Pearl Jam still wooing the fans after 12 years

BY MARK LAZERUS

THE OBSERVER-REPORTER

mlazerus@observer-reporter.com

PITTSBURGH - The worn-out flannel shirts have been replaced by respectable button-downs. The tattered jeans are shunned in favor of khakis. The scraggly unkempt hair has been eschewed for a clean, close-cropped look - not to mention a few receding hairlines.

And that's just the band.

Not surprisingly, Pearl Jam drew a crowd of aging Gen-Xers to its sold-out show at Mellon Arena Saturday night. Sure, there was a smattering of teenagers and college kids, but most of the fans in attendance looked as if they had just left the office and didn't have time to go rummaging through the closet for their decade-old flannels.

Pearl Jam - the last band standing from the early '90s Seattle grunge scene - has been around 12 years and has produced seven studio albums and dozens of live CDs. And as the band's music has grown and matured, so has the band itself. Bassist Jeff Ament and drummer Matt Cameron are in their early 40s. Guitarists Stone Gossard and Mike McCready and frontman Eddie Vedder are in their late 30s. Even the themes of disaffected youth which gained Pearl Jam its fanbase are often overshadowed by Vedder's political commentary these days.

But Saturday night's show proved one thing: The old folks can still bring the house down.

For about two and a half hours and 28 songs, Pearl Jam kept the crowd on its feet, cheering and singing throughout the entire show. After a short, inoffensive opening set by Weezer sound-alike Sparta, Vedder and Co. came onto the bare-bones stage and ripped through six songs before even offering a "Good evening."

The band opened with the sing-along hit, "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town" before churning out a blistering half hour of hard-driving songs such as "Corduroy", "Save You" and "Hail, Hail". After briefly greeting the crowd, Vedder went right back to work with another six songs in a row, the last being the larynx-straining "Blood."

Following "Blood," Vedder teased an early end to the show, saying, "It's impossible to sing anything after that one." He turned to leave the stage, then came back and ingratiated himself with the locals by cracking, "I'm just kidding. These vocal chords are made of steel - they're from Pittsburgh."

Through an 18-song show and two five-song encores, the band played a few songs from every album, only playing a handful off their latest record, "Riot Act," for which the current tour is named. They interspersed popular sing-alongs such as "Daughter," "Wishlist" and "Betterman" to break up the show, which was dominated by the band's harder tracks. Other highlights were covers of the Beatles' "Hide Your Love Away" and J. Frank Wilson's oldie, "Last Kiss".

Noticeably absent from the set list were the band's two biggest hits, "Jeremy" and "Black," both of which were on Pearl Jam's debut record, "Ten," which sold 11 million copies.

But the crowd didn't seem to mind, as nearly every person in attendance knew every word to every song that was played - except for the last one, the indecipherable, haunting "Yellow Ledbetter," during which even Vedder often makes up the lyrics as he goes.

That they can get away without playing their mainstream hits is a sign of how things have changed for Pearl Jam, which is a bizarre anomaly - a megaband with a cult following. The band has very few casual fans, and their newer songs get very little radio airplay. But they continue to sell about a million copies of every record and hundreds of thousands of double-CD bootlegs of every show they do to their dwindling but devoted fanbase, and they still sell out every arena they play.

The fans are older, the hairlines are receding and the flannel is gone, but Pearl Jam is showing no signs of slowing down with age.