Various Artists - Dead Man Walking - The Concert (Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles, CA, 3-29-1998)

Here's something I stumbled across the other day. I've owned the "Dead Man Walking" movie soundtrack since it first came out in 1996. I think it's great. It's rare for movie soundtracks in that all the artists wrote songs specifically about the movie after seeing an early cut of it, and that it's a great list of artists, including the likes of Johnny Cash and Bruce Springsteen, doing excellent songs. I didn't know until I came across this that there was a concert that took place two years later. It was meant to bring more attention to the same issue as the movie and the soundtrack, namely, the moral issue of capital punishment.

There's good news and there's bad news. The bad news first is that the concert was over four hours long, and most of that isn't here. I found a bootleg of the full performance, and unfortunately the sound quality is too low to be enjoyable, in my opinion. The good news is, much of the concert came out on DVD (only, no album), so the sound quality is great.

In 2025, three years after I first posted this album, a set Tom Waits did for the concert, which wasn't included on the DVD, somehow was leaked to the public with excellent sound quality. So I've added that in as well. It seems to have been the longest set of the night. I found a blog post by someone who attended the concert in order to figure out where to put the Waits songs relative to the others in the concert. It turns out he did most of his set in the middle of the show, but also did the final song at the end, so that's how I have it. 

Note that this final song, "Innocent When You Dream," included the other stars on stage. However, I've watched the video of this, and they generally just stood around not doing much, maybe adding a little backing vocals, and that's it, so I haven't included them in the artist credits for the song. But Bonnie Raitt showed up for this last song as well. That was a surprise, since she wasn't billed as a performer. In fact, she just sat in the audience and watched most of the concert. But she did play some slide guitar which can be heard on this last song, so I did include her in the credits for it.

However, some music still is missing from this concert. Michelle Shocked played four songs, and none of those are here. Furthermore, Steve Earle played three more songs than what's here, Lyle Lovett played one more, and Ani DiFranco played two more. I'm guessing Shocked wasn't included due to some kind of licensing or rights issue, and the other songs were cut to keep the DVD a reasonable length.

All the musicians here did a good job, but the main reason I'm sharing this is Eddie Vedder's set. Personally, I'm not a really big Pearl Jam fan. However, I thought the two songs he contributed under his own name to the "Dead Man Walking" album were excellent. I like those better than almost anything else he's done in his long career. Both songs were written by Vedder, but performed with the famous Pakistani musician Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. It was a remarkable blend of Western music with Indian music that worked really well.

Luckily, all of Vedder's set is included here, and rightfully so, since it was the highlight (and closing act) of the concert. He started with a Cat Steven song done just solo acoustic. Then he had a little bit of accompaniment on the next song. However, the main event was the last two songs, with were those same two songs he did for the "Dead Man Walking" soundtrack. Unfortunately, in the time between the release of that album and this concert, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan died. However, he was very capably replaced by his nephew Rahat Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and a famous musician in Pakistan in his own right. The two songs are much longer than their album versions, almost ten minutes apiece, and they took the world music collaboration to the next level.

The DVD was about ten minutes longer, but I cut out a bunch of talking. In particular, actor Tim Robbins, who directed the movie, had some long talking sections that I felt didn't have much relistening value. For instance, he had one section where he listed jokey and obviously made up song titles that didn't make the soundtrack album. All that got cut. But any talking between songs by the musicians here was kept.

This album is an hour and 38 minutes long.

UPDATE: On November 17, 2025, I updated the mp3 download file. As mentioned above, I added the Tom Waits songs, increasing the album length by over half an hour.

01 talk (Steve Earle)
02 Ellis Unit One (Steve Earle)
03 Promises (Lyle Lovett)
04 L.A. County (Lyle Lovett)
05 talk (Lyle Lovett)
06 Lungs (Lyle Lovett & Steve Earle)
07 Walk Away (Tom Waits)
08 talk (Tom Waits)
09 Gun Street Girl (Tom Waits)
10 talk (Tom Waits)
11 The Fall of Troy (Tom Waits)
12 talk (Tom Waits)
13 A Little Rain (Tom Waits)
14 Goin' Out West (Tom Waits)
15 Big Black Mariah (Tom Waits)
16 Jesus Gonna Be Here (Tom Waits)
17 Yesterday Is Here (Tom Waits)
18 Crime for Crime (Ani DiFranco)
19 Up Up Up Up Up Up (Ani DiFranco)
20 talk (Ani DiFranco)
21 Fuel (Ani DiFranco)
22 Trouble (Eddie Vedder)
23 talk (Eddie Vedder)
24 Dead Man (Eddie Vedder)
25 The Long Road (Eddie Vedder & Rahat Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan)
26 The Face of Love (Eddie Vedder & Rahat Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan)
27 Innocent When You Dream (Tom Waits with Bonnie Raitt)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Wn5C3B4Z

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/1dHOsxfGFmNoQIm/file

I couldn't find any good images of many of the artists together. Since Eddie Vedder was the big star and musical highlight of the show, I went with a photo of him. This is from when he was the only one on stage, playing "Trouble" by Cat Stevens. Oh, and I used the actual logo from the concert at the top, but I inverted the colors so it would match the black background of the rest of the cover.