Porch (Drop In The Park 1992-09-20) vs. Help Help (Clarkston 2003-06-25)

I'll come back to help help later, but I was listening to this porch setting up the round, and it's a monster. This is the sort of version that wouldn't work today for any number of reasons, the least of which is that wildly succesful 50 year old family men should have figured shit out by now. But this captures the swing for the fences recklessness and fellow travelers on a journey whose outcome is unknown but anything is possible feel that made pearl jam impossibly captivating to my teenage/early 20s self. I could say that this version is at least 4 minutes too long (it probably is) or is not as good as the unplugged or some of the tighter versions (it isn't), but damn does this take me back in a big way.

I also like how you can see/hear how the band is still figuring itself out. It's a tremendous jam, but it lacks the fluid transitions that come from people who've spent a lifetime playing together

Porch. So much Porch.

yeah Porch everyday.

for both these reasons, Help Help gets my vote, surprisingly.

Not my favorite version of Porch here but still a young and exciting Porch. Made for an easy vote.

This guy gets it.

Help Help is a song that is almost improved live for me, and this is a very good version. Having said that, a pretty good version of Porch will usually beat a great version of Help Help, and while not my favorite, that's still a very good porch

Live versions of "Porch" from 1992 sound like exactly what they were -- situationally functional but musically purposeless jams designed to keep folks' toes tapping and fists pumping while they watched Eddie perform whatever death-defying circus act he felt move to perform on any given night. These passages got better as they got shorter, and as the band's performances became more introverted -- from memory, they started getting really good in 1995 (I like the Salt Lake City version), but peaked in 2000 (my vote goes to Lubbock but they're all good, especially on leg 2), when the band's improvisational instincts were at their sharpest and most conversational. In the end, Pearl Jam are not a band with enough on-the-fly musical imagination to support a thirteen-minute jam on any song -- they can sustain short detours, but run out of ideas after a couple minutes.

"Help Help" is a great example of them being able to reasonably pull off a weird song live. It's a side of the band I much prefer. Easy vote here.

Help Help

Porch just isn’t that good of a song.

Once again, Kevin Davis gets it.