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How Pearl Jam became the unlikely soundtrack to the Blackhawks’ golden age

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Patrick Sharp, looking so unnatural in the green and white of the Dallas Stars, took a knee on the United Center ice on Feb. 11, 2016, and craned his neck to watch the big scoreboard hanging high above. Not too long ago, there was nothing the Blackhawks loved more — or did better — than rousing tribute videos to returning ex-Blackhawks, and this one was a doozy. It lasted the entire television timeout. The crowd roared with each passing highlight of a big goal, each clip of a funny off-ice bit, each of the three times Sharp raised the Stanley Cup over his head.

As the video — set to Pearl Jam’s “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town,” a melancholy ode to long-lost love — built to its emotional crescendo, tears filled Sharp’s eyes while Eddie Vedder howled, “My God, it’s been so long. Never dreamed you’d return.”

Not long after the game, Sharp received a text. It was from Vedder, who told Sharp he saw the video online and that it was “beautiful.”

“That was pretty awesome,” AJ Dolan said, nearly seven years later.

Was that the culmination of Dolan’s feverish, myopic, borderline comical and — let’s face it — slightly absurd quest to cram as much Pearl Jam as possible into the Blackhawks fan experience as the team’s former senior manager of game operations and entertainment? Or was it the time he played 10 — ten! — Pearl Jam songs in one game, on Dec. 20 of that same year, the day the band was voted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? Or how about the time he got to the rink early and blasted 19 consecutive full-length Pearl Jam songs — a full concert, basically — over the United Center sound system, just because he could?

Yes, “Chelsea Dagger” has been synonymous with the Blackhawks for the last 14 years as the team’s longstanding goal song. But it’s not The Fratellis who were the soundtrack of the greatest era in franchise history. It was Pearl Jam.

For no real reason other than a few guys in the United Center control room wanted it to be.

The trick, you see, to sneaking in five or six songs by the same, let’s say, less-relevant-than-it-used-to-be band in one hockey game is to get pretty obscure. We’re talking deep, deep cuts. Had Dolan and his team been blasting “Alive,” “Even Flow,” “Jeremy,” “Corduroy” and “Last Kiss” every night, even then-Blackhawks president John McDonough — whose only nighty musical insistence was “Juke Box Hero” by Foreigner, speaking of less-relevant bands — might have caught on. But when you’re throwing in “Breakerfall” or “WMA” or “MFC” or “Mankind,” it’s pretty easy to sneak yet another Pearl Jam song by the boss.

“If John McDonough knew I would try to get to four or five Pearl Jam songs a day, he would have said to stop it,” Dolan said with a laugh. “But he wouldn’t know three of them.”

The goal was always simple: One Pearl Jam song per period, minimum. Throw in one during pregame and maybe another one or two during an intermission, and suddenly you’re pushing the bounds of reason.

One time — one time — Dolan said his direct supervisor, vice president of marketing Pete Hassen, told him, “Dude, you’ve gotta calm down on the PJ.” Media relations director Brandon Faber, who initially hired Dolan as an intern just before the start of the 2008-09 season, “egged me on and loved it.” Once in a while, Dolan would get a note from McDonough deeming the music “a little too hard-rock alternative.” Well, yeah. While nearly every other rink around the league was drowning in brain-rattling EDM or generic modern pop and hip-hop, the United Center was bizarrely specific, spinning half a dozen Pearl Jam songs and two or three Tool tracks while sprinkling in a little Rage. Against the Machine.

The United Center opened in 1994, and never left.

“It was a couple years there where we were cranking it out a lot,” Sharp said. “I remember. Some of the players didn’t like it. I know I loved it.”

Kris Versteeg rebelled against all the Pearl Jam by creating a techno-heavy warmups playlist to torment all the alt-rock fans in the building (players typically pick the warmup music, while the game-presentation staff runs the DJ booth during play). Brent Seabrook, everybody’s big brother, sarcastically anointed Dolan “vice president of music” for taking his job so seriously and, as was his wont, needled him relentlessly about it. Jonathan Toews would have preferred the Tragically Hip or Canada’s own alt-rock icons Our Lady Peace, instead, but suffered all the Pearl Jam with his usual stoicism.


Brent Seabrook. (Stacy Revere/Getty Images)

After a fight or post-whistle skirmish, the thumping “Animal” would play. When an opposing player started jawing at a referee, Dolan pulled out perhaps his most obscure tune, “Don’t Gimme No Lip,” from Lost Dogs, a double album of B-sides and rarities. He would find any excuse to throw yet another Pearl Jam song in there.

“Sometimes, you’d notice,” Toews said, barely suppressing an eye roll.

As for Sharp?

“He was all, ‘Keep it cranking, keep it cranking,'” Dolan said.

How did it get to that point? Well, Dolan could say of his Pearl Jam fandom, in the lyrics of Vedder, that “It’s my blood.” Vedder grew up in north Chicago suburban Evanston, and Dolan’s father was married to Vedder’s biological father’s sister for 10 years. Those steeped in Pearl Jam lore know well the tale of Eddie Severson Jr., who divorced Karen Vedder when Eddie was a baby. Eddie grew up believing Karen’s second husband was his biological father, only to learn the truth as a teenager after Severson died from multiple sclerosis (the song “Alive” tells this tale as part of a legendary — and fictionalized — trilogy of songs). So Dolan’s father was in fact Eddie Vedder’s uncle, and he grew particularly close with Severson as he was dying.

During a nearly three-hour thunderstorm delay at a Pearl Jam concert at Wrigley Field in July of 2013, Sharp took Dolan backstage, and Dolan got to tell Vedder about their familial connection.

“It was probably a great moment for AJ,” Sharp said. “I just stayed out of the way and watched it go down.”

Dolan, who left the Blackhawks in 2018 and just started a job touring the world and running event production for LIV Golf, was the driving force behind all the Pearl Jam, but he wasn’t alone. Hired in 2008 as a media relations intern, handing game notes and such to reporters in the press box — “I would have scrubbed toilets at that point,” he said — he quickly found kindred spirits in fellow Pearl Jam fan Sergio Lozano, the senior. director of scoreboard operations, and Ray Kramer, the longtime United Center audio engineer.

“We bonded over Pearl Jam right away,” Dolan said.

These were still the freewheeling early days of Rocky Wirtz/McDonough/Jay Blunk management, and jobs were fluid. (Dolan was in the room when marketing intern Matthew Benjamin pitched “Chelsea Dagger” during the 2008 preseason when Blunk, then the executive vice president, put out a call for a new goal song.)

Within a couple months, Dolan was in the DJ’s chair during games. By 2011, he was calling the whole show, running game ops. McDonough famously ran a very button-down operation. And if you’re going to have to wear a suit and tie every night just to blast some music, you might as well try to have some fun with it and see what you can get away with.

“It was a very, very conservative organization,” Dolan said, laughing. “Music was our outlet of rebellion.”

And they got away with a lot. McDonough and Blunk came from the Cubs and Wrigley Field, where pretty much the only music being played was on an organ. So while Dolan, Lozano and Kramer would occasionally get nudged in one direction or another — “not poppy enough” or “too hard” — Dolan said they were left alone “95 percent of the time.”

It started with a Pearl Jam song every period. But within a couple of years, there were nearly 50 Pearl Jam songs in regular rotation. It became a running gag among fans and on social media, one fully embraced by reporters, in particular. The band caught wind of its surprising connection to Vedder’s hometown team as fans routinely tagged Pearl Jam on Twitter and, largely through Sharp’s celebrity, got to know the team a bit.

The ridiculousness and the how-do-we-keep-getting-away-with-this nature of the playlists only fueled Dolan, Lozano, Kramer and eventually Mike Horn — who was hired as game presentation manager in 2016 — to play more and more. , culminating with the night the band was voted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

The playlist that night included nearly the entire “Vs.” album. A little more mainstream than usual, but hey, it was a special night.

“We looked at each other and we’re like, ‘We’re getting to 10,'” Dolan said. “I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but we’re going to do it.”

Dolan left the Blackhawks to take a job in North Carolina in the fall of 2018. He came back to Chicago for Thanksgiving that year and dropped in for a game, and his old pals in the game-ops booth serenaded him with four Pearl Jam songs. , including his favorite, “Breath” — “the best song ever,” Dolan said. The music certainly hearkened back to the Blackhawks’ glory days better than the 8-3 loss to the Vegas Golden Knights did.

You’ll still hear Pearl Jam at the United Center these days, but usually just once per game, and usually some mainstream hit. Other than a mysterious Pearl Jam-heavy game on Nov. 3 of this season, gone are the days of hearing “Breath” or “Rats” or “You Are” or “Unemployable” playing to a largely befuddled Blackhawks crowd. Still, the band and the team are forever linked now. Sharp is still tight with the band. Vedder was even at the wedding of Blackhawks broadcaster Caley Chelios, a family friend through his friendship with Blackhawks great Chris Chelios. The ties between band and team won’t be cut so easily. But it’ll surely never be like the 2010s again.

Most fans chalk up the Blackhawks’ decline to age, the salary cap, poor roster management, years of go-for-it trades depleting the prospect pool, to inevitability and the inexorable march of time. After all, glory and championships, like so many hearts and thoughts, fade away.

But look a little closer and you see that the Blackhawks’ rise and fall coincided almost exactly with the rise and fall of Pearl Jam music being played at games — one of the greatest and most ridiculous running gags in game-ops history.

“People knew that Pearl Jam was played an absurd amount at Blackhawks games,” Dolan said. “And I took great pride in that.”

(Top photo of Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam: Kevin Mazur / Getty Images)

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