September 7–14, 2000
music
Pearl Jam
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Eddie Vedder photo: Jay Matsueda |
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You can’t blame Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam for being at odds with the current musical culture. Lots of chart-topping modern rock bands (who don’t pick fights with TicketMaster) sound just like the grungy Seattle arena rockers, yet Pearl Jam themselves haven’t had a bona fide smash in what seems like forever. Not that their fans — who filled the E-Centre twice last weekend — care. Vedder led his band through a nearly 3-hour set, despite the fact that "the throat’s starting to go." Mixing old ("Breath," "Evenflow") with new ("Light Years," "Wishlist"), tunes that lean towards classic rock ("Corduroy") and punk ("Spin the Black Circle"), Pearl Jam and Vedder (who, regardless of how much third guitar he plays, will always be "the frontman") were deeply embroiled in their perpetual identity crisis. Vedder himself still can’t seem to decide whether he wants to be the Jim Morrison poet/prophet type or fit into the gritty/activist Neil Young mold. But on both counts, Vedder has always come up a bit short. He’s neither poetic nor enigmatic enough to pull off Morrison and for all his political rhetoric, his songs generally aren’t poignant enough to do Young justice. (An aside: Fans dutifully held up "Nader 2000" signs, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Vedder dissed Philly’s political acumen during a Boston performance.) Pearl Jam’s middle ground is rattling off personal anthems you don’t need to believe in much to shout along to. But even when Vedder does touch a nerve, as he did on Friday with his years-before-Columbine "Jeremy" or "Wishlist," he feels compelled, as many non-instrument-playing front people do, to fill up all the space with his voice, clumsily stretching entire songs into lyrical diphthongs or aggressively running the words all together. There were way too many songs in the set with choruses that are (or at least sounded like) "woahhhhh" or "heeeey," songs that try to squeeze every last bit of emotion out of meaningless syllables. But to Vedder’s credit, he’s a principled and charismatic singer who, with a mediocre voice, average looks and a band whose music is Zep/Stones-derivative at best, inspired his cult following from the strains of "Animal" to a final encore of "Yellow Ledbetter" to sway, punch the air and raise their hands, and then happily sit in traffic for two hours afterward.
