Anti-Bush antics featured at Pearl Jam's Vancouver concert


Pearl Jam's lead singer Eddie Vedder looks out to the audience during a concert in this file photo.

Saturday, May 31, 2003
VANCOUVER (CP) -

Evolving into a travelling political protest, Pearl Jam's tour made its first Canadian hit with crowds cheering a powerful rant against President George W. Bush and the spearing of Microsoft boss Bill Gates' head on a microphone stand.

In an encore, singer Eddie Vedder unleashed the spoken-word diatribe called Bushleaguer that attacks the U.S. president, saying: "He's not a leader, he's a Texas leaguer."

The song has incensed fans south of the border. At a Denver show in April, Vedder turned his Lord of the Flies antics on Bush, impaling a rubber likeness of his head, and angry fans walked out.

No Bush puppets were thrown about the sold-out show at Vancouver's GM Place but the the controversial song drew snickering cheers from the throngs of his stereotypically cynical Generation-X fans.

Voodoo theatrics were saved for the man Vedder has upheld as a symbol of greedy capitalism since the grunge band's rise to fame in the early '90s. The times were marked by a technology boom and then a recession that left many of his generation unemployed.

Gates, the Microsoft mogul, built his corporate empire in Vedder's home town Seattle, just south of Vancouver.

At the end of the band's 2½-half hour set, Vedder came on stage with a cigarette and the bottle of wine he'd been swigging on all night and said he was waiting for a special guest.

"We asked Bill Gates to come up here for the show. He said no, he was busy, he was going shopping."

"And I thought, what could he possibly need? Apparently, it turns out, he's going to buy Canada."

The crowd booed when a huge security guard walked into the spotlight wearing a Gates mask. Vedder took it from him, pulled it down on a microphone stand and began serenading it with Soon Forget, a ukulele nursery rhyme about greed and loneliness.

The intense and serious Vedder did manage to lighten up and crack a smile a couple times during the show that drew heavily from the band's new album, Riot Act, packed with guitar fury and angst and eccentric ballads.

"We ran into these guys from, where was it, Medicine Hat," he laughed.

"Their car broke down on the way here so this is for them," he said before launching into Elderly Woman.

The crowd drowned him out singing along and Vedder stopped, letting them carry the chorus.

"Keep going," he said.

"My God, its been so long/ Never dreamed you'd return/ But now here you are/ And here I am," they sang.

Vedder brought the stadium together, holding up a mirror that reflected an overhead spotlight and beaming it across every section of the stands.

Canadian Pearl Jam fans have been waiting for this kind of attention from the band for years. After a hiatus from touring they performed a free concert at Vancouver's Commodore Ballroom in May, 2000. That show was the start of Pearl Jam's Binaural tour, which is remembered for the mosh-pit tragedy that claimed the lives of nine fans in Denmark.

Years later, there were still huge signs mounted at GM Place warning people on the way in that moshing would not be tolerated.

The band has sold-out shows planned for July 28 in Toronto and July 29 in Montreal.
© Copyright 2003 The Canadian Press