Pearl Jam still defying the odds

Pearl Jam enjoys the best of both worlds, can have its cake and eat it, too, whatever that means.

Playing Monday at Rexall Place, Pearl Jam is among the most popular rock bands in the world, yet one of the most enigmatic. They are rock superstars who somehow stay "underground."

Must be nice.

While responsible for a good chunk of the finest "angst-rock" ever made, Pearl Jam has done some strange things in its history. It flooded the market with live albums, recording, pressing and selling every single live concert. Pearl Jam therefore holds the record for live albums, or "official bootlegs," as they call them. It got tons of press for an unsuccessful battle with Ticketmaster, has seen a regular decline in album sales since the debut Ten in 1991, refused to make music videos, yet allows fans to record shows like the Grateful Dead did. Pearl Jam appears to have cancelled as many tours as it launched and hasn't had a hit worth mentioning in at least six years. The superstar might cry, "Oh, no!" The underground hero would probably sneer, "So what?" Take your pick.

Turn on the radio and you'll still hear such songs as Daughter, Jeremy, Even Flow and Better Man, though the band has had four studio albums in the long and strange years since.

Politically, Pearl Jam bats left and has been involved in almost every worthy cause imaginable. It endorsed John Kerry in the well-publicized, but unsuccessful "Vote for Change" concert series.

In April 2003, dozens of fans booed and walked out of a concert in Denver when Eddie impaled a mask of George W. Bush on his microphone stand.

For all this baggage, Pearl Jam can still sell out arenas and stadiums wherever in the world it plays.

"Where have they been?" seems to be the most common question leading up to its sold-out show on Monday. This is the band's first appearance in Edmonton since August 2003, when it drew 4,000 fans to the convention centre. They certainly could've played a bigger building, but in the words of the concert promoter, "They want the kids to mosh."

They did.

Eddie Vedder and his lads didn't grant any daily press interviews for this tour - underground bands do this to remain underground, superstars do it because they're just too busy, take your pick - so we'll have to muddle through the mystery and create a nice story from whole cloth.Or from a bunch of stuff found on the Internet, anyway.

The story of Pearl Jam is the stuff of urban myth. From the rainy burg of Seattle in the early '90s came a new sound called "grunge rock." At least two of the most famous Seattle bands epitomized this style, the other one being Nirvana. They're all dead now: Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden ... Pearl Jam carries the grunge torch alone, though at this point, its music has evolved far beyond the label.

The band formed in 1990 from the ashes of Mother Love Bone, whose singer Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose. Guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament were impressed by the work of a young singer named Eddie Vedder. Long story short: They hit it off, formed a band, scored a deal with Epic Records and changed their name from Mookie Blaylock - to avoid confusion with a basketball player who also happened to be named Mookie Blaylock - to Pearl Jam. Depending on who you believe, the name comes from a hallucinogenic condiment made by Eddie's grandmother; either that or it's a term for semen.

See? Sometimes it's better not to know.

The same could be said of Pearl Jam's lyrics.

Like Nirvana, Pearl Jam was one of the first modern heavy rock bands to incorporate tragedy into its music - and make it not only acceptable, but insanely popular. Its effects can still be heard today in one whiny hard rock band after another. At the time, it was fresh. These were not feel-good party anthems.

Pearl Jam's first hit, Alive, deals with incest and murder. Jeremy was inspired by the true story of a 16-year-old boy who committed suicide in front of his class.

Loss, abuse and confusion also are touched on in Even Flow.

You could become seriously depressed getting too deep into it.

The media jumped on the grunge rock trend with both feet, declaring the music of Pearl Jam, among others, to be "the voice of a disaffected generation." Eddie hit the cover of Time magazine at the height of his fame: Angry rocker, voice of a generation.

You may recall how angry everybody was. Nevermind may have burst open the gates, but Pearl Jam's Ten smashed them down forever.

I dimly remember the band's 1993 concert here as one of the best concerts of the year, if not the decade. The band certainly had a knack for connecting on several levels, viscerally, intellectually, emotionally, dramatically, and by all accounts, Pearl Jam's legendary live show is the real reason it's managed to remain superstars all this time. It's working on a new studio album set to hit sometime this winter, but it scarcely matters how it will sell or what hits it will yield.

Eddie and Co. have clearly discovered the secret of success: Concerts are not simply marketing tools to sell albums.

It's the opposite: albums are "promissory notes" that the band will come back and deliver a killer live concert (which you can then buy at www.pearljam.com at the low, low price of just $10 US each; oh, you clever, clever underground superstars).

By that tally, these guys owe Edmonton a few more.