Pearl Jam, Constantly Touring, Still Commands Genuine Loyalty
With arms waving and voices raised, a packed crowd joined Eddie Vedder singing, "Oh, oh, I'm still alive" at Irving Plaza on Friday night. Mr. Vedder's band, Pearl Jam, is the lone survivor among Seattle's multimillion-selling grunge bands of the early 1990's, and it has held onto its audience in the most old-fashioned way, through constant touring. Its Irving Plaza show was a rare break from an international circuit of arenas and stadiums.
Pearl Jam can count on a following so dedicated that some audience members were already shouting along on songs from "Pearl Jam" (Monkey Wrench/J), the album it released a few days earlier. And it has become that rarity in current rock: a band that commands genuine loyalty without a relentless presence on radio and MTV.
Nowadays, Pearl Jam is an unlikely combination of a beer-soaked metal band and a 1960's-loving jam band. Between songs, Mr. Vedder swigged from a wine bottle and smoked a cigarette, while Mike McCready, on lead guitar, wore a Motörhead T-shirt. (Mr. Vedder's T-shirt, in homage to New York City, commemorated the punk of the Plasmatics.) The audience was largely male and testosterone-fueled. There was crowd-surfing, and one fan jumped onto the floor, and people in his way, from a tall speaker cabinet.
But the audience wasn't singing along to songs about hot girls or wild times. Pearl Jam's songs are ceaselessly troubled by private insecurities and, increasingly, by the state of the world. Its current single, "World Wide Suicide," mourns a soldier's death and rails against endless war; in "Marker in the Sand," Mr. Vedder howled, "Now you got both sides claiming killing in God's name/But God is nowhere to be found, conveniently." Other songs, from its 1996 "Present Tense" to the new "Life Wasted," pondered how to break free of old traumas and guilt, to rise above depression.
The songs are propelled by brawny guitar riffs, but they don't convey the old arena-rock certainty. Odd meters and syncopation chop up the riffs, and songs move restlessly between minor-key verses and major-key choruses, rarely staying triumphal for long. The core of Pearl Jam, which also includes Stone Gossard on rhythm guitar and Jeff Ament on bass, has been together since 1990, and Matt Cameron (formerly of Soundgarden) has been with the band since 1998. They are close-knit as only a long-touring band can be.
Any of Pearl Jam's old metal ponderousness has long since given way to a mercurial, neo-psychedelic mesh. When the band played "Even Flow" from its 1991 debut album, the song was sped up and detoured into a modal jam, with a sirens-and-squiggles guitar lead from Mr. McCready. It sounded far more like the Jefferson Airplane than like early Pearl Jam, even when fans started chanting "Hey! Hey! Hey!" like a football crowd along with it. Pearl Jam isn't giving its arena-rock crowds what would satisfy them. It's giving them something more thoughtful, more audacious and far better.
par thefrenchconnection » Dim Mai 07, 2006 9:07 pm 
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Jeremy est né le 28.04.06 et Fanny le 17.07.09 
comment est le son 
merci Shane .......alors elle sonne comment en live 
(comme d'hab???)
