PEARL JAM

MOVING TARGETS

Pearl Jam are still a bristling band on the run from the success of Ten

by Matt Ashare |  
Published October 16, 2013

Rock and roll greatness, on a grand scale, is often as much about mythmaking, as it is about a good song. There’s Dylan as Odysseus, stoking the righteous anger of the folk gods with his electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, before embarking on a long, perilous journey to bring it all back to a place one might call home, fending off the twin perils of artistic compromise and utter obscurity as he spurns the siren song of conformity. There’s Springsteen, the Boss, who as a scrappy young songwriter battled epically just to be heard, as he slogged it out with the E Street Band in dives along the Jersey Shore. There’s U2, who fought their way out of war-torn Ireland to bring a gospel of unity to the world. And, well, the list goes on and on and on.

         This could have been a story about the Clash, the British punk-rock legends who metaphorically fought the law (and, the law won) for an electrifyingly confused five years (1977-1982), the span of which has now been decisively compiled in an expansive, and handsomely packaged box set called “Sound System.” Instead, it’s about Pearl Jam, an equally embattled populist, if not quite pop band of perfectly mismatched brothers-in-arms, who also raged in vain against the corporate apparatus of a multinational infotainment industry, but who have persevered, bloodied but unbowed, still largely intact, give or take a couple of drummers. “Lightening Bolt,” their tenth album since their landmark debut “Ten” in 1991, came out on Tuesday after streaming for a week on iTunes, a platform I suspect the Clash would have been keen to take full advantage of in their day.

         The roots of Pearl Jam’s troubles go all the way back to “Ten,” a multiplatinum monolith packed with moody, broody heroic guitar anthems that resonated sympathetically with the not-so-good vibrations of the times. Released in August of ’91, “Ten” was far from an immediate success: it wasn’t until a fellow band of Seattlelites named Nirvana began to storm the charts with “Nevermind,” which came September of that year, that Pearl Jam found themselves heralded as the next great grunge sensation. The stage-diving video for the ginormous single “Alive” only served to reinforce Pearl Jam’s alt-rock image, an image that was further solidified by the band’s appearance as one of the opening acts on the main stage of 1992’s Lollapalooza Festival tour

It was fairly clear by the end of the summer of ’92 that “Ten” was the sort of instant classic that had the stuff to cultivate a far broader and more substantial appeal than the trio of Lollapalooza headliners Pearl Jam supported on the tour — Soundgarden, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and, ah, Ministry. And therein lay the rub: the arbiters of alt-rock cool firmly discouraged the courting of mainstream success, and a Greek chorus anti-Pearl Jam backlash was joined by no less an authority than Kurt Cobain, who accused them of “selling out.”

In retrospect, while Pearl Jam were at least tacitly complicit in their initial marketing strategy — that is indeed Eddie Vedder crowd surfing, an early version of crowd sourcing, in the “Alive” video — they were also victims of circumstance. The muscular musical core of Pearl Jam, guitarist Jeff Ament and bassist Stone Gossard, had cut their teeth in the Seattle post-punk, proto-grunge band Green River. But they moved on to more arena-friend glam-rock with the short-lived Mother Love Bone, before hooking up with lead guitarist Mike McCready to pursue what might best be described as classic American guitar rock. As a late addition to the line-up, Vedder may have embodied a portrait of the alienated artist as a tortured young man, but if that’s somehow “faux alternative” then we may have to take a closer look at Mozart and maybe even Van Gogh.

Nevertheless, the loaded die was cast, and rather than play a rigged game, Pearl Jam assumed a defensive posture and, for starters, refused to make any videos for the follow-ups to “Ten.” (I know it’s hard to believe, but that amounted to a major statement of defiance back in the early-’90s. Seriously.) The band joined forces with Neil Young in 1995, protested Ticketmaster’s inflation of concert ticket prices, and all but abandoned the arena-friendly vibe of “Ten” in favor of both softer and more challenging sounds.

Adversity can breed loyalty, and Pearl Jam presented a united front in their anti-establishment posture. With the notable exception of Radiohead, whose adverse reaction to the trappings of fame led them down a digital wormhole they’ve yet to fully emerge from, it’s hard to think of a band in the recent past who rejected superstardom in favor of more modest kind of success more willfully and ardently than Pearl Jam in the mid-’90s.

Yet, musically they seemed divided. There were blistering blasts of raw power (the percussive “Go”), punk salvos like “Lukin” (named for the bassist in the Seattle band Mudhoney), and sinewy garage-rockers like the coded ode to vinyl “Spin the Black Circle,” which seemed aimed at asserting the band’s alt-rock credibility. And, then there were the were the softer, more acoustic-oriented storytellers that highlighted Vedder’s sensitive side (“Daughter,” “Betterman,” and “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town”), songs that charted a course toward potentially friendlier shores, not far from where a band like R.E.M. had found a way to thrive on their own, idiosyncratic terms.

Pearl Jam, who headline the John Paul Jones Arena in Charlottesville on October 29, have long since come to terms with the psychic wounds of the past. In 2009, the band presided over the deluxe reissue of “Ten,” which initiated a project that will see the re-release of their entire back catalog. Two years later, they compiled a career-spanning live/rarities two-disc set, “Pearl Jam Twenty,” to serve as a soundtrack companion to the Cameron Crowe rockumentary of the same title.

And, yet, there are still distinct echoes of the band’s rocky formative years in the well-worn grooves of “Lightening Bolt.” Take “Mind Your Manners,” the in-your-face, scream-and-thrash rant that’s the disc’s first official single. Perhaps a bubbly synth-pop number or classical etude would be less representative of “Lightening Bolt,” but hardcorish punk is more in Pearl Jam’s wheelhouse, I suppose. It comes off mostly as an inside joke of sorts. But, with its call-and-response, yell-along outro of “Go to hell/That right/How you like it?/In hell,” it’s really the punchline to the more measured “Getaway,” the undulating mid-tempo rocker that opens the album with a characteristic plea from a tightly wound, socially conscious Vedder for civility in the face of the deep religious divisions that have afflicted our culture. As Vedder advises in the chorus, “It’s okay/Sometimes you find yourself having to put all your faith/In no faith/Mine is mine and yours won’t take its place/Now make your getaway.”

“Lightening Bolt” is frontloaded with hard-rockers, including a taut, riff-driven number that finds Vedder wrestling with family dysfunction a la “Jeremy” in the “My Father’s Son, and extoling the strange virtues of an unnamed seductress in the disc’s explosive title track. And, a world-weary Vedder takes stock of the human condition circa 2013 in the edgy “Infallible,” reflecting “Somehow it is the biggest things that keep on slipping through our hands/By thinking we are infallible we are tempting fate instead/It’s time we best begin, here at the ending.”

The band’s softer side surfaces on the minor-keyed power ballad “Sirens,” a plaintive, yearning love song that plays to Vedder’s strength as a humbly emotive singer, capable of investing simple sentiments like. “It’s a fragile thing/This life we lead/If I think too much/I can’t get over. . .,” with both strength and vulnerability. And, there are also a few genre excursions, including the bluesy stomp of “Let the Records Play,” the jangly pop of “Swallowed Whole,” and the ukulele-accented swing of “Sleeping By Myself,” a kind of classic oldie-styled number that brings to mind the unlikely hit the band had with their 1999 cover of “Last Kiss,” a song popularized by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers in the ’60s.

What holds the album together, as has generally been the case, is Vedder, who took over as the band’s spiritual guide amidst the tumult of the ’90s, and has mostly thrived in that role. His is the ethos of the underdog, the scrappy, unconventional upstart who triumphs without ever fully fitting in or, all due deference to Kurt Cobain, selling out. And Pearl Jam have come to embody that vision, even as they’ve established themselves as a rock institution. In a culture where everything’s a brand and every brand is sponsored by other brands, Pearl Jam remain a welcome exception — proof that there’s still some value in simply being yourself, even if that’s no so easily bottled or packaged. It’s the myth as anti-myth.