Footnotes and fancy free

Pearl Jam bring their no-image image to Great Woods

by Matt Ashare

It's nothing more than a short footnote at the bottom of page 260 of former Rolling Stone staffer Kim Neely's Five Against One, a rather straight, unsensationalized telling of the Pearl Jam story. But it says more about who Pearl Jam are -- what they've become in the seven years since the release of their debut album -- than any of the adolescent psychodramas singer Eddie Vedder may have endured, imagined, or simply invented by way of accounting for his own volatile emotional life. As Neely recounts, legend has it that a representative from Epic, Pearl Jam's record label, made the mistake of suggesting to a roomful of industry insiders at a 1997 North by Northwest music-conference panel on band management that Pearl Jam had no "image." Susan Silver, the manager of Soundgarden, responded sharply by pointing out what by then was more or less the conventional wisdom on the subject -- "That is the image."

By almost any standard, the Pearl Jam who came to Great Woods last week for a two-night stand at the tail end of their biggest tour since 1994 appeared shorn of all the outward trappings of what the music media and business generally tend to regard as image. No fancy clothes and/or haircuts (except guitarist Mike McCready's newly bleached blond 'do). No flashy multimedia stage props. Just five guys -- Vedder, McCready, bassist Jeff Ament, guitarist Stone Gossard, and former Soundgarden member Matt Cameron on drums -- playing their rock songs in front of a modest backdrop of five Pier One candelabras and a giant plain white sheet. Vedder did wear an Exploited T-shirt the first night, but you got the sense it worked less as a sign of cultural solidarity with the hardcore band than as an ironic anti-fashion statement -- an inside joke told to an audience of outsiders. After all, Pearl Jam may have invited Rancid to open the final shows of this tour, but I didn't see too many mohawks or leather jackets at Great Woods (where Ben Harper was the opener).

No, Pearl Jam are the alternative band whose audience skewed mainstream so quickly and so severely that at this point in their career you wouldn't know they were ever once considered part of any underground movement. There wasn't any crowd surfing or moshing at Great Woods. Not even on Tuesday night, when the band broke out that 1992 mosh-pit classic "Even Flow." Which is not to imply that Pearl Jam fans play by all the rules: if they obeyed the venue's anti-moshing orders, maybe that's just because they were too stoned. There were fewer joints being visibly smoked during Cypress Hill's set at this summer's Smokin' Grooves tour than at Pearl Jam's two shows. As one young woman explained to a friend as they both brushed quickly past on their way to the bathroom before Wednesday night's show, "You just smoke a fuckin' joint and let Eddie take it to the next fuckin' level."

So, apparently, Pearl Jam fans in '98 are down with the chronic. Which is cool, and probably healthier than being repeatedly kicked in the head by crowd surfers (I think even C. Everett Koop would agree with that diagnosis). It made for a rather old-school concert-going experience -- like what I imagine it must have been like to see the Who or the Stones or the Guess Who or Bad Company in the '70s, especially when one woman was spotted baring her breasts in Eddie's general direction at Wednesday's show, a move I haven't seen in these parts since, well, Ozzy in '97. And maybe that (the relatively large quantity of pot smoke and relatively small number of stage props, not the breasts) is why Pearl Jam struck me as being so much older than their seven or eight years together. These guys have gone from being Neil Young's back-up band to being his peers in a remarkably short period of time (they covered his "(Why Do I Keep) Fucking Up" in Tuesday's encore and played a tune from Mirror Ball on Wednesday). And though it was once fashionable to insult them by calling them "classic rock," their no-image image is exactly that -- classic rock -- and no insult at all. Pearl Jam fans -- the 20,000 who filled Great Woods to capacity each night -- certainly have no trouble understanding that.

As anyone who's taken the trouble to visit any number of Pearl Jam Web sites in the past week already knows, the two Great Woods shows were quite different, not just in terms of the songs the band played, but in regard to the way they played them. Tuesday night may have been quantitatively better in the classic-hits department -- the band played all three of the big singles from Ten, "Even Flow," "Jeremy" (which sounds so much like "Even Flow" that I totally understand why they usually play either one or the other), and "Black." But Wednesday night was the hands-down winner in almost every other respect. For starters, the set was longer -- 25 songs to Tuesday's 22. More than that, though, when you're doing the classic-rock thing, it's the qualitative elements that make the difference -- things like tone, inspiration, and all those other intangible unquantifiables that make a concert a Concert.

On Tuesday, Vedder didn't really, to borrow that young woman's expression, "take it to the next fuckin' level" all that well. He seemed a little tired, subdued. In fact, he didn't even bother addressing the audience until the middle of song #11, "Even Flow," when he spoke the words "Alright Boston, this is Mike McCready" by way of introducing an extended guitar jam, catalyzing a storm of applause and hollering that nearly drowned out the solo. Wednesday was a different story, a different Vedder. He talked between songs, dedicating song #4 -- "Going to California," er, I mean "Given To Fly" -- to someone named John, offering a "thank you" before song #8 ("Wishlist"), and pointing out that it was "take-no-prisoners time" when the band kicked into "Even Flow" (#9).

Something seemed to have gotten under his skin -- his movements were more exaggerated and volatile, the tone of his deep voice was more emotional. Indeed, one Internet fan site claims Vedder was spotted crying during "Dissident" (song #6), which I didn't catch. It would have been hard, however, to miss Vedder's explosive, expletive-laced outburst during the encore, during which he admonished the crowd for throwing change on stage, saying, "If anyone sees somebody throwing change on stage, you have my permission to beat the fucking holy shit out of him." It was an awkward way to segue into a song titled "State of Love and Trust," but this is a band who are at their best when they're feeding off Vedder's energy (negative or positive).

That outburst, like the North by Northwest exchange in Five Against One, was just a footnote to a story about pop music and celebrity that really has no simple moral. Vedder, and to a lesser extent his band, has worked hard -- harder than most -- over the past five or six years to reduce the size of Pearl Jam's audience, to keep his songs personal and meaningful, to make music-not-product, and yet to remain a rock band in the most classic sense of playing emotional rock shows to emotional rock audiences. That something so simple could be so difficult probably says a lot about the commodification of culture in the late 20th century. Of course, it's nothing that hasn't been said plenty of times before -- nothing that Kurt Cobain didn't articulate, for example, in his liner notes for Incesticide. But this is Pearl Jam's story, and they're sticking to it.