I can start by saying that last night ranks among the best nights of my life.  It was truly unbelievable and its giving me chills even now.  I imagine we’ll be riding this high for a few days.

To start off, I’ve been a fan of Pearl Jam for about 15 years.  Yes, do the math and you can see that is from before Jacob’s birth.  Vitalogy came out in 1994 and I was listening to that during the first few years of Jacob’s life.  One of my favorite albums.

About 8 months ago, Jacob asked me for some new music suggestions.  He’d gotten burnt out on AC/DC and was looking for something new.  I suggested he give Vitalogy a listen.  2 months later he knew more about Pearl Jam than I did.  4 months later he could recite me the track list of every album - many of which I had never listened to.  6 months later he could pretty much recite you their entire wikipedia entry.

Cut to last night.  We bought tickets for the first LA show for the new album Backspacer.  We bought them through the fan club, but didn’t even consider that there was a lottery for the first few rows and that was a possibility.  We knew that seniority mattered, so we thought we’d be in good seats but probably not fantastic seats.  Wrong.  We got 2ND ROW CENTER.  We were both kinda stunned and sat in the back watching Ben Harper warm up before going down to take our seats during the break.

Show was just plain incredible.  If it had just been a show from anywhere in the venue it would have been incredible.  But put us in the 2nd row and it was mind-blowing.

And then…

About midway through the 2nd set, I noticed that Eddie had looked right at Jacob a few times.  I glanced at Jacob and Jacob was kinda in shock about it.  Towards the end of the show, they started a somewhat obscure track called State of Love & Trust.  Jacob had been singing every word to every song with gusto and I think Eddie noticed that.  When this song started, I saw Eddie look right at Jacob and he saw he was singing it with just as much force and confidence, and I could literally SEE Eddie get the idea that he should invite this kid up to sing with him.  Not 30 seconds later… he did!

He pointed right at Jacob and said “come on up here”.  Jacob scrambled up with the urging of everyone we were sitting with.  And he was up there.  In front of 6,000 fans.  Belting out this song with Eddie Vedder.  It was so unbelievable.  I scrambled for my iPhone, hoping the battery would hold out long enough.  And I got the whole thing.  Here are pics and the video.

Jacob on stage with Eddie Vedder from Jay Dysart on Vimeo.

So then to cap it all off… during the finale, Eddie started passing out tambourines to a few people. He took one backstage and got a pen and scribbled a message for Jacob on it and brought it right to Jacob. Wow. Could it get more awesome?

This is us at the end:

It took us 30 minutes at least to get back to our car. Everyone wanted to congratulate Jacob and give him hugs and high-fives. We drove home just in shock. Hard to believe it was even real.

Special thanks to the amazing fans who gave Jacob so much love - especially those who shared the pictures with us over email.  This dad is so thankful to have these pictures to remember this forever.

Oh, and I didn’t even mention that earlier in the week Jacob won a special Pearl Jam twitter promotion where they sent out a picture of a local record store and award a limited edition orange vinyl single to the first person who shows up there.  What a week!

Just found this video today. Someone got the whole thing on video and posted it on YouTube.