Pearl Jam joins the fans in a communal celebration

By JEFF MIERS
News Pop Music Critic
5/3/2003

Over the past week, Buffalo has been treated to two shows that the rock cognoscenti surely will be recalling to their grandchildren decades from now.
Last week, rock legend and poet Patti Smith and her band played two breathtaking shows in our city, both of which left audiences stunned, and happily so.

Friday night, Pearl Jam - perhaps the most important, lasting and creative band to emerge from the early '90s rock movement - offered a nearly three-hour show to a crowd seemingly ravenous for the band's blend of raw power, rich musicality and dynamic, often grandiose interplay.

Fittingly, Pearl Jam encored with a riotous version of Smith's anthemic "People Have the Power."

Few shows are so stuffed with magic and communal celebration that one is encouraged to believe he is a different person leaving the show than he was when entering it. This was one of them.

First things first. Pearl Jam has cultivated an audience on its own terms, painstakingly, with great care and deliberation. The band exploded in 1991 with the release of its debut effort, "Ten," but rather quickly turned its back on the mass adulation and commercial success that album generated, in favor of a majesty of a more lasting sort.

That meant no MTV, no onslaught of media coverage, no glitzy photo ops. Instead, Pearl Jam - vocalist Eddie Vedder, bassist Jeff Ament, guitarists Mike McCready and Stone Gossard, and drummer Matt Cameron - concentrated on turning the band from a solid and often inspired "grunge" outfit into the sort of rock band that defies categorization and the temporal fashion concerns that make some bands sound dated after a few years.

We're blessed that the band followed this course, for with each album since the release of "Ten," it has shown marked improvement in terms of composition, musicality and vision. Today, Pearl Jam is perhaps the only band of its generation currently touring worthy of comparison with the greatest of the greats - the Who, Springsteen, Zeppelin, et al.

Guitar rock hasn't sounded this good in a few decades. Taking the stage with a stately and subdued reading of "Love Boat Captain," from the band's most recent album, "Riot Act" - perhaps its finest to date - Vedder and his cohorts brought an intimacy to their performance that implied a sense of community between artist and audience. Three songs in, and it was apparent that the band members were having as much fun as the audience.

"This is the second-to-last night of this leg of the tour," Vedder told the crowd early on. "Many people think that the last night of the tour is the one where the band stretches out and takes chances. But we up here on the stage know that it's actually the second-to-last night that is the special one."

The crowd, which seemed close to capacity, went absolutely nuts.

The set list, which changes drastically from night to night and city to city, was perhaps the most comprehensive and inspired this writer has heard from the band.

"Brain of J," "Hail Hail," "Save You," "Corduroy," "Even Flow," "Faithful," "Given to Fly" (which Vedder dedicated to Buffalo-born filmmaker Vincent Gallo), "Spin the Black Circle," "Wishlist," "Green Disease," "Black," "Go," "Betterman," "Crazy Mary," "Do the Evolution," "Alive" - this is the sort of modern rock music that reminds fans why they fell in love with the idiom in the first place.

Pearl Jam has consistently offered vivid interpretations of diverse material recorded by other artists, and Friday night's show was no exception. Stunning versions of the Police's "Driven to Tears," the Dead Boys' "Sonic Reducer," the Who's "Baba O'Reilly" and Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son" all fit seamlessly into the band's stellar set.

Pearl Jam plays rock 'n' roll as if the musicians' very lives depended on it. Perhaps they do. One thing is certain, however - ours are enriched by their passionate, far-reaching craft.

e-mail: jmiers@buffnews.com