It Gets Vedder
Or, being an unapolgetic Pearl Jam fan
I still like Pearl Jam even though I’m pretty sure that even the members of Pearl Jam don’t like Pearl Jam anymore. This is a joke I’ve been telling for years, at least since ’98 when Pearl Jam released their fifth album Yield. It’s used as a disarming agent when I tell people that my favorite band still is and has always been Pearl Jam. Because I want them to know that I’m aware of how uncool Pearl Jam is. I want them to understand that by declaring my love for Pearl Jam in such a self-deprecating, not to mention band-deprecating fashion, that I’m not who they think I am. Or at least who I think they think I am. Obviously, I am a neurotic and self-doubting maniac who desperately seeks the approval of others but is unwillingly to admit so in a direct manner. (LOVE ME!!!!!!!) I think all entertainers are, and I’m nothing if not an entertainer. (For real, love me.)
But I am not that terrible guy who likes Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten and Ten alone; I’m not the guy who rocks Creed, Seven Mary Three, Nickleback or any other three-dollar Pearl Jam knockoff band. And therein lies the heart of the whole problem, Pearl Jam’s humongously popular debut Ten and the cavalcade of Bizarroesque, store brand doppelgangers that it spawned that have forever besmirched the name and sound of Eddie Vedder and co. Because unless you’re a diehard when I say the words Pearl Jam, that is what’s conjured.
Usually, after I break the news to my super cool new friend whose approval I covet so dearly that I love Pearl Jam, they respond with one of the following:
A) Eye roll
B) Ask me, “Seriously?”
C) Make a face like a little bit of soft serve poop, poop that is inexplicably freezing cold, just slithered out of their backend and is now nesting comfortably in their underpants.
D) Ask me again, “No, seriously?”
E) Calmly nod their head and smile back serenely. Then just as I begin to relax strike me viciously across the face with a copy of Kid A glued to a brick. After falling to the ground they will take this opportunity to tiger pounce on me and continue turning my face into funnel cake, all the while chanting, “Pearl Jam sucks, Pearl Jam sucks, Eddie Vedder sounds like a goat giving angry blowjobs!”
F)
After assessing the damage my confession has made I tend to follow it up by asking my judicious former new friend if they’ve ever actually heard any Pearl Jam songs that weren’t off Ten. Because Pearl Jam’s Ten, while still their most popular album, was only their first album and is in no way their best work or even an accurate barometer of what kind of band they really are. I ask them if they’ve ever heard anything off of Vitalogy or No Code or any of their live stuff; and the answer tends to be no. Well, then you haven’t really heard Pearl Jam.
I am now 30 years old and I’m tired of being a Pearl Jam apologist. I make it a point to come out to all of my friends pretty early on just to get it out of the way, I told my mom a long time ago, my brother was the first to know and my girlfriend walked in on me singing along to “Better Man” and figured out the rest. I think most people’s grungedar picks up on it when they meet me. I wear more flannel than a lesbian construction worker and my hair and moustache make me look like Chris Cornell’s less attractive stunt double. (Slightly less attractive.) But again, I always declare my love for the Seattle quintet in such a half embarrassed, self-mocking way. Well, F that noise. I’m using this article to declare publicly that Pearl Jam is my favorite band of all time and that I’m proud as can be about it and couldn’t give a nanoshit what anyone thinks about it. (Wow, that was needlessly defensive.)
Just to be clear I get that there are better bands than Pearl Jam. Led Zeppelin is certainly a better band. The Beatles are definitely a more important band if not a better band. Hell, even bands that sprung into existence around the same time or after Pearl Jam can be considered better bands or more important than them, (Nirvana, Radiohead, Queens Of The Stone Age), but that’s not the same as favorite. Your favorite band is just your favorite band and that’s the end of it. It’s like love in that way, when it hits you, it hits you in the face, balls, tip of the left ear, vagina and somehow the soles of your feet. And not only are you going to need medical attention but you may want to call your bank and cancel your credit cards because your wallet has been lifted as well. That’s love. What I’m getting at is when you discover your favorite band it hits you hard and your shit will never be the same.
The first album I bought was Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy, it was 1994 and I got it on cassette.
If you ever buy one Pearl Jam record this should be the one. It is in my estimation their quintessential work. Is it flawed? Fuck yes, but maybe that’s a big part of the beauty of it. It’s a sprawling, weird, disjointed and yet perfectly ebbing explosion of a record. That being said, the first time I gave it a listen that wasn’t quite my conclusion. I remember being 13 years old and putting it on and wondering why none of the songs sounded like “Even Flow” or “Alive” or any of the others I heard on MTV. I was confused, I think I checked the album art to make sure it did in fact say Pearl Jam on it. I don’t think I honestly liked the album the first listen, or maybe even the second and third. I didn’t dislike it either, it just baffled me.
To give some more backstory, Vitalogy is Pearl Jam’s third album and the one when they really started getting a little less obvious and in my opinion a lot more great. It’s the record that shouldn’t work but does, it takes the stark, raw recording style of the Stones’ Exile On Main Street and marries it up with The Who’s The Who Sell Outsense of experimentation, and anything goes eccentricity. With a dash of BeatlesWhite Album mind molesting thrown in for good measure.
Sure, sometimes the vocals are too low in the mix but sometimes rock should sound messy and a little unclear. The album first song “Last Exit” kicks the door in with so much desperation and abandon in the music, as well as Vedder’s voice, you would swear it was the last song he was ever going to sing. “Not for You,” the third track, has for both audience and artist as the years stretch on become so sad and angry it’s nearly unbearable, in a good way. In it Vedder sings one of his best lines, “All that’s sacred comes from youth…” The standout track and the one to show people who are curious is “Corduroy.”
“Corduroy” is, along with “Alive,” the mission-statement, definitive PJ song. It is a complicated ode to betrayal and trust. It’s defiance in the face of damnation and self-destruction. It’s a song about realizing that some things change and there’s nothing you can do about them; but some things don’t have to change if you don’t let them, and those are the things that matter.
The whole album captures for me what Pearl Jam is at its peak. On Vitalogy Pearl Jam sounds exultant and damaged all at once. They’re usually righteously angry on the songs but they also can appear serenely blissed out in smaller doses laced throughout the album. As a kid it was the first time I heard music that could be furious and euphoric all at once. Music that could contain and convey longing and betrayal, sometimes seemingly toward the same subject. It really managed to nail down the ambivalence of adolescence and later adulthood.
I’m not going to walk you through the whole catalogue but just know that if Vitalogy intrigues you with its many left turns and unexpected sonic surprises, the follow-up album, 1996’s No Code, is even more eclectic and unpredictable.
Here are two of many favorites off the album that are sequenced one after the other just to give an idea of the diversity and gonzo, fuck it, let’s do whatever we want approach to albums Pearl Jam had in its heyday.
Alright, enough with the history lesson, this sprawl of text is about my subjugation as a Pearl Jam fan and the casting off of said shackles. Hopefully this can serve as a call to arms and unfettering for all my secret shame having, Pearl Jam loving brethren and sistren. Be proud of “Who You Are,” both the song off the aforementioned, super great album No Code, as well as you know, who you are as an individual.
But the question remains, why is there so much shame and degradation for the Pearl Jam fan? Why aren’t they and the band they love given the respect they both so clearly deserve? It’s because essentially Pearl Jam is now a cult band that was once, arguably, the biggest band in the world. Which means they’ll never truly be accepted by the indie elitist crowd because of where they come from and likewise they’ll never be taken back in by the masses because of where they’ve gone. They’re the band that would not be king and the band without a country.
Back in the halcyon haze of the early 90s grunge explosion, Pearl Jam was crammed down everyone’s collective throat. After their auspicious debut Ten their follow-up Vs.set a record for most albums sold in its first week, it held this record for five years. But this is also when things starting getting interesting. Because despite the first week sales Pearl Jam refused to make any music videos for Vs. or any of their next two records. They did make an animated apocalyptic head shredder of a video for their fifth album Yield’s “Do The Evolution” but that’s basically it for years. Not making videos was the beginning of Pearl Jam consciously stepping away from the spotlight. They, and especially Vedder, were getting sick of the overexposure. The next step in the severing and fracturing of their massive fan base was their new, more adventurous music like Vitalogy and No Code. Which is where I and other fans come in.
But we all already know the story: They stopped making videos, started making more compelling, challenging and less poppy music and stopped touring briefly due to a good intentioned but disastrous bout with Ticketmaster. By the end of the 90s Pearl Jam’s once massive fan base had been thinned down to a smaller but extremely dedicated cult who were willing to follow the band anywhere.
But none of that is really why I love Pearl Jam. Sure, it’s a good story and I love rock mythology but for me it’s not about the supposed integrity of the band. What, so all the other bands I love who do make videos and make it a point to try be the biggest band in the world are false? I don’t think so. I respect all of that about the band but it’s not why I go back to Pearl Jam again and again.
It’s not because they’re one of the best live bands in the world either. Not because they change the setlist every time and always do something unexpected and always deliver it with a mercurial, possessed energy. It’s not even because they’re one of the few bands that can sound better live than on record, although I do love that.
It’s because simply their music speaks to me like nothing else. There are better bands, more accomplished, more experimental more consistent. Yes, but to me nothing is as good as Pearl Jam at its best. Nothing comes close.
To round things out I will say that though I am proud to be in love with Pearl Jam I know that there might be no convincing others. And ultimately writing this exegesis of my passion for them has finally granted me the firm conviction to not give a shit if no one else likes Pearl Jam. If I can never convey the awesomeness of their music to anyone else, I no longer care. Even if I went to see them live and it was just me and Darth Vedder singing, “Smile” back and forth to each other, I’d be content. (Sidebar: That would just fucking rule, right? Not for Eddie so much but for me, seriously I just got all quiverbits thinking about it.) Why the sudden change, why do I no longer care that liking Pearl Jam will forever be uncool? Because I’ve made peace with it. And because Patrick Warburton, voice of Brock Sampson, is a devout, vocal Pearl Jam fan.
And I no longer seek the validation for the music I love from people I know, I only require it from ultra beefcake, mullet adorned, murder happy, eternally cool and dangerous like some homicidal Fonzie, father figure, cartoon characters. And that’s not just progress. It’s evolution, baby.
