As part of an elaborate build-up to the band’s 20th anniversary in 2011, Ten is being reissued in four special editions. There were hints even then that given the opportunity, they’d remix it, to make it sound more like the record they had originally wanted to make. When I interviewed them in 1993, just after their second album, Vs, came out, it was clear, however, that the group themselves had longstanding misgivings about the final version of Ten and that the comparative rawness and essentially ‘live’ feel of Vs more happily represented them and the way they would have preferred to sound on their debut. Pearl Jam were on their way to becoming arguably the biggest US rock band of the ’90s. They only had ears for the music, which was thrilling, and Eddie’s lyrics, which gave heartfelt voice to their adolescent traumas and teenage anxieties, their disen-franchisement, frustrations and the feeling that the world in its entirety was against them. Not that any of this rank snottiness about Pearl Jam’s grunge pedigree carried much weight with the band’s new fans – 12 million of them, eventually – who bought Ten in sufficient numbers to keep it on the US charts for over two years. For Cobain, Ten, released a month before Nirvana’s Nevermind, was a creaking repository of hoary rock clichés, dated metal riffs and hard rock bluster – all those guitar solos, man – that he continued to rail against long after most sensible people had stopped listening to his sulky bleating. Kurt Cobain was also famously quick to denounce Pearl Jam, who he seems to have regarded as something akin to the Great Satan, musical evil incarnate (if only Eddie had been as keen to mention The Vaselines as an influence as he was to talk in interviews about his beloved Who!). Andrew Wood, who had a history of drug abuse, died of a heroin overdose four months before the July 1990 release of their debut album, Apple, thus scuppering things entirely for the band. Not that Stone and Jeff actually saw much reward from Mother Love Bone. Gossard and Ament subsequently joined charismatic vocalist Andrew Wood in Mother Love Bone, who were signed to Mercury in a major label deal that was much frowned upon by fledgling grungenistas, for whom noble penury was presumably preferable to the apparent vulgarity of actually selling records. While vocalist Eddie Vedder had been recruited from San Diego band Bad Radio, founder members Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament were Seattle thoroughbreds and had played in proto-grunge types Green River with Mark Arm and Steve Turner, who later formed Mudhoney. The idea of Pearl Jam as greedy interlopers, new and unwelcome on the Seattle scene, was blatantly unfair. What so exercised these flannel-shirted fundamentalists was a perception of Pearl Jam as slick opportunists, mercenary chancers whose music and the way they played it was a cynical betrayal of what grunge was meant to be, a grubby defilement of something they liked to think was wholly pure, unadulterated by gross commercial imperatives. Pearl Jam hove hairily into general view in ’91, accompanied by a chorus of disapproval from the grunge mujahedin that turned into a disconsolate wail a year later, a dismal ululation, loud enough to be heard from Seattle to Stockholm, when sales of their debut LP, Ten, went through what is popularly acknowledged as the roof.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |