Best Concerts of the 1990's - RHCP, SP, PJ - Review w/ ED
restlesssoul
Posts: 6,951
I'm sure we all read this when it came out, I'm pretty sure it's from the RS with Ed in the crowd on the cover...but I found it online and thought it was a good read.
Red Hot Chili Peppers with Smashing Pumpkins and Pearl Jam: U.S. Tour
OCTOBER-DECEMBER 1991
Drunk with the music … emotionally vomiting on canvas … climbing onto a balcony or somehow hanging above the crowd, so that it made people stop and think, 'You know what? This guy does not give a fuck about his life,' and that there was some kind of celebration in that."
That is how Eddie Vedder describes what it was like to be onstage in the autumn of 1991 — in front of the wrecking-ball swing of Pearl Jam; facing an audience each night instead of being lost in one; armed with the eleven songs from Ten, his band's new, barely known debut; having just half an hour to connect with the crowd before the Smashing Pumpkins and Red Hot Chili Peppers took over.
"It didn't matter," Vedder says, "what building we played in, how many people were there, who was going to play after. It was just that moment, being completely immersed, spinning around. If I wasn't completely wrecked — scratched up, blood somewhere, torn clothes — I didn't feel like I played hard enough.
"It's interesting to look back," he continues with the amazement and slight discomfort of someone looking at old family photos. "But we had nothing to lose. You had ten years of playing music and never having a crowd. Then all of a sudden you had one, and you wanted to take advantage of that time."
"The main thing I remember," says Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament, "is being backstage and playing our guitars, to the point of sweating before we went onstage, so when we hit the stage, it didn't take us twenty minutes to warm up. We wanted to kick ass as much as we could in thirty minutes."
Pearl Jam were the low band on the totem pole on this tour; the group was Ament and guitarist Stone Gossard's third try at rock & roll glory after earlier stabs with Green River and Mother Love Bone. Fresh out of Chicago, the Pumpkins were the creamy, dreamy middle of the show, touting their debut album, Gish, and drowning the crowds in the thick paisley whorl of Billy Corgan's and James Iha's guitars. The Peppers, from Los Angeles, were veterans, eight years in the game. Their new record, BloodSugarSexMagik, was their best to date: wiry funk with a sharp lyric candor, especially in the album's surprise hit, singer Anthony Kiedis' poignant junkie memoir, "Under the Bridge."
Today, this three-act lineup looks like alt-rock Olympus, the Nineties rock revolution comin' round the mountain. Combined with the first Lollapalooza tour that year and Nirvana's U.S. shows the same fall, the Peppers-Pumpkins-Pearl Jam package pulled the sound and vitality of the American underground into broad daylight. But there was also a little serendipity involved: The Pumpkins and Pearl Jam were on that bill because the acts first invited to support the Peppers — Ice Cube, Lenny Kravitz and Soundgarden — declined.
The tour fell together, Kiedis confesses, "in traditional Chili Pepper last-minute-McGillicuddy fashion." Kiedis saw the Pumpkins performing on MTV's 120 Minutes and thought they had "this very different, beautiful, musical aesthetic," he says. "And [ex-Pepper] Jack Irons called [Peppers bassist] Flea and said, 'I'm friends with these guys, they just finished their first record, would you consider taking them?' Flea listened to the tape — which was Pearl Jam."
At the first stop — the Oscar Mayer Theater in Madison, Wisconsin — the bands introduced themselves to one another before showtime. The Peppers and Pearl Jam quickly bonded over a common love: basketball. Kiedis watched both openers that night and says he immediately knew there was magic in the house: "I remember thinking, 'They really have their shit together for young, first-record bands.' "
Pearl Jam were so new to touring that they were traveling by bus, instead of van, for the first time. They were also breaking in a new drummer, Dave Abbruzzese, as well as their repertoire; the group had recorded Ten before doing any major live work. "From playing the songs live," says Ament, "we wished the record was harder. When I hear live tapes from that time, we seem ridiculously fast."
Inside the acceleration was a dynamic tension closer to Led Zeppelin than to the Dead Boys: an intuitive ebb and flow in Ament's bass and Gossard's and Mike McCready's guitars. Pearl Jam's set lists on the '91 tour — and at the club dates they headlined on off nights, like the memorable November show at CBGB in New York — were packed with that heave and sigh: "Jeremy," "Why Go," "Alive," "Even Flow." The band usually opened with "Oceans" or "Release" but always bid violent sayonara with "Porch," during which Vedder pushed, as he puts it, "the boundaries of insane behavior": diving into the crowd, climbing up stage curtains. In St. Louis, Vedder scrambled, monkeylike, above the audience, along the entire length of the venue's mezzanine balcony.
"It cracked people's shells — and that coolness void," Vedder says. "If they weren't able to respect the songs, they could at least respect the fact that this guy is hanging on a greasy, dusty sprinkler pipe forty feet above their heads — and still has the mike, and he's singing. And if I fell, they caught me. Which was a huge trust exercise."
The Smashing Pumpkins' acid-splashed introspection was a vital respite from the unchained testosterone of Pearl Jam and, later, the Peppers. "They had sort of a feminine dynamic," Kiedis says of the Pumpkins, noting that Corgan "was a very strong presence, even though he was inward and gentle and had a different energy altogether. Even when I wasn't watching, when I was listening while we were getting ready backstage, I could tell that he meant it."
Ironically, the tour was a mixed triumph for the Peppers, who were about to break wide with "Under the Bridge." On that first night in Madison, Kiedis recalls, "every single person in the audience knew the lyrics to 'Under the Bridge.' " Along with a fistful of songs from BloodSugar and the '89 album Mother's Milk, the Peppers got nasty with Stevie Wonder's "Higher Ground" and usually encored with some Hendrix: "Crosstown Traffic" or "Fire." The band did its notorious bare-ass-and-tube-sock routine only "when the mood struck," Kiedis says, and Flea even threw some family values into the show. He brought his young daughter Clara out for an occasional cameo. (At Roseland in New York, she sang "The Alphabet Song.")
But John Frusciante, the Peppers' shy, killer guitar prodigy, was pulling away from the rest of the group. He finally quit, in midtour, the following May, going on a bleak sabbatical that ended in 1998, when he rejoined. "John was having a real hard time, and there was a ton of tension," says Ament, who saw the Peppers' growing estrangement from the sidelines. "I remember that being a downer, just loving those guys so much at the time. And they were playing amazing shows."
The Pumpkins and Pearl Jam would get blindsided by success further down the road: the fatal heroin over dose of the Pumpkins' touring keyboard player, Jonathan Melvoin, in 1996; the subsequent firing of their drummer Jimmy Chamberlin over his own drug use (he returned this year); Pearl Jam's sudden megastardom and Vedder's public battles with fame. "It was a moment in time," Vedder says of his band's overnight celebrity, "that I don't know if we were poised for or" — he laughs — "if we handled it with poise. But there was a lot going on in all our lives. I was coming to terms with the death of my father; there were things I was going through emotionally in regard to that.
"But I remember pouring our hearts and souls into it," he says of the music and shows. "I'm really glad we had that opportunity. And I'm glad we survived it. Because the music continues."
Red Hot Chili Peppers with Smashing Pumpkins and Pearl Jam: U.S. Tour
OCTOBER-DECEMBER 1991
Drunk with the music … emotionally vomiting on canvas … climbing onto a balcony or somehow hanging above the crowd, so that it made people stop and think, 'You know what? This guy does not give a fuck about his life,' and that there was some kind of celebration in that."
That is how Eddie Vedder describes what it was like to be onstage in the autumn of 1991 — in front of the wrecking-ball swing of Pearl Jam; facing an audience each night instead of being lost in one; armed with the eleven songs from Ten, his band's new, barely known debut; having just half an hour to connect with the crowd before the Smashing Pumpkins and Red Hot Chili Peppers took over.
"It didn't matter," Vedder says, "what building we played in, how many people were there, who was going to play after. It was just that moment, being completely immersed, spinning around. If I wasn't completely wrecked — scratched up, blood somewhere, torn clothes — I didn't feel like I played hard enough.
"It's interesting to look back," he continues with the amazement and slight discomfort of someone looking at old family photos. "But we had nothing to lose. You had ten years of playing music and never having a crowd. Then all of a sudden you had one, and you wanted to take advantage of that time."
"The main thing I remember," says Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament, "is being backstage and playing our guitars, to the point of sweating before we went onstage, so when we hit the stage, it didn't take us twenty minutes to warm up. We wanted to kick ass as much as we could in thirty minutes."
Pearl Jam were the low band on the totem pole on this tour; the group was Ament and guitarist Stone Gossard's third try at rock & roll glory after earlier stabs with Green River and Mother Love Bone. Fresh out of Chicago, the Pumpkins were the creamy, dreamy middle of the show, touting their debut album, Gish, and drowning the crowds in the thick paisley whorl of Billy Corgan's and James Iha's guitars. The Peppers, from Los Angeles, were veterans, eight years in the game. Their new record, BloodSugarSexMagik, was their best to date: wiry funk with a sharp lyric candor, especially in the album's surprise hit, singer Anthony Kiedis' poignant junkie memoir, "Under the Bridge."
Today, this three-act lineup looks like alt-rock Olympus, the Nineties rock revolution comin' round the mountain. Combined with the first Lollapalooza tour that year and Nirvana's U.S. shows the same fall, the Peppers-Pumpkins-Pearl Jam package pulled the sound and vitality of the American underground into broad daylight. But there was also a little serendipity involved: The Pumpkins and Pearl Jam were on that bill because the acts first invited to support the Peppers — Ice Cube, Lenny Kravitz and Soundgarden — declined.
The tour fell together, Kiedis confesses, "in traditional Chili Pepper last-minute-McGillicuddy fashion." Kiedis saw the Pumpkins performing on MTV's 120 Minutes and thought they had "this very different, beautiful, musical aesthetic," he says. "And [ex-Pepper] Jack Irons called [Peppers bassist] Flea and said, 'I'm friends with these guys, they just finished their first record, would you consider taking them?' Flea listened to the tape — which was Pearl Jam."
At the first stop — the Oscar Mayer Theater in Madison, Wisconsin — the bands introduced themselves to one another before showtime. The Peppers and Pearl Jam quickly bonded over a common love: basketball. Kiedis watched both openers that night and says he immediately knew there was magic in the house: "I remember thinking, 'They really have their shit together for young, first-record bands.' "
Pearl Jam were so new to touring that they were traveling by bus, instead of van, for the first time. They were also breaking in a new drummer, Dave Abbruzzese, as well as their repertoire; the group had recorded Ten before doing any major live work. "From playing the songs live," says Ament, "we wished the record was harder. When I hear live tapes from that time, we seem ridiculously fast."
Inside the acceleration was a dynamic tension closer to Led Zeppelin than to the Dead Boys: an intuitive ebb and flow in Ament's bass and Gossard's and Mike McCready's guitars. Pearl Jam's set lists on the '91 tour — and at the club dates they headlined on off nights, like the memorable November show at CBGB in New York — were packed with that heave and sigh: "Jeremy," "Why Go," "Alive," "Even Flow." The band usually opened with "Oceans" or "Release" but always bid violent sayonara with "Porch," during which Vedder pushed, as he puts it, "the boundaries of insane behavior": diving into the crowd, climbing up stage curtains. In St. Louis, Vedder scrambled, monkeylike, above the audience, along the entire length of the venue's mezzanine balcony.
"It cracked people's shells — and that coolness void," Vedder says. "If they weren't able to respect the songs, they could at least respect the fact that this guy is hanging on a greasy, dusty sprinkler pipe forty feet above their heads — and still has the mike, and he's singing. And if I fell, they caught me. Which was a huge trust exercise."
The Smashing Pumpkins' acid-splashed introspection was a vital respite from the unchained testosterone of Pearl Jam and, later, the Peppers. "They had sort of a feminine dynamic," Kiedis says of the Pumpkins, noting that Corgan "was a very strong presence, even though he was inward and gentle and had a different energy altogether. Even when I wasn't watching, when I was listening while we were getting ready backstage, I could tell that he meant it."
Ironically, the tour was a mixed triumph for the Peppers, who were about to break wide with "Under the Bridge." On that first night in Madison, Kiedis recalls, "every single person in the audience knew the lyrics to 'Under the Bridge.' " Along with a fistful of songs from BloodSugar and the '89 album Mother's Milk, the Peppers got nasty with Stevie Wonder's "Higher Ground" and usually encored with some Hendrix: "Crosstown Traffic" or "Fire." The band did its notorious bare-ass-and-tube-sock routine only "when the mood struck," Kiedis says, and Flea even threw some family values into the show. He brought his young daughter Clara out for an occasional cameo. (At Roseland in New York, she sang "The Alphabet Song.")
But John Frusciante, the Peppers' shy, killer guitar prodigy, was pulling away from the rest of the group. He finally quit, in midtour, the following May, going on a bleak sabbatical that ended in 1998, when he rejoined. "John was having a real hard time, and there was a ton of tension," says Ament, who saw the Peppers' growing estrangement from the sidelines. "I remember that being a downer, just loving those guys so much at the time. And they were playing amazing shows."
The Pumpkins and Pearl Jam would get blindsided by success further down the road: the fatal heroin over dose of the Pumpkins' touring keyboard player, Jonathan Melvoin, in 1996; the subsequent firing of their drummer Jimmy Chamberlin over his own drug use (he returned this year); Pearl Jam's sudden megastardom and Vedder's public battles with fame. "It was a moment in time," Vedder says of his band's overnight celebrity, "that I don't know if we were poised for or" — he laughs — "if we handled it with poise. But there was a lot going on in all our lives. I was coming to terms with the death of my father; there were things I was going through emotionally in regard to that.
"But I remember pouring our hearts and souls into it," he says of the music and shows. "I'm really glad we had that opportunity. And I'm glad we survived it. Because the music continues."
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