Pearl Jam played a secret show Thursday night at the Waimea Valley Audubon Center on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, as part of the opening of the Quiksilver Big Wave Invitational surfing competition. Lots of pictures here.

Setlist:

Corduroy
Do The Evolution
World Wide Suicide
Severed Hand
Even Flow
Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town
The Amerikan in Me
I Believe In Miracles
Can´t Keep
Soon Forget
Crazy Mary
Indifference
Better Man
Baba O´Riley
Rockin´ in the Free World

via Billboard

Here’s a dumb little story. I used to have a web page dedicated to Pearl Jam. It was actually dedicated to live Pearl Jam mp3s (legal) more than anything. I should also mention, this was 1997. MP3 was not a common household term. The RIAA hadn’t started suing children and dial-up was by far the most common method to connect to the Internet. There was a pretty small community of people who would convert their tape, vinyl and CD bootlegs to MP3, and since I was able to host a lot of MP3s on a fairly fast connection, a few people would send me songs to share. On December 24th, 1997 I got an email with a 3.2MB attachment. The file was titled ‘faithful.mp3′, and the email read something like this:

Hi,

Here’s a holiday treat that you can share if you’d like, I assure you it’s fine with the band. Please don’t try to figure out who this is. Thanks,

Anonymous

I opened up WinAMP and started listening. Sure enough, it was Pearl Jam. Someone had emailed me a studio version of a track that wasn’t scheduled to be released for another month. Now by this point in the time Pearl Jam had played ‘Brain of J,’ ‘Given to Fly,’ ‘Wish List’ and ‘Do the Evolution’ (from Yield) live, but that was all anyone had heard. The track was rather poor quality, clearly had not been mastered/finished, and as I would find out later, not the actual version of Faithful that ended out on Yield.

Before you ask, of course I tried to figure out who sent it. The farthest I got was using the headers of the email to determine that it had originated from a small ISP in Seattle. When I inquired with that ISP who the email address belonged to, they rightfully told me to piss off. To this day I have no idea if it was someone in the studio, a band member, or just some random fan who obtained some of the studio outtakes.

I’ve spent the last 20 minutes using the Wayback Machine to try and find a copy of that web page from 1997, but right now I’m striking out. Somewhere on a CD in my brothers apartment I’m sure I have a copy of the faithful.mp3 that my anonymous friend sent - until I find it, here’s a live version -

Pearl Jam - Faithful (from Philadelphia, PA. 10/03/05)