Rearviewmirror

Pearl Jam rose from the ashes of Mother Love Bone to become the most popular American rock & roll band of the '90s. After vocalist Andrew Wood overdosed on heroin in 1990, guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament assembled a new band, bringing in Mike McCready on lead guitar and recording a demo with Soundgarden's Matt Cameron on drums. Thanks to future Pearl Jam drummer Jack Irons, the demo found its way to a 25-year-old San Diego surfer named Eddie Vedder, who overdubbed vocals and original lyrics and was subsequently invited to join the band (then christened Mookie Blaylock after the NBA player). Dave Krusen was hired as the full-time drummer shortly thereafter, completing the original lineup. Renaming themselves Pearl Jam, the band recorded their debut album, Ten, in the beginning of 1991, although it wasn't released until August; in the meantime, the majority of the band appeared on the Andrew Wood tribute project Temple of the Dog. Ten didn't begin selling in significant numbers until early 1992, after Nirvana made mainstream rock radio receptive to alternative rock acts. Soon, Pearl Jam outsold Nirvana, which wasn't surprising -- Pearl Jam fused the riff-heavy stadium rock of the '70s with the grit and anger of '80s post-punk, without ever neglecting hooks and choruses; "Jeremy," "Evenflow," and "Alive" fit perfectly onto album rock radio stations looking for new blood.

Krusen left the band shortly after the release of Ten; he was replaced by Dave Abbruzzese. Pearl Jam's audience continued to grow during 1992, thanks to a series of radio and MTV hits, as well as successful appearances on the second Lollapalooza tour and the Singles soundtrack (Stone Gossard also embarked on a side project called Brad, which released the album Shame in early 1993). Despite their status as rock & roll superstars, the band refused to succumb to the accepted conventions of the music industry. The group refused to release any videos or singles from their second album, 1993's Vs. Nevertheless, it was another multi-platinum success, debuting at number one and selling nearly a million copies in its first week of release. On their spring 1994 American tour, the band decided not to play the conventional stadiums, choosing to play smaller arenas, including several shows on college campuses. Pearl Jam cancelled their 1994 summer tour, claiming they could not keep ticket prices below 20 dollars because Ticketmaster was pressuring promoters to charge a higher price. The band took Ticketmaster to the Justice Department for unfair business practices; while fighting Ticketmaster, they recorded a new album during the spring and summer of 1994. After the record was completed, the group fired Dave Abbruzzese, replacing him with former Red Hot Chili Peppers and Eleven drummer Jack Irons.

Vitalogy, the band's third album, appeared at the end of 1994. For the first two weeks, the album was only available as a limited vinyl release, but the record charted in the Top 60. Once Vitalogy was available on CD and cassette, the album shot to the top of the charts and quickly went multi-platinum. Pearl Jam continued to battle Ticketmaster in 1995, but the Justice Department eventually ruled in favor of the ticket agency. In early 1995, the band recorded an album with Neil Young. Meanwhile, Vedder toured with his wife Beth's experimental band Hovercraft in the spring of 1994 as Stone Gossard founded an independent record company; Mad Season, Mike McCready's side project with Layne Staley of Alice in Chains, released their first album, Above, in the spring of 1995. Comprised entirely of Neil Young songs, Mirror Ball appeared in the summer under Young's name; although the individual members of the band were credited, the name Pearl Jam did not appear on the cover due to legal complications. Pearl Jam released a single culled from the sessions, titled Merkinball and featuring the songs "I Got Id" and "Long Road," in the fall of 1995.

In late summer of 1996, Pearl Jam released their fourth album, No Code. Although the album was greeted with fairly positive reviews and debuted at number one, its weird amalgam of rock, worldbeat, and experimentalism dissatisfied a large portion of their fan base, and it quickly fell down the charts. The record's performance was also hurt by Pearl Jam's inability to launch a full-scale tour, due both to their battle with Ticketmaster and a reluctance to spend months on the road. The band spent most of 1997 out of the spotlight, working on new material; Gossard also released a second album with his side project Brad, titled Interiors. By the end of the year, Pearl Jam had completed a new, harder-rocking record entitled Yield. The album was greeted with enthusiastic reviews upon its February 1998 release, but its commercial fortunes weren't quite as clear cut. While their sizable cult embraced the album, sending it to number two its first week of release, Yield quickly slipped down the charts. Pearl Jam supported the record with a full-scale arena tour in the summer of 1998, issuing the concert LP Live on Two Legs at the end of the year; Jack Irons did not participate due to poor health, and was replaced by ex-Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron. In 1999, Pearl Jam scored an unlikely pop radio smash with their cover of the J. Frank Wilson oldie "Last Kiss," originally released as the seventh in a series of fan club-only singles that had also featured several incongruous covers in the past. Demand from fans and radio programmers resulted in the nationwide release of "Last Kiss," and it eventually became the band's highest-charting pop hit to date, peaking at number two and going gold. The group returned in 2000 with the Tchad Blake-produced Binaural. In order to circumvent bootleggers, their subsequent European and American tours were recorded in full and released in an unprecedented series of double-CD sets, each of the 72 volumes featuring a complete concert.

Joe Strummer once claimed that the Clash had stardom in their hands, then they dropped it on the floor and broke it. Pearl Jam took the opposite tact: they purposely left stardom behind. Nirvana may have ushered in the age of grunge and alternative rock, but Pearl Jam were the biggest band in the land during the first half of the '90s, dominating radio airwaves, MTV, and college dorms alike. Most bands would have embraced such widespread acclaim, but the quintet bristled at this vein, and started to restlessly explore new musical territory, a move that eventually whittled their fan base down to just the hardcore by the beginning of the next decade. That hardcore following was still large, and the band could still have the occasional surprising crossover hit, like the 1999 cover of J. Frank Wilson's teen tragedy classic "Last Kiss" that went to number two on the Billboard charts, but they were no longer the biggest band in the land.

Spanning two discs, Rearviewmirror (Greatest Hits 1991-2003) chronicles that journey and it does an expert job not only of capturing the moment when Pearl Jam were monstrously popular, but proving that they still turned out good music even when they were fading from the spotlight. Unlike most career-spanning, multi-disc retrospectives, Rearviewmirror does not emphasize latter-day albums in order to achieve a sense of balance that's inherently phony. Of the 33 tracks, only 12 date from the post-Vitalogy era, which means that the bulk of the collection concentrates on their early-'90s heyday, and nearly every radio hit and concert staple is here, outside of the Victoria Williams cover "Crazy Mary" and "Tremor Christ." While their presence would have been nice, they're not terribly missed, partially because such non-LP cuts like "State of Love and Trust," "I Got ID," "Last Kiss," and "Man of the Hour" are collected here, but mainly because the compilation plays so well.

The songs are divided into the "Up Side" and "Down Side," meaning the first disc has all the rockers and the second disc has all the ballads. At first, this seems like a questionable strategy, since it's usually preferable to have all the hits follow in chronological order, but what makes this work is that the songs on each disc are presented in chronological order, and they sustain their mood quite well (this is partially helped by Brendan O'Brien's new mixes of "Once," "Alive," and "Black," which retain the feeling of the original songs but remove much of the dated glossy sheen in the production). Distilled to their hits and anthems, all of Pearl Jam's best qualities shine through and they sound bigger, better, and frankly more coherent than they do on their full-length albums. And that's why Rearviewmirror is a cut above most '90s hits collections: it not only gives casual fans all the hits, but it captures why the band mattered, while providing a better listen than their proper LPs in the process.

— Stephen Thomas Erlewine

As many others have done this year, the other night I went to see the Pixies' reunion tour. Next week, the Nirvana box set is finally released, as is a new two-disc expanded version of Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral; Low's upcoming Sub Pop record kicks off with a track whose rhythm section and vocal melody sound like a miniature version of Alice in Chains; Q magazine named The Red Hot Chili Peppers the Best Act in the World Today at its 2004 awards show; TV commercials for Green Day's American Idiot reminds us that 10 years ago they released Dookie; and now Pearl Jam are lionized with the two-disc, 33-track, best-of album, Rearviewmirror. I'd be frightened that we're about to undergo a full-blown 90s alternarock revival—an era depressingly and backhandedly praised as much for what it was not (e.g. the hair metal that it "kicked out," or the nu-metal that some of it slowly morphed into) than the music it produced. But then, it never went away, did it?

In recent years, Billy Corgan's Zwan, a reunited Jane's Addiction, the Scott Weiland-fronted Velvet Revolver, and the Chris Cornell/Rage Against the Machine mashup Audioslave have released records to varying degrees of commercial success. Prior to that, the nascent sounds of grunge remained among the dominant North American hard rock templates throughout the 90s and into this decade, living on in a lineage that extended from its Seattle roots through Bush and Candlebox to Creed and Nickleback.

Oddly, Pearl Jam have remained a constant since the days when 120 Minutes graduated to Alternative Nation, transitioning from stadium fillers to one of American rock's largest and most beloved cult bands, a Grateful Dead for the great washed. After deftly turning their backs on fame just as much of the public seemed poised to turn on them, Pearl Jam cultivated the unwavering support of a cabal of devotees who followed the band across a string of studio albums that casual observers have likely forgotten—No Code, Yield, Binaural, and Riot Act—and the almost comical release of every live show from their 2000 tour, a move that, depending on your level of cynicism, was either a thank you or an unintentional fuck you to their lemmingesque fanbase. Musically, Pearl Jam slightly spiced up their sound over the course of a decade, adding a few Eastern-tinged delicacies and some garage-rock snackfood to their typical meat-and-potatoes diet. By the time Creed became a permanent fixture on late-90s rock radio, the Florida band sounded as much like Pearl Jam as, well, Pearl Jam themselves.

Rearviewmirror divides the band's career into an "up side" and a "down side"—the former are the earnest rockers, the latter are the earnest ballads—although the monikers would also have been appropriate had they arranged the record chronologically. The "down side" to Pearl Jam's career allowed many people to romanticize the group's shift away from the spotlight as one purely of choice, and the band has since been characterized by honesty, good intentions, and yeoman's work, the sort of qualities that often make for turgid, sometimes rote, faceless music.

In truth, Pearl Jam were always planted squarely in the middle of the road. While Nirvana was characterized by punk's sound as much as its ethos, Soundgarden had one foot in contemporary metal, Smashing Pumpkins mixed 80s goth and new wave in with their glam, and Green Day, NIN, and the RHCP were clearly creatures of the post-punk era, Pearl Jam was always a classic rock band, the one alt-nation superstar that completely ignored both punk and its aftermath. Pearl Jam were all solos and riffs and lighters-aloft, arena-rock sentiment; like so many 60s rockers, they looked to the Asian sub-continent for their first flirtations with "growth" and "maturity"; they even cuddled up to the "right" rock 'n' roll architects (Pete Townshend, Bob Dylan, Neil Young). To claim Pearl Jam as the greatest rock band of our time—as many listeners and critics do—is virtually a negation of the past 30 years of guitar-based music, a relieved sigh that the values of the 70s aren't completely lost.

And... that works for a lot of people. Pearl Jam struck chords within listeners like few of their contemporaries. Those diehards probably looked at the Rearviewmirror tracklist and chuckled, wondering why it didn't include this rarity or that B-side (it does have a few key ones, e.g. "Yellow Ledbetter") or a handful of what the album rock stations used to call "deep cuts." This comp isn't for them, though; it's for the rest of us, and a lot of listeners will likely glance at it, wonder where the hell "Crazy Mary" is, and consider it a handy career-spanner—all the Pearl Jam they'll ever need. If they buy it, those listeners will likely be surprised that—despite some non-descript titles ("Corduroy", "Go", "Immortality", the title track)—they remember most of these tracks, and despite slipping well below the radar, the band has, in many ways, improved over the years.

The record seemingly begins the same way as their debut, Ten, but this version of "Once" (like "Alive" and "Black") has been slightly re-mixed by Brendan O'Brien. Hardly radical and barely noticeable, the new versions buff the shine from the originals, actually improving three of the band's better, more melodic early tracks. On the album's first disc, the band's years of popularity—through third album Vitalogy—are only highlighted by the Singles track "State of Love and Trust" and the forceful "Not For You".

A lot of the other big guns are better left unremembered: The five-against-one mutterings of "Animal"; "Evenflow", "Rearviewmirror", and "Go" plod along, monuments to the appropriateness of the tag "grunge"; "Spin the Black Circle" is their first step toward the clumsy romanticism of bygone days; and "Jeremy" remains as painful as ever. Perhaps that last track is only truly powerful when coupled with images of Vedder's emotive pantomimes, hard-scrawled title cards that say things like "the serpent was subtil [sic]" and "90210", or a shirtless boy both wrapped in the American flag and standing in front of a wall of flames and crouching in the woods in front of an overblown photo of a teeth-baring fox...

On the up side, the garage-esque "Do the Evolution" is either over-the-top fun or completely ridiculous, depending on whether or not you believe Pearl Jam actually possess a sense of humor (in this case, I think it's the former), and "I Got Shit" (formerly "I Got ID"), "Save You", and "Hail, Hail" have a few more shades than the gray of the band's grunge era.

On the way down, things are also scattered. Like they do on the early rockers, Vedder's vocal diversions, tics, and lack of enunciation occasionally move from exaggerated emoting into self-parody (see, in particular, "Given to Fly"). His voice is still the band's hallmark sound—a mealy-mouthed, gravely style that influenced a decade of really, really shitty music—and it's still fun to impersonate; unfortunately, on pain-wracked attempts to convey more universal emotions (the glib "Elderly Woman Behind a Counter in a Small Town", the lyrical disaster "Wishlist", "Better Man", the awkward cover of "Last Kiss"), it's not very fun to listen to.

Even when Eddie's opening his mouth, the tunes are often excruciatingly drab dirges—"Immortality" and "Nothingman" are the biggest offenders. (Yet ironically, the most overtly dirge-like track—the almost mantra-esque, Eastern-tinged "Who You Are"—is one of the set's most effective.) Elsewhere, the patient "Off He Goes", "Nothing As It Seems", and "Man of the Hour" and the solipsistic "I Am Mine" all carry a more weathered, wise sense of self, and these tracks greatly upstage the more youthful and clumsy neo-emoisms of the band's better known songs—in particular its ballads.

In some ways, it makes sense that Pearl Jam are improving as they slip further from the gaze of contemporary listeners and into the neolithic caves of mid-70s classic rock. For all the harm it unwittingly did to rock radio—and for as comical as it can be in its most unchecked moments—Vedder's voice is powerful and can even be captivating. The more considered and time-tested tones it now carries fit the band's more subtle shading.

In full ham-fisted stadium rock mode, Pearl Jam now oddly seem miles away from Nirvana, still the best of their one-time Seattle contemporaries. Instead, they're not-so-distant cousins to the denim brigade, the faceless 70s arena rockers who dutifully punched time clocks and produced no-nonsense, sometimes hook-filled rock. Today, Pearl Jam seems bruised, ever so slightly more adventurous, and, thanks to the devotion of their fans, they're afforded the chance to dress up as rock iconoclasts rather than take a slide toward VH1-ready adult contemporary balladry. It's like punk never happened.

— Scott Plagenhoef, Pitchfork