*re-hashed Bammer post about this being the album that either sealed your fate as a PJ fan for life, or pushed you to move on ... and playing Pilate for my HS basketball team and everyone else hated it and I was strangely proud to be the last PJ fan standing*

Never got around to picking this one up

Yield was the first album I'd gotten a leaked copy of.

Right around mid-December '97 I was wrapping up my first full year in the military. I'd heard from a friend back home in Hartford that a new PJ song was getting airplay on a radio station - can't remember which one. I'd planned on going home for the holiday, so when I made it to Hartford I called the radio station and asked the DJ to play it. He said they were asked to stop playing it until the single was released. I was bummed I'd have to wait.

Fast forward to mid-January '98. I'd been collecting bootlegs from tape traders, some of whom I'd found via their AOL or geocities pages, displaying the shows they had for trade or B+P. Being a new collector, I had zero shows but found a guy who was a huge Orioles fan, his AOL page reflecting just that, and I did several B+P with him. It was also through him that I'd gotten an advanced copy of Yield on tape. I got it about two weeks before the release and listened to it all night in my dorm room, and pretty much every day until the album came out.

I bought the cd at midnight at a CD Warehouse - I think - and played it endlessly that year.

It's hands down their best album.

Yeah, I have been having a bit of a Yield moment right now. Last time I listed my favorites I had it at #4 but I feel like I should listen once again...it maybe should be higher on my list.

I don’t remember buying or first hearing Yield. I remember it dropped the day before my birthday, and that it was love at first sight.

It was on the radio all the time as I was driving the 50 miles between dorm and job, which was great because I didn’t have a car with a working player of any kind in it and there were not a lot of good radio station choices in South Dakota in those days.

My best friend from high school and I road tripped to see our first Pearl Jam concert in Rapid City on that tour, in a venue that felt like we were in a high school gym or something.



We were staying on a military base. There was a thunder and lightning storm crackling over the Black Hills as the venue opened. And those bored-ass South Dakota kids got drunk as hell and just went for broke. They had the ugliest, scariest pit I’ve ever seen in my life. They all showed up for the opener (I mean, holy shit there’s a fucking rock concert coming HERE?!), and they were wild from jump.

Then the band came out and just owned them. It was like watching my grandpa break a horse. They ambled up, greeted us with a terse “ok fuckers,” and proceeded to spit fiery versions of Evolution, Animal, Last Exit, and Brain of J without another word. By the time that opening run ended, the kids were alright. They’d had their catharsis, they’d sweat it out and gotten some bruises, and they understood who was in charge here. Everyone settled in with the band for a run of great, close-quarter performances (Betterman from that show is on lo2l).

I then swung back home to pick up my brother and drive him up to Minneapolis for HIS first Pearl Jam concert, which was pretty good even if the handicap overflow section we were in was about as far back on the right hand side as you could get.

It was such a great time to be a fan of the band that I think the constant excitement of it affected my view of the album for years. An immediate, artistically confident record coming just a year and a half after the last one. A big tour. A documentary that was fun to watch. The wildest music video. A live album. It was just a constant run of great new things happening, which is a rare experience with this band.

These days Yield is probably my fifth favorite Pearl Jam record. But it’s also something of a centerpiece. I can hear the band who made No Code in it. I can also hear the band that made Backspacer. I can hear Glorified G echoed and Dance of the Clairvoyants foreshadowed. It’s mostly a nostalgic work for me now...maybe moreso than any other Pearl Jam record....but it’s still syrupy good.

That last paragraph is great, mcp

I remember being in my second year of university and a bunch of us piling into a friend's car on release day to head to the mall to pick up copies of Yield.

One of us cued up the tape on our way back to class and everybody listened silently throughout Brain of J, only to break into a chorus of applause when the song concluded.

Still my favourite PJ album.

Great memories.

All these years later, and I'm still proud of how I managed to pick-up Yield on the day it was released.

I was in high school, and my grades were slipping pretty bad, and my parents basically said until the grades came up I wasn't doing much of anything and I was to be home straight after school...home for me was taking the bus to my grandparents house, because it was easier for my parents to pick my siblings and I up after work...and we'd be supervised...I don't think my parents trusted me much, haha!

Anyway, as luck would have it, my girlfriend lived two blocks away from my grandparents....and there was a music store a another couple blocks away, that we'd hang out at from time to time.
So I gave my girlfriend the cash, she bought a copy and left it in my grandparent's mail box... She called me (to ask about homework, of course...) and that's how I knew the coast was clear... I offered to get the mail for my grandma, slipped the CD in my backpack and enjoyed it...with headphones.. later that evening.

I somehow didn't even know Yield existed until Riot Act was released, at which point I guess I saw a discography or something.

Bring back Dave A

Was that the only gap you had? Or were you still just discovering at that point?

I feel like the Vitalogy-No Code-Binaural-Riot Act run would read differently, minus that brief surfacing for air.

I’m stuck on how they’d give away a live show that hadn’t happened yet.

Yield released on 3 February 1998.
Melbourne show for Give Way was 5 March 1998.

Did an Australian time traveler come back and give it to Best Buy?

I remember calling Camelot Music at Parkdale Mall a week ahead of release and paying in advance for my CD over the phone so I wouldn't miss out. When the release date came, I begged my dad to drive me to the mall to pick it up. The PJ section was fully stocked, no one was there buying copies, yet I still had my copy set aside. It was great.

This time of year always reminds me of Yield. Always seems to be the first really good weather week of the year when February comes around.

Another demonstration of the fallibility of memory.

dad’s right: Give Way accompanied the Single Video Theory VHS, which came out later in 1998.

My brother had VS, Vitalogy and No Code, so my personal timeline went a bit like:

VS
No Code
Vitalogy

Ten

Binaural (the first PJ album I listened to on day one - though because I was in South Africa, it was actually about a month after its release elsewhere)
Riot Act
Yield (technically I could've listened to this at launch but somehow missed it).

Etc

So I think my experience of the pre-Binaural albums was that of listening to the canon, in that I had access to 3 of them immediately, so I wasn't discovering/listening to them one by one and different points of my life.

I was more a Vs guy, and i read and heard that No Code was the worst of them, so i didnt have it. It was virtually impossible to know anything about the band if you didnt have the albums, there was no videos, no fucking live shows....you got Jeremy, Alive and Even Flow and the Unpplugged on Mtv thats its so it was hard. When Yield came out, there was a buzz about being a great one, but i was more into Smashing Pumpkins Adore at the time. A friend of mine got it and said it was alright, but a little quieter, it was kinda weird for us at the time.

But the Do The Evolution video change everything....all of a sudden i could talk bout Pj with my school mates. Mtv had a new PJ video in high rotation...thats when i went for No Code ( the cheapest PJ cd in my record store ) and afterwards ask my grandma to get me Yield.

Love these stories.

The fkn ‘90s man. The best.

yeah, i love all of this.

Also, as a kid in 1997 i was super into The Rolling Stones and buying Bridges To Babylon the day it came out, super nervous about it, with a friend of mine at home telling me about the video premiere of Anybody Seen My Baby? and just one year after i had jumped into so much new music, Smashing Pumpkins, Manson´s Mechanical Animals, Yield, Beastie Boys´s Hello Nasty...even Hole´s Celebrity Skin.