So I took off from work Sunday to go to Pearl Jam’s show at the Verizon Center in Washington (and I have to say it was one of the better performances I’ve seen from the band out of five concerts now — just check out the set list) and going in, I wondered how many songs it would take Eddie Vedder to address the audience about something political.

For the record, he made it through a whopping 13 songs before prefacing “Green Disease” with some comments about President Bush’s proposal to lift federal bans on offshore oil drilling in the face of soaring gasoline prices. Eddie came close earlier in the show, urging the crowd before “Do the Evolution” to “pay attention” amid “some good things” and “some bad things” going on with the country, but the offshore drilling remarks were the overt anti-Bush administration comments that I fully expected to hear ahead of the show. I mean, this is a guy who wrote “Bushleaguer” in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks — you think he’s going to take the stage down the street from the White House and stick to singing? That’s never been the socially conscious band’s style.

Vedder railed against what he called the big-business mentality of the Bush administration, alleging that the president seeks to gobble up and reverse the fortunes of protected lands while he still can to open more acreage to drilling (and, by inference, grease the pockets of oil executives that back him). Continuing, Vedder left no doubt about his choice in November’s election, saying it would be nice to have some “color” in the White House.

Vedder’s nameless endorsement of Barack Obama aside, the remarks prompted me to review how the presumed Democratic presidential nominee and his likely rival, John McCain, responded to Bush’s call for increased drilling last week. Obama has pledged to keep in place the government’s 27-year moratorium on offshore drilling, arguing instead that he would invest $150 billion over the next 10 years to create “green” jobs and improve the electricity grid to accommodate plug-in hybrid vehicles, according to the Associated Press.

Obama criticized McCain’s position on the matter, essentially accusing the Arizona senator of flip-flopping. The Republican favored the moratorium during his 2000 campaign, but last week said he now supports lifting it to give states the option to drill, AP reported. On June 16, McCain said the move would “be very helpful in the short term resolving our energy crisis,” the crisis apparently being that gas costs $4 a gallon and the upward trend is expected to continue.

(An aside: Is it really a crisis? I mean, my brother was going to drive up from South Carolina to go to the show with me, but he later balked at shelling out the funds to keep his tank full for the trip. Yes, high gas prices are an inconvenience that we’re all learning to live with, and they might be keeping us closer to home, but an energy crisis in my mind is something that leads to much greater sacrifices — rolling blackouts and such. And as much as I missed seeing the show with my brother, I reminded him Pearl Jam was also playing in Columbia, S.C., during this tour.)

Anyway, Obama and his people point to findings of the Energy Information Administration, which has said opening access to undersea oil fields “in the Pacific, Atlantic and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030.” Nothing “short term” about that. McCain’s entourage counters by calling Obama’s approach a “do-nothing, out-of-touch energy policy.”

With thoughts of an “Even Flow” guitar solo from Mike McCready so jamming long that Eddie has time to smoke a cigarette and ingest some wine before resuming his crooning still fresh in my head, all this political spin makes me want to retreat to music. This number from Sunday night’s D.C. show is a good start:

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