CHOOSING THEIR OWN DESTINY Pearl Jam
Apr 05, 2011
The seminal Seattle band's brilliant, yet often misunderstood, 1993-95 period gets a long-overdue reappraisal via a new 3-CD box set.
BY RON HART
"This is a song about people who don't have taste but they like us anyway," flippantly proclaimed Eddie Vedder, to a capacity crowd of nearly 3,000 adoring fans at Boston's Orpheum Theater on April 12, 1994, before kicking into "Not For You", perhaps the greatest song ever written about fly-by-night fans.
It was a pivotal moment of the last show of a three-night stand at the Orpheum, the live recording of which has been hotly sought-after by Pearl Jam fans for nearly two decades and now made available as the bonus disc of Vs./Vitalogy: Deluxe Edition (Epic/Legacy), an outstanding three-disc box set chronicling what are arguably the three most important years in the history of the band. Vedder's tone that evening was a reflection of the tail end of a long, weary emotional marathon race for credibility - Pearl Jam having been swept up in a whirlwind of hope, hype and hypocrisy following the massive success of debut album Ten, released in the fall of 1991 just as the atom bomb of grunge was beginning to see its commercial potential billow in a mushroom cloud of mainstream success.
Pearl Jam formed in 1990 from the ashes of Mother Love Bone (who had superseded Alice In Chains as the genre-busting living bridge between the budding Seattle music scene and the hair metal movement it helped to melt into a pool of Aquanet residue), and with Ten their crossover appeal was immediately apparent, especially within the ranks of the Bon Jovi set who couldn't quite get down with the likes of Tad and The Melvins. Back-to-back-to-back radio and MTV hits "Alive", "Evenflow" and "Jeremy" quickly pushed their viability as grunge's official pop idols through the roof.
However, Pearl Jam was out to prove they were nobody's fleeting substitute for the Bulletboys or Trixter, and when they returned in 1993 with their second album, they turned a completely blind eye and deaf ear to the trappings of the very fame that brought them to the top of the music industry mountain at the tail end of the Bush Sr. regime. Firstly, they refused to make any videos for the LP originally entitled Five Against One but renamed Vs., both titles indicative of the confrontational attitude they harbored. And then you have the artwork featured on the album cover, which was the total antithesis of the hi-fiving optimism of Ten: two varying black-and-white portraits of a fenced-in sheep, which bassist Jeff Ament has been quoted as saying was highly symbolic as to how they were feeling at the time, "like slaves."
As for the music, while much of the material on Vs. did adopt a similar tone to that of Ten, their sound took on a more AOR feel, indicative of the masterful production skills of Brendan O'Brien as well as the prolific company they were keeping, opening up for Keith Richards and his X-Pensive Winos and jamming with Neil Young on the MTV Video Music Awards. (Pearl Jam was also fond of covering Young in concert, along with The Who.) Plus, the subject matter changed, as the band began getting more political with their lyrics, musing on the traumas of child abuse ("Daughter"), the perils of seeking political refuge ("Dissident"), agoraphobia ("Elderly Woman Behind The Counter in a Small Town"), racism ("W.M.A."), and quite possibly the most spot-on dis towards studio gangstas this side of Mobb Deep's "Shook Ones Part II" ("Glorified G"). Vs. also contains some of the group's hardest rocking songs, namely the one-two opening combination of "Go" and "Animal", the uncompromising screamadelica of "Blood" and the chugging "Rearviewmirror", to this day a pinnacle of the PJ live experience. Yet ultimately the record wanders quietly off into the sunset through the meditative, moody pulchritude of album closer "Indifference".
The expanded edition of Vs. included in this collection contains three bonus tracks: an acoustic version of the beloved studio outtake "Hold On"; a previously unreleased instrumental showcase for the underrated skills of lead guitarist Mike McCready, "Cready Stomp"; and the band's version of Victoria Williams' "Crazy Mary" (with Williams herself on guitar and backing vocals), also released on the 1993 benefit album Sweet Relief, created in tribute to the Multiple Sclerosis-stricken singer-songwriter.
***
If Vs. was the sound of Pearl Jam rejecting the trappings of fame, 1994's Vitalogy, meanwhile, was an exercise in the denunciation of any preconceived notions of their band as a predictable creative entity; here, they unabashedly chose art over commerce. Written and recorded intermittently during the group's massive, Ticketmaster-defying world tour, and once again with O'Brien at the controls, this crucial album carries a loose, experimental feel rife with the tension and turmoil reflected backstage at the time, evident in the unceremonious firing of their third and best drummer, Dave Abbruzzese, shortly after they put the LP to bed. But with or without the drama, Vitalogy remains to this day, quite arguably, PJ's fussy, fearless masterpiece.
Elaborately packaged as a facsimile of an old medical book from the 1920s, it was an even further step away from the commercial appeal of Ten, making Vs. seem positively mainstream by comparison. While the group's penchant for penning hard driving guitar rock was as ubiquitous as ever on the likes of the punk-soaked ode to vinyl addiction "Spin The Black Circle", the aforementioned "Not for You" and "Corduroy" (a longtime fan favorite that deals with the trappings of becoming a public spectacle), the more daring cuts were what really set this particular record apart from the rest of the PJ catalog, not to mention the growing number of clones - Stone Temple Pilots, Candlebox, etc. - who were glomming onto the band's sound at the time, giving the band all the more reason to rage against the machine, so to speak. There was the Tom Waits-esque spoken word freak-out "Bugs"; the King Crimson-echoing "Tremor Christ"; and of course, the lengthy Dadaist sound collage "Hey Foxymophandlemama, That's Me", which incorporated looped vocals of actual inpatients at an undisclosed psychiatric ward. But strangely enough, amidst the madness rests one of Pearl Jam's most accessible tunes in "Betterman", a song about domestic violence loosely based on Vedder's observations of his mother's relationship with his stepfather. To this day, there isn't anything in the Pearl Jam canon that comes remotely close to the originality and immediacy of this challenging flash of grizzled greatness. The expanded edition of Vitalogy also features a trio of bonus cuts: an alternate guitar-and-organ version of the single "Betterman"; a previously unreleased take on "Corduroy"; and the demo of "Nothingman," taken from the original DAT tape.
***
Which now leads us back to the top of this diatribe, and to Disc 3, that monumental live album from the Orpheum in Boston. For a tour as heavily bootlegged as Pearl Jam's tour of 1993-1995, there were certainly a lot of potential choices for which show to include in this box. You had the November 30, 1993 show at the Aladdin Theatre in Las Vegas that saw a reunion set of bassist Jeff Ament and guitarist Stone Gossard's first band and Seattle demigods Green River. Another candidate was the killer radio broadcast of the April 3, 1994 show at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, GA, parts of which were released overseas as B-sides to the multi-part "Dissident" single. And what Pearl Jam fan could forget the January 8, 1995 studio performance, part of the group's "Self-Pollution Radio" show that also featured sets from Soundgarden and the short-lived Seattle supergroup Mad Season. (That is available, in fact, as a cassette included with the Limited Edition Collector's Box Set of the Vs./Vitalogy reissues, but it would have made a worthy addition to the deluxe edition at hand as a fourth component.)
Yet the final verdict for inclusion came down in favor of this mythologized April 12, 1994 show at the Orpheum, a gig that holds a historical place in the hearts of PJ fans the world over. The reason is partly due to its mind-blowing set list, which was drawn up specifically by members of the band's crew. It contains such anomalies as the deep Ten nugget "Oceans" serving as show opener, a visceral run through Neil Young and Crazy Horse's "Fuckin' Up" and a super-rare onstage rendition of funky "Even Flow" B-side "Dirty Frank". The April 12 date is also significant for the fact that just four days earlier, the body of Kurt Cobain had been found at the Nirvana frontman's Seattle home. This evening Pearl Jam unveiled a ballad from the as-yet-unreleased Vitalogy titled "Immortality", performed with markedly different lyrics and powered by such raw emotion as to add fuel to the theory that the song was written by Vedder in direct response to Cobain's suicide, a tragic event weighing heavily on the singer during those last two weeks on the road in support of Vs., in spite of the fact that the two were always pegged as rivals on the Seattle rock scene.
Yet in lieu of the grim specter of death that hung above the alternative nation's head at the time of this concert, it didn't stop Pearl Jam from paying homage to the living all the same, particularly longtime Jet City allies Mudhoney, whose presence factors significantly during the show. In addition to frontman Mark Arm coming out onstage to perform Pearl Jam's fiery cover of the Dead Boys' "Sonic Reducer", Vedder also sings part of "Suck You Dry" (a Mudhoney single from 1993's Piece of Cake) during the extended interlude of "Daughter". Elsewhere, he gives props to fellow alterna-icons Jane's Addiction towards the end of "Rats" by quoting "Pigs In Zen" and "Idiots Rule". "Aw, you've got taste," Vedder says to the audience, after quizzing them about their knowledge of such underground ‘90s bands as Zeke and The Frogs. "Never would've known that meeting you at a Pearl Jam show."
The Vs./Vitalogy era was a crucial one in the history of Pearl Jam precisely because of the poetic turning point it represents. The musicians made a very conscious and very public decision to follow their own path to rock stardom, choosing their own destiny on how to collectively captain their own ship and barring any undue influence from the corporate music-industrial complex - be it Ticketmaster, FM radio or even their own record company.
This pair of bonafide modern rock milestones and the tour that came between them stood - still stands - for a time when the line was drawn in the sand like so much magic marker on Eddie Vedder's arm, when Pearl Jam was intent on following the career trajectory of such heroes as Neil Young and Pete Townshend and not the whims of their SoundScan numbers and flannel shirt sales at Macy's. They were stating, very pointedly, "Fuck you, this is not for you!" And had Kurt Cobain taken the same sociopolitical stance in the face of a voraciously fickle public instead of usurping his fears, fright and frustration through the plunger of the needle and the damage done, he might still be with us today.
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