Afterwards Charles and I watched a quite different music show from the Vienna
Philharmonic concert we’d recorded a week before: Pearl Jam 20, an odd 2011 documentary on the Seattle-based rock
band Pearl Jam whose title is a pun on the fact that they’d been together 20
years as a band when the film was made and their first album was called Pearl
Jam 10. (Their second album was called Vs. and sometimes the title was expressed as “Two Fives”
— i.e., 10 — though in the film the band members refer to the album as
“Versus.”) The film was directed by Cameron Crowe, former rock critic turned
film director, and he recalled that he had moved to Seattle in the early 1980’s
and found the music scene dramatically different than what he’d been used to in
L.A., where the bands were fiercely competitive and tried to elbow each other
out of potential “discovery” by the music business. In Seattle, unlike in L.A.
or New York, Crowe said, the members of various bands were often good friends
and helped each other. Crowe
seemed to think that was unique in rock scenes, though the history of music is
full of city-based “scenes” in which there was a lot of mentoring and mutual
support going on: in New Orleans in the first two decades of the 20th
century (despite the fabled “cutting contests” in which bands competed on the
street, there was also quite a lot of support, as witness the way Louis
Armstrong was mentored by King Oliver and Kid Ory), in Liverpool in the late
1950’s and early 1960’s (before the Beatles broke and the rest of the British
music biz descended on Liverpool like locusts) and definitely in San Francisco in the mid-1960’s (before he had a
record deal himself, Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead came to L.A. to
participate in the Jefferson Airplane’s sessions for their second — and
commercial breakthrough — album, Surrealistic Pillow, and even suggested the title).
Pearl Jam grew out
of an earlier band called Mother Love Bone, featuring a charismatic blond
singer named Andrew Wood who had a major drug problem — he was coming out of
rehab when he joined the band,
which the other members should have taken as a warning. Mother Love Bone lasted
long enough to make one album (for Mercury, in 1989) before Wood died of a
heroin overdose — what I hadn’t known was that he lingered on two days on life
support, kept alive just long enough so his family and friends could see him
one last time before they pulled the plug, which made a macabre impression on
the other two key members of Mother Love Bone, guitarist Stone Gossard and
bassist Jeff Ament. Rather than attempt to continue Mother Love Bone with a
replacement singer, Gossard and Ament briefly went their separate ways and
Gossard started organizing another band, which Ament joined. They also
participated in a side project called Temple of the Dog organized by Chris Cornell, leader of Soundgarden
(actually the first of the late-1980’s/early-1990’s bands from Seattle to sign
with a major label, though since “alternative” or “grunge” weren’t established
as musical categories yet Soundgarden was marketed by their label, A&M, as
heavy metal) and Andrew Wood’s former roommate, which Gossard and Ament in
their interviews in the film seem to regard as a sort of transition project
between Mother Love Bone and Pearl Jam. (I bought the Mother Love Bone album on
CD in the early 1990’s and was startled and rather disappointed, mainly because
Wood’s voice was a typical heavy-metal screech and seemed far less flexible and
dramatic than Eddie Vedder’s.) Eddie Vedder, who would become Pearl Jam’s
singer, was living in San Diego when the band sent him, along with several
other candidates, an instrumental demo tape to which they wanted prospective
singers to add a vocal; they seem to have been impressed with him largely
because he was the only person they were considering who sang in his own style
and did not try to imitate Andrew
Wood. They were expecting a long, slow career buildup, years of playing in
clubs and touring as bigger artists’ opening acts until they developed an
independent following and slowly built up their reputation and their record
sales; instead their first album, 10,
exploded onto the charts thanks largely to their explosive performances on the
1992 Lollapalooza tour. The story is familiar: an early career peak, a gradual
drop-off in record sales — though their concerts consistently drew well
(largely, one suspects, to the hair-raising stage act they did; Vedder in
particular became known for scaling the stage machinery and then leaping from
it into the audience, and throughout those tours the other band members were
worried he’d injure, incapacitate or kill himself) until they picked a (losing)
battle with the Ticketmaster combine, which had grown from a ticket broker to a
giant promoter with exclusive contracts with so many venues it became almost
impossible for a rock band, even one at Pearl Jam’s level of commercial
success, to do a tour without them.
Some of the most grimly amusing parts of
the movie show the mutual incomprehension between Pearl Jam and the people in
the U.S. government when they came to Washington, D.C. to testify that
Ticketmaster was an antitrust-violating monopoly; in one sequence, one of the
people interrogating them asks, “Don’t you have an exclusive recording
contract?,” and one of the band members says that’s an irrelevant question —
alas, missing the chance to make the obvious point: when Pearl Jam wanted to
record, they had several companies offering them contracts and they were able
to choose between them, but when they wanted to do live tours in major venues,
it was Ticketmaster or nothing (or, as the film depicts, shows in
out-of-the-way locations, including an outdoor venue where the show got rained
out; perhaps they should have followed Bessie Smith’s example and rented a
tent). The show also hit other high and low points of Pearl Jam’s career —
including probably the grimmest day in the band’s history, the 2000 rock
festival in Roskilde, Denmark, in which nine people were trampled to death and
three others severely injured when fans crowded too close to the stage and
started stepping on and over each other. (The band members saw what was
happening and tried to get the fans to move back, but too late.) Crowe directs
this film in a nervy, energetic style that seems to be an attempt to reproduce
the energy of Pearl Jam’s music on film, even though he indulges in one of the
most annoying habits of music documentary directors: until the very end he
never lets us see Pearl Jam perform one single song, start to finish. He does
avoid another one of the traps of films like this: he doesn’t include the usual
plethora of talking heads going on and on and on about his subject’s importance; besides the members
of Pearl Jam themselves, the only person extensively interviewed on camera is
Chris Cornell, their longtime associate and friend. Instead there are some
quite amusing clips from people commenting on Pearl Jam in the early 1990’s, in
the flush times of their success — including a couple of excerpts from the late
Andy Rooney’s 60 Minutes
commentary on the grunge scene, in which he said he was tired of hearing
20-something girls say they liked bands like Pearl Jam because they agreed with
them that life was hopeless, and he’d gladly trade ages with them.
Clashes
between the younger generation that likes contemporary music and older people
that look askance on it and can’t understand why anyone would want to listen to it have become axiomatic
(I’ll never forget reading Bruno Walter’s autobiography Theme and
Variations and learning that for a
music-loving German teenager in the late 1890’s the generation gap was over
Wagner — Walter and his generation loved him, his parents and their generation hated him, though the older Germans
generally conceded that Tannhäuser and
Lohengrin were great operas and
reserved their scorn for everything Wagner wrote after that). One recalls the
oddball video issued as part of the complete Buddy Holly boxed set on the
European label Purple Chick, a weird appearance by Holly and his band, the
Crickets, on a New York local show MC’d by Arlene Francis in a patronizing
fashion, telling her viewers that even if they don’t think they like rock ’n’
roll they should listen to it anyway or else they won’t “understand” young
people. Pearl Jam 20 scores in
ways a more conventional music-doc wouldn’t have — Cameron Crowe’s affection
for his subjects and their music is quite obvious — though there are parts of
the movie you’d have to be pretty well up on Pearl Jam trivia to understand
(the film didn’t make it clear that while Pearl Jam recorded an album backing
Neil Young, Mirror Ball, they
were not allowed to take credit
for it as “Neil Young and Pearl Jam”; instead all the Pearl Jam members were
credited merely as individuals, because they and Young were under contract to
different record companies) and a more conventional presentation might have
made part of the history clearer. Still, as an example of a rock band that has
lasted over 20 years with four of the five original members still on board (the
only one they’ve rotated was the drummer; like Bruce Springsteen and, for that
matter, the Beatles, they had to go through several drummers before they found
the right one long-term) and survived a skyrocketing career upswing and the
seemingly inevitable fall, Pearl Jam are worth treasuring — especially as a
reminder that 20 years ago it was still possible to become sensationally
popular in the music business while still writing emotionally sophisticated,
impassioned songs about the darker aspects of human existence. Today all that
sells are boy bands, dance divas and ultra-materialistic rappers!
