Scot and Jeff talk to Josh Jordan about Pearl Jam.
Introducing the Band
Your hosts Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) and Jeff Blehar (@EsotericCD) with guest Josh Jordan, writer for various outlets. Follow Josh on Twitter at @NumbersMuncher.
Josh’s Musical Pick: Pearl Jam
Break out the flannels — it’s time for the gang to tackle a long overdue episode on Pearl Jam, the most durable (and arguably best — sorry, Nirvana fans) band of the famed Seattle grunge era of the ’90s. But Pearl Jam were so much more than just a “grunge” act, and have remained consistently great (as well as a legendarily top-shelf live act with a fanatical cult-like following) all the way up to the present day. Josh is almost a ‘ringer’ of sorts — a bona-fide megafan who has been to over 70 Pearl Jam shows since the mid-’90s. Josh talks about how he, like most people whose adolescence came during the early Nineties, got into Pearl Jam at the jump via Ten and immediately started using Eddie Vedder’s “poetry” in middle school English class. Jeff was of a similar vintage, but his fandom was interrupted: he fell off after Vitalogy when he discovered The Beatles and classic rock in high school, and only returned to them years later thanks to the fortuitous purchase of the well-curated compilation Rearviewmirror.
Ten, Vs., and Pearl Jam’s role in the Seattle grunge scene
Scot quickly covers the origin story of Pearl Jam: Seattle act Mother Love Bone collapses when its lead singer Andrew Wood dies of an overdose, surviving members Jeff Ament (bass) and Stone Gossard (rhythm guitar) recruit hugely talented lead guitarist Mike McCready into the fold, and a demo tape from San Diego-based sensitive surfer bro Eddie Vedder finds its way into their hands. Vedder was brought into the band just in time to add lyrics and lead vocals to a series of songs already written by Gossard and Ament, the result was Ten (1991) and the rest is history.
Perhaps surprisingly, the gang isn’t particularly enthusiastic about Ten, which most casual fans regard as Pearl Jam’s greatest album (it is certainly their most famous, one that nationally defined the sound of the grunge revolution). Jeff violently hates its quasi-hair metal anthems (even “Even Flow,” a great song, sounds like sludge on the record). He considers “Black” to be faux-sensitive tripe and is authentically offended by the terribleness of “Deep,” though he relents when it comes to “Jeremy” and the straight ahead dash of “Once.” Scot isn’t much more complimentary, noting that so much of PJ’s music is compulsively listenable but he never feels the need to return to Ten. Even Josh isn’t an enormous fan, though he defends many of these songs as live juggernauts (particularly “Release” and “Porch”). Josh notes that the album’s production (which feels more “late Eighties” than grunge) is the primary culprit, and that producer Brendan O’Brien (who joins the band on Vs.) was a savior for the group.
The gang is vastly more positive about Vs. (1993), an album that looms nearly as large in the legend of early ’90s grunge as Ten and which is approximately twenty times better-sounding and more consistent. Jeff calls this their “classic rock album”: Brendan O’Brien’s crisp production blasts away all of the chintzy reverb heard on Ten and the band comes up with a set of massively catchy, memorable hard-rock tunes. Jeff prefers the remarkably sensitive lyrical conceit of “Daughter” (Vedder writing from the point of view of a young girl) and the hilarity of “Glorified G” — if you’re gonna work political messages into your music, this is the way to do it: with a smile. Scot is all about the titanic chorus of “Dissident” and the propulsiveness of drummer Dave Abbruzzese’s “Go.” And as the gang remarks on how an album with so much cursing on it managed to get flood-the-zone radio airplay, Josh tells the story of trying to convince his dad that Eddie Vedder wasn’t singing exactly what he is actually singing on “Leash” by futilely showing him the CD’s c