrospective documentary Pearl Jam Twenty, which is set to arrive along with a corresponding book published by Simon & Schuster and a soundtrack album featuring music selected by Crowe from the film. Pearl Jam Twenty, the movie, will be broadcast on PBS stations on October 21st as part of the network's American Masters series.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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