Like Wine, Pearl Jam gets Better with Age
The stepchildren of their Seattle crosstown rival deserve a closer listen.
Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, San Francisco
July 16, 2006
Two minutes into the concert, there was an awkward pause between the singer, Eddie Vedder, and his band, Pearl Jam.
Almost immediately, the audience knew something was wrong.
The singer’s band mates continued to play, waiting for their front man to utter the next line in the opening number.
He didn’t.
Instead, he came clean.
“I forgot the fucking song,” Vedder acknowledged over the microphone. The crowd laughed and then cheered. It was a humbling moment, something rare among rock stars.
Pearl Jam’s lead singer, who that night looked more like The Doors’ Jim Morrison than the long, bushy hair, flannel shirt-wearing rocker that everyone else in San Francisco’s Bill Graham Civic Auditorium knew from the 1990s.
“I will be begging your forgiveness for the rest of the evening,” he apologized and then went immediately into the next number.
For the remainder of the concert, as I sat in the balcony (the show was the second of three sold out performances), I watched with awe as Pearl Jam performed its most popular hits and lesser-known songs with equal amounts of vigor.
This was the first time I saw Pearl Jam live and I only wondered why I hadn’t before.
When Pearl Jam emerged in the early 1990s, they were lumped with an assortment of equally thrilling, innovative groups that included (in no particular order) Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots, Smashing Pumpkins, Alice in Chains, and that other group from Seattle everyone still seems to fawn over.
Like the other bands, Pearl Jam was certainly at the forefront of the rock scene with their mega-selling album, Ten. In fact, all of those groups had their own smash-hit record—Soundgarden’s Superunknown, Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dreams, Alice in Chains’ Dirt, Stone Temple Pilots’ Core, and, of course, the granddaddy of them all, Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Twenty years later, these bands as well as others from the so-called “grunge” era, for various reasons, were unable to continue their commercial and artistic success with such consistency except for one, Pearl Jam.
As I cue up my Pandora radio stations and revisit the music of the past, much of which include the bands mentioned earlier, I found that nearly all of those groups, notably Nirvana—who, as a teenager, I had overwhelmingly preferred over Pearl Jam—have a distinct sound that now sounds stuck in time.
Unlike Pearl Jam’s versatile music style (from the loud, politically charged “World Wide Suicide” to the soft, delicate tone of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon”), most of the other bands either had too small a collection of songs to allow for growth (i.e., Nirvana) or simply wrote songs that appear similar to one another (Soundgarden).
But even more apparent, so much of that music—especially those bands that have returned from a long hiatus (Soundgarden again)—still reeks from the era’s infamous teenage angst sound.
Whereas Pearl Jam’s music, especially the songs that were produced post-Ten (at first slammed by the media—with one rock critic calling their underappreciated third album, No Code, “a mid-life crisis”) may be bitter upon the initial listen, but over time, it gets sweeter and smoother and then the buzz kicks in and, before you know it, you’re hooked.
Off to a rough start, Pearl Jam performing in San Francisco at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium (Part I)
Pearl Jam performs “Harvest Moon” in Portland, Oregon
