Well, bought the rag...interesting. It does seem a bit forced on NME's part to lay the past to rest. But, it's positive to the band so i'm pretty pleased with it.
I did laugh when they wrote about how Jeff ran after NME's taxi to give them a copy of Deranged Diction's record!!!! Good ol Jeff never stops putting out!!
I did flirt with buying this the other day but then I saw the bands they raved about in there were called stuff like Dogpoo Coefficient, Rent The Urn, Wobblemongle and so on... then I remembered that even when I was stoned and vacant at uni the only interesting bit was doing the crossword whilst we waited for 15 to 1 to start. It's basically the muso equivalent of 'shoot' magazine.
Mind you, I seen to remember a quite positive review of Light Years.
I bought it and was really disapointed with it. All they seemed to want to do was talk about Kurt Cobain. FFS, the guy was an idiot, he shot himself, get over it. What the hell have PJ got to do with them anyway? If you want to write a nice peice on the 'tragedy' of Kurt's life then fine but in an interview with Pearl Jam I want to read about Pearl Jam. Why is it that every article I read about Pearl Jam has to bang on about Kurt Cobain and Nirvana? Ok they were from the same city and era but if I read something about the Beatles it's unual to read about The Stones or The Who in such detail in the same article. So why are PJ and Nirvana unseparable, its not like they were all that similar musically or even friends. Yes Kurt slagged of PJ but they weren't the only band he didn't like. To me it just felt that it was only a small portion of the article was actually anything to do with their chat with the guys.
I just long for the day when I can read about PJ and not have to read about Nirvana at the same time.
Such is the ever-polarising nature of Pearl Jam-and, let’s be honest, much of that is their dismissal by major label recording artist Kurt Cobain as “corporate rock careertists” echoing down the ages – there are people who won’t read this article just because they’ll see the words ‘Pearl’ and ‘Jam’ on the page. This is a shame; nearly 20 years into their career, the Seattle band have long embodied much of what makes rock’s alternative flipside good.
Currently the world’s biggest unsigned band (kinda: out of contract with Epic, they’re now releasing their records independently in the US), they’ve got a new album – their ninth, ‘Backspacer’, out September 21 – that backs the aforementioned claim up. A lean, punchy, garagey collection of rock’n’roll songs (the best of the bunch being a furious new wave pop song called ‘Got Some’) and a couple of career-best ballads (‘Just Breathe’, ‘The End’) that clocks in at just over 30 minutes, I think it’s their best since 1998’s ‘Yield’. Some of the people who won’t read this article would enjoy it; it’s a shame that what amounted to a playground spat (a subject Cobain was familiar with, having written ‘School’ on Nirvana’s ‘Bleach’ about the petty scene politics of nearby Olympia’s hip elite), should haunt the career of a band who’ve proved their counter-culture credentials time and time again.
Remember that this is a fiercely principled band, who didn’t tour the US between 1994 and 1997 after going to war with touring firm Ticketmaster, dogged in an (ultimately unsuccessful) legal battle over unfair ticket pricing. A band who run their Wishlist Foundation, the charity that distributes monies from their record sales and fan donations to various human rights, environmental and pro-choice groups, on the same floor of their north Seattle warehouse HQ that houses their management and fan club. This – in and among the six surfboards with portraits of each member and their manager; the giant cut out letters from the ‘Ten’ sleeve; Perspex box upon Perspex box of fanmail; portraits of Pete Townshend and Joe Strummer; an Elton John-themed pinball machine; a giant Ramones flag given to the band by the late Johnny Ramone; disinfectant cubes of George W Bush’s face in the urinals – is where NME’s meeting with the five-piece band takes place today, taking the shape of an hour-and-a-half long interview session.
This comprises 30 minutes with guitarists Mike McCready and Stone Gossard (and the latter’s golden retriever, Bessie), and affable pair who talk a lot about, well, guitars and so won’t feature much more in this ideology-slanted piece, 30 minutes with singer Eddie Vedder (at least 10 minutes of which is taken up with fannish but not particularly interesting Who anecdotes he makes us promise not to print), and 30 minutes with old/new drummer Matt Cameron (the former Soundgarden man has drummed with the band since 1998, yet the relationship stretches back to 1990 Pearl Jam/Soundgarden hybrid Temple of the Dog). The drummer sits alongside bassist Jeff Ament. You join us 15 minutes into conversation with the latter pair. We’re talking about grunge.
Well, when in Rome…
“The thing is, Kurt was basically representing Mark (Arm, Mudhoney frontman and, alongside Gossard and Ament, a former member of Pearl Jam precursor band Green River) at that time, and he’d already said that stuff,” recalls the bass player. “The only reason it really hurt was because it brought all that stuff up again and reminded me that my friendship was Mark was still broken. I couldn’t really give a shit what Kurt said, I didn’t even know him, even though I fucking loved Nirvana – especially when Dave Grohl joined – but the few times I tried to be friendly with Kurtm he didn’t really respond.”
What else can you remember about that time?
“I enjoyed the fact that our music scene and our bands were getting attention,” muses Cameron. “But the downside was that the press didn’t always get it right. I was kinda creeped out when they were saying that grunge killed all the hair metal bands – I had a couple of run-ins with those guys over that stuff – but I knew our scene was better than the LA hair metal bullshit…”
“I was like, ‘Bring it…” adds Ament.
“…and I guess it was easy for some and harder for others,” continues the drummer. “Like the Eddies and the Kurts and the Chris Cornells – it happened really quickly for those guys and they might not have been prepared for the amount of attention they received.”
“I lament that there weren’t more Seattle writiers who were reporting what went into the media at that time,” says Ament. “There were people around who knew the real stories and the people who ended up writing about it, whether it was Everett True or Michael Azzerrad or whoever, those guys didn’t know what the fuck was going on here, yet they were the so-called historians of what was going on. They didn’t even turn up until 1990 – we’d been doing what we were doing for eight years before that in the punk rock scene! That was super-irritating.” Aments sighs.
“And the whole Nirvana/Pearl Jam feud and people like Courtney Love getting involved. Like, who the fuck was that woman? She knew nothing about what was going on! Usually it was people just trying to start shit. Like, I didn’t know much about Nirvana and they didn’t know much about us. I’d seen them a couple of times, I doubt Kurt ever saw us play a full show…”
OK, so they were never quite Beat Happening (talking about 1991 debut ‘Ten’, Ament reveals he played – spit! – fretless bass on all but two songs on the record), and it would be revisionist to suggest they ever were. But you can certainly make a claim that those who’ve judged them purely on the basis of some headline-grabbing Seattle scene gossip have missed out on some great rock music these last 18 years. Pearl Jam were always a different proposition to Nirvana, Mudhoney, the Melvins and their punk rock ilk. They had guitar solos – really, really long guitar solos – and owned more to the red, white and blue dyed rawk of Neil Young than the aforementioned trio’s beloved Black Flag. Whether they like it or not, they were more like “the LA hair metal bullshit”, only with integrity, than anything else that was around in the Pacific Northwest – “when the grunge tag came attached to us I thought it was hilarious,” says Ament. “If we had one goal it was not to be that” – and so to judge them by the punk rock rule book is like bemoaning that frogs can’t fly; it was never in their DNA to do so. Don’t like them because you don’t like guitar solos? Fine. Don’t like them because Kurt Cobain didn’t? Well, that’s silly….
Thing is, for a long time, it seemed like Pearl Jam didn’t really like themselves. In the wake of their dispute with Ticketmaster and after their exile from press and promotion post-‘Ten’, not even making a music video for most of ‘90’s, Rolling Stone magazine wrote astutely that the band had “spent a decade deliberately tearing their own fame apart”. It was as if – despite all that made the band special and unique: tempered grace, a thirst for beauty, the fact that unlike so many musicians from the area they weren;t so mired in K records dogma they could use a phrase like “sonic exploration” without blushing – they themselves felt they had to prove they were something other than “corporate rock careerists”. With their actions, yes (in all three interview sessions, all of the band will reluctantly concur that sometimes they’ve made things harder for themselves than they necessarily had to. To illustrate: upon taking the photos that accompany these words, our photographer asked if they;d recreate the high-five from the ‘Ten’ sleece to commemorate the record’s re-release, but as if they suspected NME had some sinister agenda, they responded as if we’d asked them to gargle poo, rather than just the bit of fun it was intended as), but also with the music itself. This is the kind of theory that bands normally write off as music journalists thinking too much, In this case, Ament agrees.“You know, I actually thought that when Pearl Jam started writing some more punk rock type songs. I was in a hardcore band (the bassist will later chase after our taxi to give us a copy of his recently reissued old hardcore band Deranged Diction’s first demos) and I wanted to be more than that. Even with the first record, on a song like ‘Oceans’, we were trying to just be a great band…but that could stretch. It’s like when we wrote ‘Spin the black circle’ (the band’s 1994 ode to the death of vinyl from third album ‘Vitalogy’). I was like, ‘Ugh!’. I can play the entire Dead Kennedys back catalogue! I didn’t really want to make music like that at the time.”
All of which leads on to what’s truly exciting about ‘Backspacer’. See, there might not be a guitar solo in sight – there’s some guitar licks, but hardly the noodle-rock opus that sits in the middle of, say, ‘Alive’ – but for perhaps the first time, the new record seems like the halfway house between all that ever made them great (and made the pun rock purists tut) and the notion of a contemporary unmainstream rock band that the members feel comfortable with today. It’s a harmonious compromise, the best of both worlds and an example of what a huge rock band might be if they didn’t particularly fancy treading the same route as U2. They might balk at the comparison, but they’re really not unlike the Grateful Dead; where that band encouraged fans to bootleg their live shows, Pearl Jam instead make mixing desk-recorded CDs of their live shows available to fans within 24 hours of the gig’s final note being played. And like Jerry Garcia and co did, they do what rock bands are supposed to do: unfashionably play gigs, and lots of them (although the fact their forthcoming O2 Arena show sold out in just nine minutes suggests they don’t come to these shores nearly enough). They rarely stray out of their fanbase, yet that fanbase is huge and global enough to mean that, more or less, they’re free, creatively at the very least, to do whatever they want to, Pearl Jam seem comfortable with themselves-it’s a freedom a chain-smoking Eddie Vedder (NME: “Mind if I smoke?” Vedder: “I’d prefer it”) enjoys.
“You’d think this is the most optimistic Pearl Jam have ever sounded?” he laughs. “Well, it’s about time, isn’t it?” The singer reluctantly aggress that ‘Backspacer’ is an optimistic record, yet insists it’s important for the band not to lose their “edge”. “It wasn’t contrived – it wasn’t like we said, ‘Let’s make this more positive’ or anything – but it helps that we’re a really good band. It’s nice when things can be unspoken, when you don’t have to have all these banal conversations about what things could or couldn’t be and you can just play. It’s one of the benefits of being in a band for such a long time; I’m surprised more bands don’t do it.”
He pauses. Takes a drag of his American Spirit. Says a bunch of stuff about the change in American administration that, while bang on the money, you’ve heard a million time before and I won’t bore you with again here. But then Eddie Vedder hits the nail on the head squarely and soundly.
“The way I see it, life is precious. We’re on this spinning ball in the middle of the universe and it doesn’t make any sense and it shouldn’t be happening. It’s hard to grasp the beauty of the situation. But if you can’t find something that’s great about all that, well, I feel sorry for you.”
Vedder’s utterance is more or less where I’m getting at with all this. There’s not many people who ever met, loved or liked Kurt Cobain who’d now agree with the mantra of “It’s better to burn out than to fade away” he stole from Neil Young as a pay-off to his suicide note, and despite being the Young-ites they are, Pearl Jam’s entire career seems based on doing exactly the opposite. Back when Nirvana were presenting working album titles to Geffen of ‘I hate myself and want to die’, Pearl Jam were running around the world’s stages with Vedder singing “I-ha, I-ha, I’m still aliveeeeeee”- while Pearl Jam maybe took the Nirvana’s singer’s taunts to heart, you can’t help but wish that Kurt had listened to Eddie’s words too.
See, after spending an hour and a half in the proud five-piece’s HQ – a shrine to their existence and achievements, a palace of creativity and being – you’re reminded that there are definitely worse things than being corporate rock careerists…
Of course, Nirvana fans seem more interested in the continued comparison than us PJ fans, maybe because we've moved on to bigger and better things and they are always gonna go no further than 1994. Therefore, the continued dialogue is tedious, so the first half of the article is almost redundant for me, but the second half is golden. Thanks again.
This seemed to be the nicest thing they have ever written, but the Kurt & Nirvana comparisons are very tired. Will be interesting what the review is going to be like for the o2 show & Backspacer. I will never forget when they reviewed VS & said Daughter sounded like MR Big, anyone remember them? That is when i realised they had no idea what they were on about, but dont let the truth get in the way of selling magazines.
Eastern Creek 95,Syd 1 98,Bris 2 98, Syd 1&2 03, Reading Fest 06, Bris 1 06, London 09, Hyde Park 10, Gold Coast BDO 14 Budapest 22 Krakow 22 Amsterdam 22 St Paul 1&2 23 Chicago 1&2 23 Chicago 1&2 24 New York 1 24 Philly 1&2 24 Boston 1&2 24 Gold Coast 24 Melbourne 1 24 Sydney 1&2 24
Thanks for posting it, Wash!
NME could publish a better article. The band is almost 20 years old and the press still loves to talk about Nirvana X Pearl Jam and Grunge.
As a fan I would like to know more about the new album, the future etc.
Is that Brüno on the cover?
Let's say knowledge is a tree, yeah.
It's growing up just like me.
Ow man, that NME article is such a crap piece of writing!
Too many things that annoy me in that article to post here.
Clearly, the writer only has TEN (besides all the Nirvana albums I think..) and knows nothing about the evolvement of Pearl Jam. I wasted my money on this NME issue...sigh.
Ow man, that NME article is such a crap piece of writing!
Too many things that annoy me in that article to post here.
Clearly, the writer only has TEN (besides all the Nirvana albums I think..) and knows nothing about the evolvement of Pearl Jam. I wasted my money on this NME issue...sigh.
and yet the writer said its their best album since Yield... so he does have more than TEN... :?
its actually a very supportive article.
oh scary... 40000 morbidly obese christians wearing fanny packs invading europe is probably the least scariest thing since I watched an edited version of The Care Bears movie in an extremely brightly lit cinema.
Thanks for typing that out, wash! (The linked image scans didn't work)
Interesting read indeed.
:: Caesaria - Israel 1995, Wembley 1996, Manchester 2000, Leeds 2006, Manchester 2009, Manchester 2012, Manchester 2012 (EV), Leeds 2014, London 2018 ::
Comments
I did laugh when they wrote about how Jeff ran after NME's taxi to give them a copy of Deranged Diction's record!!!! Good ol Jeff never stops putting out!!
2007 ░▒▓ London, Dusseldorf, Copenhagen, Nijmegen
2009 ░▒▓ Manchester, London
2010 ░▒▓ Hyde Park
*§* Music is all the juice i'll need *§*
www.cluthelee.com
www.cluthe.com
Mind you, I seen to remember a quite positive review of Light Years.
I just long for the day when I can read about PJ and not have to read about Nirvana at the same time.
That's the NME for you I suppose
Rant over, thanks for listening!
Wembley 07
Shepherds Bush
Manchester
Why didn’t Kurt get help for his shit? Or go to an isolated island to get away from it all?
I don’t expect an answer, I’m just saying.
thanks for summing up the crappy article.
2007 ░▒▓ London, Dusseldorf, Copenhagen, Nijmegen
2009 ░▒▓ Manchester, London
2010 ░▒▓ Hyde Park
*§* Music is all the juice i'll need *§*
thanks, wash!!
www.cluthelee.com
www.cluthe.com
Just trying to upload a scan, which might work. If it doesn't, then I'll type it up!
2007 ░▒▓ London, Dusseldorf, Copenhagen, Nijmegen
2009 ░▒▓ Manchester, London
2010 ░▒▓ Hyde Park
*§* Music is all the juice i'll need *§*
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2508/3821166716_457cb36c34_b.jpg
2007 ░▒▓ London, Dusseldorf, Copenhagen, Nijmegen
2009 ░▒▓ Manchester, London
2010 ░▒▓ Hyde Park
*§* Music is all the juice i'll need *§*
you're awesome!! thanks!
www.cluthelee.com
www.cluthe.com
Currently the world’s biggest unsigned band (kinda: out of contract with Epic, they’re now releasing their records independently in the US), they’ve got a new album – their ninth, ‘Backspacer’, out September 21 – that backs the aforementioned claim up. A lean, punchy, garagey collection of rock’n’roll songs (the best of the bunch being a furious new wave pop song called ‘Got Some’) and a couple of career-best ballads (‘Just Breathe’, ‘The End’) that clocks in at just over 30 minutes, I think it’s their best since 1998’s ‘Yield’. Some of the people who won’t read this article would enjoy it; it’s a shame that what amounted to a playground spat (a subject Cobain was familiar with, having written ‘School’ on Nirvana’s ‘Bleach’ about the petty scene politics of nearby Olympia’s hip elite), should haunt the career of a band who’ve proved their counter-culture credentials time and time again.
Remember that this is a fiercely principled band, who didn’t tour the US between 1994 and 1997 after going to war with touring firm Ticketmaster, dogged in an (ultimately unsuccessful) legal battle over unfair ticket pricing. A band who run their Wishlist Foundation, the charity that distributes monies from their record sales and fan donations to various human rights, environmental and pro-choice groups, on the same floor of their north Seattle warehouse HQ that houses their management and fan club. This – in and among the six surfboards with portraits of each member and their manager; the giant cut out letters from the ‘Ten’ sleeve; Perspex box upon Perspex box of fanmail; portraits of Pete Townshend and Joe Strummer; an Elton John-themed pinball machine; a giant Ramones flag given to the band by the late Johnny Ramone; disinfectant cubes of George W Bush’s face in the urinals – is where NME’s meeting with the five-piece band takes place today, taking the shape of an hour-and-a-half long interview session.
This comprises 30 minutes with guitarists Mike McCready and Stone Gossard (and the latter’s golden retriever, Bessie), and affable pair who talk a lot about, well, guitars and so won’t feature much more in this ideology-slanted piece, 30 minutes with singer Eddie Vedder (at least 10 minutes of which is taken up with fannish but not particularly interesting Who anecdotes he makes us promise not to print), and 30 minutes with old/new drummer Matt Cameron (the former Soundgarden man has drummed with the band since 1998, yet the relationship stretches back to 1990 Pearl Jam/Soundgarden hybrid Temple of the Dog). The drummer sits alongside bassist Jeff Ament. You join us 15 minutes into conversation with the latter pair. We’re talking about grunge.
Well, when in Rome…
“The thing is, Kurt was basically representing Mark (Arm, Mudhoney frontman and, alongside Gossard and Ament, a former member of Pearl Jam precursor band Green River) at that time, and he’d already said that stuff,” recalls the bass player. “The only reason it really hurt was because it brought all that stuff up again and reminded me that my friendship was Mark was still broken. I couldn’t really give a shit what Kurt said, I didn’t even know him, even though I fucking loved Nirvana – especially when Dave Grohl joined – but the few times I tried to be friendly with Kurtm he didn’t really respond.”
What else can you remember about that time?
“I enjoyed the fact that our music scene and our bands were getting attention,” muses Cameron. “But the downside was that the press didn’t always get it right. I was kinda creeped out when they were saying that grunge killed all the hair metal bands – I had a couple of run-ins with those guys over that stuff – but I knew our scene was better than the LA hair metal bullshit…”
“I was like, ‘Bring it…” adds Ament.
“…and I guess it was easy for some and harder for others,” continues the drummer. “Like the Eddies and the Kurts and the Chris Cornells – it happened really quickly for those guys and they might not have been prepared for the amount of attention they received.”
“I lament that there weren’t more Seattle writiers who were reporting what went into the media at that time,” says Ament. “There were people around who knew the real stories and the people who ended up writing about it, whether it was Everett True or Michael Azzerrad or whoever, those guys didn’t know what the fuck was going on here, yet they were the so-called historians of what was going on. They didn’t even turn up until 1990 – we’d been doing what we were doing for eight years before that in the punk rock scene! That was super-irritating.” Aments sighs.
“And the whole Nirvana/Pearl Jam feud and people like Courtney Love getting involved. Like, who the fuck was that woman? She knew nothing about what was going on! Usually it was people just trying to start shit. Like, I didn’t know much about Nirvana and they didn’t know much about us. I’d seen them a couple of times, I doubt Kurt ever saw us play a full show…”
OK, so they were never quite Beat Happening (talking about 1991 debut ‘Ten’, Ament reveals he played – spit! – fretless bass on all but two songs on the record), and it would be revisionist to suggest they ever were. But you can certainly make a claim that those who’ve judged them purely on the basis of some headline-grabbing Seattle scene gossip have missed out on some great rock music these last 18 years. Pearl Jam were always a different proposition to Nirvana, Mudhoney, the Melvins and their punk rock ilk. They had guitar solos – really, really long guitar solos – and owned more to the red, white and blue dyed rawk of Neil Young than the aforementioned trio’s beloved Black Flag. Whether they like it or not, they were more like “the LA hair metal bullshit”, only with integrity, than anything else that was around in the Pacific Northwest – “when the grunge tag came attached to us I thought it was hilarious,” says Ament. “If we had one goal it was not to be that” – and so to judge them by the punk rock rule book is like bemoaning that frogs can’t fly; it was never in their DNA to do so. Don’t like them because you don’t like guitar solos? Fine. Don’t like them because Kurt Cobain didn’t? Well, that’s silly….
Thing is, for a long time, it seemed like Pearl Jam didn’t really like themselves. In the wake of their dispute with Ticketmaster and after their exile from press and promotion post-‘Ten’, not even making a music video for most of ‘90’s, Rolling Stone magazine wrote astutely that the band had “spent a decade deliberately tearing their own fame apart”. It was as if – despite all that made the band special and unique: tempered grace, a thirst for beauty, the fact that unlike so many musicians from the area they weren;t so mired in K records dogma they could use a phrase like “sonic exploration” without blushing – they themselves felt they had to prove they were something other than “corporate rock careerists”. With their actions, yes (in all three interview sessions, all of the band will reluctantly concur that sometimes they’ve made things harder for themselves than they necessarily had to. To illustrate: upon taking the photos that accompany these words, our photographer asked if they;d recreate the high-five from the ‘Ten’ sleece to commemorate the record’s re-release, but as if they suspected NME had some sinister agenda, they responded as if we’d asked them to gargle poo, rather than just the bit of fun it was intended as), but also with the music itself. This is the kind of theory that bands normally write off as music journalists thinking too much, In this case, Ament agrees.“You know, I actually thought that when Pearl Jam started writing some more punk rock type songs. I was in a hardcore band (the bassist will later chase after our taxi to give us a copy of his recently reissued old hardcore band Deranged Diction’s first demos) and I wanted to be more than that. Even with the first record, on a song like ‘Oceans’, we were trying to just be a great band…but that could stretch. It’s like when we wrote ‘Spin the black circle’ (the band’s 1994 ode to the death of vinyl from third album ‘Vitalogy’). I was like, ‘Ugh!’. I can play the entire Dead Kennedys back catalogue! I didn’t really want to make music like that at the time.”
All of which leads on to what’s truly exciting about ‘Backspacer’. See, there might not be a guitar solo in sight – there’s some guitar licks, but hardly the noodle-rock opus that sits in the middle of, say, ‘Alive’ – but for perhaps the first time, the new record seems like the halfway house between all that ever made them great (and made the pun rock purists tut) and the notion of a contemporary unmainstream rock band that the members feel comfortable with today. It’s a harmonious compromise, the best of both worlds and an example of what a huge rock band might be if they didn’t particularly fancy treading the same route as U2. They might balk at the comparison, but they’re really not unlike the Grateful Dead; where that band encouraged fans to bootleg their live shows, Pearl Jam instead make mixing desk-recorded CDs of their live shows available to fans within 24 hours of the gig’s final note being played. And like Jerry Garcia and co did, they do what rock bands are supposed to do: unfashionably play gigs, and lots of them (although the fact their forthcoming O2 Arena show sold out in just nine minutes suggests they don’t come to these shores nearly enough). They rarely stray out of their fanbase, yet that fanbase is huge and global enough to mean that, more or less, they’re free, creatively at the very least, to do whatever they want to, Pearl Jam seem comfortable with themselves-it’s a freedom a chain-smoking Eddie Vedder (NME: “Mind if I smoke?” Vedder: “I’d prefer it”) enjoys.
“You’d think this is the most optimistic Pearl Jam have ever sounded?” he laughs. “Well, it’s about time, isn’t it?” The singer reluctantly aggress that ‘Backspacer’ is an optimistic record, yet insists it’s important for the band not to lose their “edge”. “It wasn’t contrived – it wasn’t like we said, ‘Let’s make this more positive’ or anything – but it helps that we’re a really good band. It’s nice when things can be unspoken, when you don’t have to have all these banal conversations about what things could or couldn’t be and you can just play. It’s one of the benefits of being in a band for such a long time; I’m surprised more bands don’t do it.”
He pauses. Takes a drag of his American Spirit. Says a bunch of stuff about the change in American administration that, while bang on the money, you’ve heard a million time before and I won’t bore you with again here. But then Eddie Vedder hits the nail on the head squarely and soundly.
“The way I see it, life is precious. We’re on this spinning ball in the middle of the universe and it doesn’t make any sense and it shouldn’t be happening. It’s hard to grasp the beauty of the situation. But if you can’t find something that’s great about all that, well, I feel sorry for you.”
Vedder’s utterance is more or less where I’m getting at with all this. There’s not many people who ever met, loved or liked Kurt Cobain who’d now agree with the mantra of “It’s better to burn out than to fade away” he stole from Neil Young as a pay-off to his suicide note, and despite being the Young-ites they are, Pearl Jam’s entire career seems based on doing exactly the opposite. Back when Nirvana were presenting working album titles to Geffen of ‘I hate myself and want to die’, Pearl Jam were running around the world’s stages with Vedder singing “I-ha, I-ha, I’m still aliveeeeeee”- while Pearl Jam maybe took the Nirvana’s singer’s taunts to heart, you can’t help but wish that Kurt had listened to Eddie’s words too.
See, after spending an hour and a half in the proud five-piece’s HQ – a shrine to their existence and achievements, a palace of creativity and being – you’re reminded that there are definitely worse things than being corporate rock careerists…
And done
2007 ░▒▓ London, Dusseldorf, Copenhagen, Nijmegen
2009 ░▒▓ Manchester, London
2010 ░▒▓ Hyde Park
*§* Music is all the juice i'll need *§*
Of course, Nirvana fans seem more interested in the continued comparison than us PJ fans, maybe because we've moved on to bigger and better things and they are always gonna go no further than 1994. Therefore, the continued dialogue is tedious, so the first half of the article is almost redundant for me, but the second half is golden. Thanks again.
It said "Life is nothing but a dream."
I've spent so many years in question
To find I'd known this all along.
I double that.
NME could publish a better article. The band is almost 20 years old and the press still loves to talk about Nirvana X Pearl Jam and Grunge.
As a fan I would like to know more about the new album, the future etc.
It's growing up just like me.
Too many things that annoy me in that article to post here.
Clearly, the writer only has TEN (besides all the Nirvana albums I think..) and knows nothing about the evolvement of Pearl Jam. I wasted my money on this NME issue...sigh.
and yet the writer said its their best album since Yield... so he does have more than TEN... :?
its actually a very supportive article.
Interesting read indeed.