Can We Kick Out The Jam?

Last night I watched Cameron Crowe’s recent biopic Pearl Jam Twenty. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Like many confused young men who came of age in the early nineties, I once endured a phase involving very loud music, marijuana, piercings, cut-off trousers and embarrassingly long, unwashed hair. I had worn out cassettes of Ten, Pearl Jam’s debut, along with Jane’s Addiction’s Ritual De Habitual and Alice in Chains Dirt while delivering boxed lunches in my Honda Civic to the bemused office workers of Nashville. I envied the way Eddie Vedder’s unkempt good looks and soft, stuttering interview style contrasted the spastic maniac he turned into onstage. I could often be found standing on the precipice of something, smoking cigarettes and staring long and hard into the distance between Nashville and the Pacific Northwest.

In 1995, just after the release of Pearl Jam’s third studio album, Vitalogy, I joined a classic pop band that preferred the internal combustion of tight 60’s office wear to the undefined freedom of flannel and cargo pants. I lost interest in Pearl Jam. So did a lot of other people, but Pearl Jam, apparently, didn’t notice.

The single-most remarkable aspect of Twenty is how it illuminates this period of the band’s history. While the film does a fine job of documenting the tragedy of Pearl Jam’s beginnings and the glory of its meteoric rise to the top of the Grunge heap, it really comes alive as the band enters into the wandering years following the end of the Seattle mania. Finding themselves on the long path down from of selling millions upon millions of albums, conquering the largest venues in the world and having an unfathomable amount of money to show for it, the band ran up against the eternal question that eventually plagues all of us: What’s the point?

Most of us feel like we never get the recognition we deserve for the work that we do. Whether we are mechanics, stay-at-home mothers, accountants or singer/songwriters, we often find that our work goes relatively unnoticed, seems to be taken for granted and never really brings the approval or acclaim we are hoping it will. This frustration blurs our focus and, occasionally, makes us wonder why we even bother.

Pearl Jam, in spite of garnering more accolades, adoration and rewards than most of us could ever imagine, faced a similar crisis of motivation, albeit for slightly different reasons: The amount of praise they had received was so great that none of it felt very real. It didn’t even seem related to the work they were doing anymore. Think about it from Eddie Vedder’s perspective: When you perform in a coffee house, you can see the crow’s feet around the eyes of the women in the back row; in a stadium, you need glasses to read the signs held by the kids in the first row behind the crowd barricades.

But Pearl Jam didn’t quit; they tightened their focus. They dove into their work and the community that had built up around it, releasing a series of albums that struggled commercially but let their fans know that they weren’t going anywhere, that they were trying to make sense of everything, that they still wanted to produce something new and exciting. They began documenting all of their shows for their fans instead of releasing a single live album that might document them at their ‘best.’ Instead of kicking back and stroking each other’s egos, they turned all of their energy outward towards their fans. While remaining one of the biggest bands in the world, they somehow managed to create a real intimacy between themselves and the people who loved their music. They recognized that the band was not the point; the process was the point. Everything became about the experience of experiencing Pearl Jam. Everything became about the present moment.

I still don’t really care for much of Pearl Jam’s music. But I am very inspired by and slightly in awe of the way they have gone about making it. With the exception of U2, I can’t really think of a band that has been around for over two decades without graduating into the goofy realm of nostalgia acts. It’s easy to ruminate on the glory days, but life is about what we are doing now, what we are creating in this moment. Our bodies will eventually wear out, but we will never get old if we can just stay focused on today.

Oh, Oooooh, I’m still alive. Yay-yay-yay-yay-yeah.