T-Minus 4

This time Friday, I'll be seeing Pearl Jam at the Fort William Gardens. This time tomorrow, Touring Steve 2005 will be officially up and running as I document my week-and-a-half long adventure following Pearl Jam across Ontario, with a show in Quebec thrown in for good measure. In the meantime, I'll be devoting as much ink (well, "ink") as possible to a band which I've obsessed over since I was seventeen years old, when my parents unsuspectingly allowed me to see Pearl Jam in Minneapolis, MN. The rest, as they say, is history: Friday will be my thirteenth Pearl Jam concert and the first of seven shows I'll be seeing on the band's current sixteen-date Canadian tour.

This blog, then, will be a virtual tour diary to a week-and-a-half of rock 'n' roll fun. I'll be filling it with stories, reviews, setlists, pictures...anything I can think of, really, that will simultaneously convey to you two things: one, just how big of a nerd I am (especially where Pearl Jam is concerned); and two, just how much fun I'm having following my favourite band around my home province. Sure, it doesn't have the cachet of, say, a six-month trip to Australia--but to me, this is without question my once-in-a-lifetime road trip adventure. Hopefully this blog gets that point across.

It all kicks off Friday night in, of all places, Thunder Bay, the city where I was born and raised and lived until I was twenty-one, and where I would never, ever have imagined Pearl Jam playing in a million years. Four nights from now, I'll be on the floor of the Fort William Gardens--a building in which I quite literally grew up, by the way--being proven wrong. If you're as excited to read about it as I am to write about it, then this blog is already off to a pretty good start.