Press Pass with Pearl Jam
Alright, I was wrong. Pearl Jam, I am truly sorry. Now let me explain why.
There’s a piece of cautionary advice that says you should never meet your idols, the rationale being that you will only be disappointed. While I have never been fortunate enough to even have that option (apparently the Falls Church News-Press isn’t on Sony’s radar ... yet) I have been able to see Eddie Vedder and co. in concert four times now and before Tuesday’s show at The Venue Formerly Known as MCI Center, I was thinking about a corollary to that never meet your idols rule: Never see your idols in concert after their sixth album.
There’s a decent basis for this. By the time bands have completed their sixth album, a lot has changed, including motivations. They tour for different reasons (like the Find Keith a New Lung Tour of 2003 or the Get Garfunkel Out of Debters Prison shows of 2004) and the passion just isn’t there anymore. Disappointing.
The media at large chimes in, with lackluster reviews and commentary longing for the halcyon days of yesteryear, when the bands were louder, more energetic or didn’t need to take respirator breaks during sets.
Thus I began thinking about Pearl Jam and their “good, but not Ten” albums in Binaural and Riot Act. Then I thought about the idea of paying to listen to the preaching of a political agenda. And so, I doubted. I doubted that any show from now on could be as good as the early shows I attended, or better yet, the stellar taped shows that hooked me on Pearl Jam all those years ago.
Those early Pearl Jam shows, when Dave Abbruzzese was on drums and Matt Cameron was still beating the skins for Soundgarden. Those shows were nothing short of amazing, the sort that leave you only to describe them with such profoundly vague terms as “awesome,” or “so cool.” It’s only later, upon reflection that I’m able to truly articulate what made those shows so good.
The members of Pearl Jam are visceral philosophers. They take the abstract, the complex, the gray and strip it down to the most basic, elemental form possible. By the time they reveal their work to you, your brain doesn’t have time to react, your emotions have already decided for you and you’ve been unconsciously holding your breath and clenching your teeth for the past five minutes, only to exhale with the final note.
“Alive,” “Jeremy,” “Black,” “Go,” “Animal,” “Porch” — the songs are stark and vibrant. Yes, Vedder and the band would dress things up with their poetic rhymes and riffs, but there was just so much clarity. A clarity that leads to confidence as you fall in line with the five to take on the one, whatever it, he, she, they might be.
Time has a way of obscuring that clarity, of adding to the complexity of issues, injecting the ins and outs and what-have-yous. Soon the once-unmistakable path is fogged in, and you are merely shuffling ahead, hands outstretched to ward of unseen obstacles.
It’s a trap that many a band has succumbed to over the years. As I had never found a recent Pearl Jam concert that equaled those early pinnacles, I feared this would be the same tragic end that would meet my musical idols. After Tuesday I’m sure my fears were altogether wrong.
From the first impassioned baritone vocals of opener “Release” to the last growl and cymbal crash of “Rearviewmirror” Pearl Jam had returned reinvigorated, waving their sonic flag and rallying the sold out crowd. They powered through 28 songs in all, 29 counting the pre-opener cover of Cat Stevens’s “Don’t Be Shy,” and never once appeared to be a band of road-weary veterans going through the motions for an ulterior motive.
There were the classics of “Evenflow,” “Better Man” and “Alive,” to the new album’s “World Wide Suicide” and the outsourcing ode to Lou Dobbs, “Unemployable.” The ever-politically-minded Vedder took a pair of jabs at the current Republican leadership in the encores, with a cover of “Masters of War,” and with the penultimate song, Neil Young cover “F*ckin’ Up.”
But it wasn’t the content of the songs that lifted the majority of the crowd off it’s feet, it was the delivery. After the exchange from amplifier to eardrums, it becomes personal.
I realize now that I had been looking at this issue the wrong way. I had been looking at it critically. I’d been reading articles and reviews about Pearl Jam.
In truth, it has never been about Pearl Jam. It’s been about me.
When it felt like my five new brothers and I were marching down that proverbial path I mentioned earlier, I was the one in the lead. When I’m screaming along to “Alive,” I can assure you I’m not thinking of some hideously flawed mother. I doubt many listeners are.
The destination is different for everyone with every track, but with each, there’s something deeper than the lyrics. Pearl Jam’s songs are four minutes and thirty-two seconds of you. Their works are yearbook quotes. They are loves, both first and lost. They are winding, shady roads with the windows down on the way home from school, or whistled hymns as you pull yourself through the breakers.
The songs remind you and inspire you. They fight off age. That’s the way idols work, Pearl Jam or otherwise. Sure, Mick and the Stones might be slurring the words to “Start Me Up” for the 34,506th time, but you remember where you were the first time you heard it and suddenly you’re young again.
For the first tour since 1994, Pearl Jam is playing “Leash,” the final words of which encourage listeners to “delight in our youth.” Who knows, maybe, as the articles suggest, Eddie, Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament, Mike McCready and Mike Cameron again feel young and inspired. At the very least, Tuesday night, I know I did.
