0.20.1 - I swear I recognise your face
[[Authors Note: This is now day four into trying to find a path through this post and so whatever comes out of my keyboard in the next couple of hours is just what I am going to publish, for fear of being stuck here forever. Know that whatever the finished article looks like, I am probably not happy with it, but the show must go on. Sorry Pearl Jam, you deserved better.]]
Normally, when I am writing one of these articles the prose comes fairly naturally. Either I go in knowing what it is I want to say and I kind of write towards an objective, or I have a story I know I am going to tell in the context of the music, or if its something I've not heard before or don't have wild feelings about, I just write about how the music made me feel. I've been trying to write about Pearl Jam for nearly three days now and when I had a talk with myself just now to try and figure out what the problem is, it's that I have too much to say, too many stories, to many things tied up in how I feel about this band and their music and I can't find a clear path through them in a way that kind of hangs together narratively.
When you are a musician and this happens, where you have fragments of ideas which you just can't figure out how to fill out into a whole song, you do what the Beatles do with Mean Mr Mustard/She Came In Through The Bathroom Window/Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End, or what Radiohead do with Paranoid Android - you jam those elements next to each other despite them veering wildly away from each other and then everyone calls you a genius for doing so. So, because it's this band and because I can't make all these jigsaw pieces fit in a way that I like, this article is going to be a slightly different format than all the others. First, I'm not going to break down my thoughts on every album. Because my OCD wants to make sure I list out all the albums I cover in the articles I cover them in, you are all going to have to trust me when I say I listened to Ten, Vs., Vitalogy, No Code, Yield, Binaural, Riot Act, Pearl Jam, Backspacer, Lighting Bolt, Gigaton and Dark Matter over the course of the last week or so. Secondly, this article is going to just be Some Stories And Thoughts On Pearl Jam, and they might not necessarily relate to each other but that's the part where you read the whole thing and call me an artistic genius because of how they contrast with each other or whatever.
I've got a complicated, loving, dismissive, guilt ridden relationship with this band, but they have produced some of my favourite records and songs of all time, so if you don't read any further than this, be assured that I think they are great and you should listen to them, probably starting with Ten. Now I've written these paragraphs above where I was writing before, let's just launch into a whole bunch of different thoughts.
A Bit Not Really About Pearl Jam
In 2022 my friend Keane got married in upstate New York, in a vineyard in Albany, and I was lucky enough to be invited* and attend. I've known Keane for nearly 20 years, another veteran of the SomethingAwful forums with whom I've kept in touch and managed to meet up with on a few occasions. Keane was one of the people I asked for music recommendations when I started doing this, and Pearl Jam's Ten appeared on his list, added there by his now-wife Julie, who's taste in men may be unusual but who's musical taste is obviously excellent. Even though I haven't had much time to talk to Julie - ironically, the time her and Keane visited the UK I had a vomiting bug so bad I couldn't get out of bed and was so desperate not to pass it on to them before they had a 10 hour plane ride back to the states that I stayed home while Catherine showed them around - I keep the members of the Keane family in my mind a lot of the time these days and I'm hopeful there will be a better, less fraught, less scary time where we might be able to hang out again in the future.
The Other Bit Not About Pearl Jam - Some Thoughts on 'Grunge'
In what people are calling a bold move considering I've committed myself to writing about twelve different albums in the same post, I want to start here by talking a little about an album by a different band, which I also didn't listen to this week.
MTV Unplugged is a simple concept which somehow spawned some of the best performance albums (I hesitate to call them live albums because the sound mixing and recording quality and the studio environment with a limited audience is enough to put them in a class of their own in my head) ever made. Obviously, Nirvana's Unplugged in New York exists as the most widely known example, but of the grunge bands who turned in stellar performances, my favourite is the Unplugged performance from Alice In Chains. There are lots of reasons why, but what is relevant to this story is that a few years ago, I rediscovered it (as I never owned it on CD) through the terrible streaming services, and for a span of a few months, I listened to it repeatedly. Now I know the original versions of every song on that album, and for me, the contrast is part of the appeal. As I was driving around our hometown at some point - I had picked Catherine up and had left the album running as we drove home - she asked me what we were listening to and when I told her it was Alice in Chains, she said "Oh, I didn't think they were a Country band".
I spent a few days after that unpacking that unexpected perspective while trying to concentrate on other things. Catherine is a sophisticated appreciator of music herself, and she's not going to call something "Country" just because of the presence of an acoustic guitar. In knowing the album versions of the songs I was listening to, I wasn't really hearing the unplugged versions in their own context. After revisiting the Stone Temple Pilots and Pearl Jam unplugged sessions as well, I'm convinced now more than ever that the only differences between 'grunge' (as meaningless a signifier as you will ever get in music) of the 90s and modern country music is self-confidence, jingoism and cliche, and that grunge is just country music with low self esteem and distortion pedals. There are, admittedly, very few grunge songs about how much they love their trucks and Jesus**.
I feel this with Pearl Jam the most.
As we will discuss later, I can't speak with huge authority on all of their records, but certainly the early albums are held together by a song writing which tells a story. Whether it's a dialogue played out in lyrics, a memory told in flashback, or just a single event or character outlined in musical prose, Pearl Jam records have for me the same kind of narrative content that I found so arresting growing up listening to James Taylor. Moreso than any of the other 'grunge' bands, Pearl Jam's music feels like part of a greater musical tradition dating back to Robert Johnson and The King Of The Delta Blues Singers from which sprung all guitar music. Go ahead and listen to Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town or Better Man or Oceans and tell me that with a slide guitar or a fiddle over it you couldn't imagine it on a Garth Brooks album.
Where It All Began
When I read about the history of 90's music, especially now people are looking back on it with 30 years of hindsight, you'd be forgiven for believing that when the Seattle bands emerged onto the scene, there was some great scouring, that the inevitable force of this new music swept the nation, uniting the youth of the world beneath a flag of flannel shirts. Having lived through it, living in the isolated shores of the United Kingdom, this was not my experience. The people I knew who liked Pearl Jam were few and far between. Even amongst my own friend group, who generally shared a communal music taste, there were Pearl Jam detractors. What I can't piece together is how I fell into their orbit; I distinctly remember owning Ten on cassette tape, playing it in my bedroom in my parents house; I'm pretty certain I didn't own a CD player of my own until 1996 or so, so that would make sense. There's a reasonable chance then it was a gift of some kind, birthday or Christmas, as I didn't really start buying a lot of music on my own until after I got a job and a CD player, so definitely not when I was 17. However it happened, I fell in love with it immediately.
I wore the spools out on my copy of Ten, inflicting it without mercy on whoever was hanging out with me playing games; Vs. got the same treatment, and it's also why I realised with great regret that I no longer own physical copies of those two albums. When the engine exploded on my old Mini One, the first car I ever owned (back when Mini's were actually small budget cars), it was towed off to be scrapped containing a bag full of tapes for its antiquated tape deck which never came back to me and included my copies of the first two Peal Jam albums. Since I bought my record player this year to start rebuilding my physical music collection, I've added vinyl copies of Ten and Vs to my 'to be found and purchased' list to replace those cassette tapes now long consigned to a scrapyard landfill somewhere.
As a result, my actual physical collection dates back to Vitalogy, an album which annoys me intensely because, well, it's the wrong shape.
Lots of bands made the choice to mess with the classic jewel case CD presentation. In my collection there are gatefolds, cardboard sleeves, wraparound card covers with plastic inserts, and the cd case for Placebo's Black Market Music is literally unhinged as it has some kind of elaborate pull mechanism which slides the CD holder out like a pop-up book. But, no matter what, all of them are basically the same rectangular profile and dimensions as the classic jewel case. Except for Vitalogy, which is square like a vinyl album cover and as a result doesn't fit in any CD rack and sticks out like a sore thumb next to every other uniform sized CD in any shelf. It makes my brain itch in an unpleasant way and if this album was released today I'd be petitioning for them to release an OCD collectors edition which comes in a jewel case in the correct dimensions and I would have paid twice the retail price for it. It's also doubly vexing because Vitalogy is also my favourite Pearl Jam album, with a couple of exceptions we will get to. However, lets veer away from this line of thought for a sidebar about something else for a second.
Giving People Theme Songs
I don't know when I started doing this or why, but at some point in time, if we know each other, I will unconsciously start to associate a song with you. It's not a deliberate thing, it doesn't happen for everyone, and there are people I've known for decades who just don't have one, and people who my brain decides to spit out a connection after I've met them for five minutes. The song won't have any particular reference or relevance to stuff we've done together, how I feel about you, or characteristics you have. It's like the tombola machine in my mind spits out a song, superglues it to a person, and then they are forever linked, indexed together in my mental file structure. Because the majority of the people reading this are people who know me in real life, please don't ask me if there's a song I associate with you, I'm just going to say no every time to avoid having to explain why (for example) every time I hear Hey Hey We're The Monkees it makes me instantly think of a guy I knew called Dave who I've not seen nor thought about for nearly two decades until just now.
Vitalogy has one of these theme songs on it, for a young woman I once knew and haven't seen for twenty five years or so. She was part of our extended social circle of music and pub gatherings in the very early 2000s; I always thought she was incredibly hot, in a way out of my league way, and it always felt like she was part of our little alternative music social circle because her friends were, and she'd much rather be in the more conventional dance clubs in town. One night, just before Christmas, we left our late-night drinking venue and walked back through town. I, for some reason, ended up giving her a piggy back, and when we fell behind the group we were walking with, we ended up making out down a side alley next to the Winding Wheel theatre before going our separate ways. Christmas came and went and it was nearly a month before we saw each other again, and I never brought it up to her and we never discussed it, mostly because I was convinced it was a moment of insanity on her part - like I said, out of my league. Sometimes I wonder if I made her feel rejected or relieved I never said "hey, remember that night before Christmas..." but the past is the past. But that's who I think about every time I hear Satan's Bed off this album.
Why Vitalogy is the best Pearl Jam album
I think the first three Pearl Jam records are as strong a 1-2-3 debut trio of albums as you can get; what they also demonstrate is a band gaining confidence that the music they are making has a audience, and in turn expanding their musical horizons. Ten is great, but it operates very much inside the lines of 'grunge' on every track, from the brooding ballad-y one to the verse/chorus/verse angry one, songs on Ten can find parallels in structure across other bands at the time. Vs. moved the walls back in every direction. There's still some straight ahead rock and roll on there - Go / Animal / Daughter as 1, 2, and 3 are there to tell you "Don't worry, there's some of that sound from Ten you like on here", but W.M.A., Dissident, Rats all exist as evidence of a band asking "what else could we be doing" and mostly landing on their feet. Vitalogy is the album of big swings - having established a commercial formula, expanded on it successfully, Vitalogy feels like a band feeling like they have free reign to experiment, free of judgement. The introductory 20 seconds to Last Exit, the first song on the album, is a jumbled mess of the band tuning up like an orchestra, clashing and discordant before coming together effortlessly into the first song - a statement of intent, notice that this can go in any direction at any time. It starts conventionally enough - the first six tracks follow on in the musical path set by Ten and Vs. before Pry, To arrives and evokes those first 20 seconds again, a minute of strange, meandering funk which collapses into one of the most iconic Pearl Jam songs in Corduroy and then crashes out of that into an accordion based poem for 3 minutes in Bugs, before the aforementioned Satan's Bed arrives to whip you back into more standard fare. You get the Pearl Jam ur-ballad Better Man, and then Aya Davanita recalls the afro-beat sounds from W.M.A. on the previous album, before track 13 ends the album with a song which could be straight from Ten. The entire back half of the album is like a rollercoaster ride, daring you to stop paying attention as it veers unexpectedly in every direction. It's Big Swings all the way, and while they don't always land (Bugs is a clunker) I appreciate the intent, the willingness to do unusual things with the hopes that the audience will come with you.
Then Stupidmop happens and ruins everything. I guess I can't celebrate the band taking big swings while being upset when they take their biggest swing on the last track just because I think its seven and a half minutes of self indulgent weird jazz garbage with samples played over structureless noodling. Pearl Jam aren't the only band to ever do this, and I listened to another album just this week I'll talk about in the wrapup that did the same thing, but it irritates me no matter who is the perpetrator. There are people who might say that I can't say its my favourite Pearl Jam album if there's a song on it I hate, and to those people I say the intersection of artist and art appreciator here means that we can collaboratively produce an album which ends at the end of track 13, Immortality, because my contribution is hitting the 'stop' button before track 14 starts, and between us, we have created the best Pearl Jam album of all time.
Guilt, and the Pearl Jam back catalogue
I missed the release of No Code entirely. I don't know why, as it came only two years after Vitalogy. I can't say whether it was a me problem or a marketing problem, but you would have thought it would have been an easy sell to me if I'd known the album existed. I can't, without looking, tell you what if any singles were released from No Code; something I can do with both Yield and Binaural, both of which also sit in the CD collection behind me. If I didn't know better I'd swear No Code was a region-only release, something that never came to the UK. I listened to it for this article and I still can't retain anything about it. It's like there's a hole in my memory I just can't slot any parts of this album into.
Me, moments after listening to No Code again
By the time Yield and Binaural came out, I had caught up. Both of the albums were good, but not great. Muted somewhat in comparison, a lower energy where the highs come less frequently but the lows are not so noticeable. Both are conventional Pearl Jam, albums I like and don't love, that I enjoyed revisiting now, but back in the early 2000s, I felt had somehow lost their edge. I do like Binaural more, and I think Light Years is one of the best Pearl Jam songs of all time, and by no means do I think these albums aren't worth exploring.
When Riot Act came out in 2002, I didn't miss it. I saw the release, I was plugged into the early internet enough to know of its existence, but without warning, I just decided to stop buying their music. Maybe the No Code thing broke the streak and this was all inevitable and it was just fan inertia that carried me through buying albums 5 and 6, but there are bands with whom I shared a similarly deep emotional connection and I never stopped buying their releases long after I thought they were past their peak. For whatever reason, I broke up with Pearl Jam. No note, no card, just an unexpected, quiet ending to our relationship. I knew going into this that I had some catching up to do, but had not anticipated a further six albums of new music I'd be hearing for the first time.
This article is already dragging on too long for me to try and tell you my thoughts on each of the six albums I caught up on this week, apart from to say I enjoyed nearly all of them. Lighting Bolt was my immediate favourite, as it reminded me a lot of Vitalogy on first listen, but I'll certainly return to Dark Matter and Gigaton as well when my forward momentum for album listening isn't driving me endlessly to pastures new. Pearl Jam never did anything wrong, never produced music or voiced questionable opinion to get me to abandon them like I did. I'm sure they don't miss me, didn't care, don't psychically feel my lack of presence in their hive mind fandom, but that doesn't stop me from feeling guilty, if only because I don't understand my own choice.
In Conclusion
This one got away from me gang. But if you feel like you're giving up on something that has given you joy, that has resonated with you, that was a part of your life which is slipping through your fingers, don't be like me. Ask yourself why, why are you letting this thing go, without understanding, without reason, just because its easier that way. Give yourself permission to still love the things you love.
Maybe then you won't end up looking back with twenty years of regret.
*I told Keane that if he invited me to his wedding I'd fly across the Atlantic to attend. I think he invited me to call my bluff, but he should have known that there's no idea too irresponsible for me to commit to, and I was really pleased to be there. I had a great day and night meeting Keane's friends and I'm more than a little sure that I saw Alice Cooper eating breakfast at the hotel I was staying at in the morning.
**Ministries 'Jesus Built My Hotrod' was as close as I could get, from the same period (1992) but definitely not grunge.
