Pearl Jams luster endures

By WALTER TUNIS McClatchy Newspapers
http://www.timesleader.com/mld/timesleader/entertainment/15142122.htm
Posted on Fri, Jul. 28, 2006

What good is mathematics when Pearl Jam is involved?

The veteran Seattle band that helped define grunge at the dawn of the 90s with a multiplatinum debut titled Ten has become the only major-label survivor of the movement. Now that it has issued its 11th album, does anyone still care?

Its a curious syndrome, to be sure. Pearl Jam is hardly the first band to attain stardom with its first album only to have the rest of its career viewed as a game of commercial catch-up. But it might well be one of the very few to answer skeptics with such an involving string of ferociously rocking, topically fueled and bizarrely introspective records.

Too bad most of them have more or less fallen by the wayside in the wake of a debut album that shook the world.

When Ten hit the charts in 1991, all arms were open to a brazen, punkish sound out of the Northwest. Ten was the sound of personal revolution, an upheaval of unease that roughed up the contours of commercial pop the way punk grabbed post-disco radio rock by the collar 16 years earlier.

Pearl Jam was far from the lone conspirator, of course. Such fellow Seattle renegades as Nirvana and Soundgarden and a brigade of others held high the ripped flannel banner of grunge. But Pearl Jam was somehow different. Its not like the other guys were fraudulent. But when you saw Eddie Vedder sing Porch as his eyes rolled back into his head on Saturday Night Live in 1992, you couldnt help but sense something seriously creepy was going on.

Misery, in those days, was quite bankable. Maybe it always has been.

But when Pearl Jam started racking up serious sales figures for Ten that now top 12 million, grunge became less of a revolt and more of a commodity. Alternative music, which meant just about anything that wasnt country, rap or spit-and-polish pop, was suddenly an accepted marketing genre.

Misery, it seemed, also was selling better than ever to a new rock generation. Or, as that great animated social analyst Bart Simpson once observed, Making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Vedder says in the current issue of Rolling Stone, These were pure feelings coming out from real individuals and were being co-opted quickly by the masses and characterized into a joke. And we werent a joke.

But the thing is, neither were the ensuing albums be they hits such as Vs. and Vitalogy or comparative misses such as No Code, Yield and the true sleeper in the Pearl Jam canon, Binaural. Oddly enough, the closest thing Pearl Jam has had to a commercial hit in the past decade was a 1999 cover of the 60s teen anthem Last Kiss recorded as a benefit for the refugees of Kosovo.

Peruse the almost universally glowing reviews for album No. 11, Pearl Jam, and you would think Vedder and company had just stepped out of deep freeze. Granted, not all the music cut in the wake of Ten has made for easy listening. But in that time the band has fashioned one of its most melodic melancholy singles (1994s Better Man), one of its brashest and most punk savvy blowouts (1996s Lukin, which is revived with ample angst on the just released EP disc Live at East Street), one of its most dance-savvy social snapshots (1998s Do the Evolution) and one its most unapologetic political rants (2003s Bushleaguer).

To be sure, the music on Pearl Jam is as mighty as many of those tunes.

If you caught the band setting fire to Life Wasted last month on The Late Show With David Letterman, you saw the birth of an anthem. If Vedder so chooses, the tune could be a touchstone concert rocker for years.

If your head still bangs to the sound of Alive, Black or any of the crowd-surfing classics from its debut album, thats cool. Just keep an ear out for the earsplitters cut since then that the pop mainstream ignored.

You might discover the distance between Ten and 11 is delightfully vast indeed.

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