Rock and roll has been around long enough for us to see that it’s as susceptible to the cyclical movement of fashion as any other element of pop culture. Discomania evolved into the recent disinterment of bell-bottoms and eight-track tapes and the nostalgic Dazed and Confused. Now scary TV ads for the “Totally 80s” CD compilation herald the next wave. The circular motion of rock has created other, subtler ripples in the roiling stream of popular music, and caught in one of the eddies is, coincidentally, a boy named Eddie.
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Pearl Jam is the product of a star-crossed union. On one side of the family is a much-maligned species that thrives in huge arenas, living on the spoils of multiplatinum record sales. This parent is stadium rock, the apotheosis of mainstream success. It’s Freddy Mercury prancing in a leotard, Alice Cooper beheading himself onstage, the Grateful Dead selling out 30,000 seats five nights in a row. It’s the Jacksons’ Victory Tour, a Lynyrd Skynyrd guitar duel, Spinal Tap’s “Stonehenge.” Next Thursday, it’s Pearl Jam at the Chicago Stadium. At its heart is the rock star, the great and glowing centerpiece of the entire genre. Usually male, always sexy, the rock star epitomizes the superhuman aura of stadium rock. He can be a rampaging viking like Robert Plant, a faux steelworker like Bruce Springsteen, or a mincing satyr like Steven Tyler; it really doesn’t matter, as long as it plays in Peoria.
On the other side is the essentially American take on British punk rock that mutated in the 1980s into a bewildering array of subgenres. Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll, the house organ for the stubbornly underground movement I’ll call, for lack of a less-square term, punk, exhaustively chronicled this diaspora.
Pearl Jam have what is derisively referred to by punk musicians as “chops”: a truly embarrassing accusation when you’re one-half garage band. They can kick up a storm of noise and confusion, but they maintain a concentration of energy in the direction of the song–melody, straightforward arrangements–that punk generally doesn’t bother with. They’ve spent some time with Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin records, and it sounds as if they’ve passed up more than one keg party to stay home and practice scales. In Pearl Jam, punk and Pink Floyd have come all the way around and bumped into each other. Pearl Jam combines the Ramones’ aesthetics and punk’s alienated-teen lyricism with the melodramatic solos and pumped-up technical muscle of stadium rock. They’ve glued together the two most powerful, and profitable, trends in latter-day rock and roll. Now, you would think, everybody’s happy.
Now the beaches have all been washed in black
I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life
The last word, “mine,” is stretched waaay out then ends in a howling scream. Punk singers never stretch notes out this far, even when they’re screaming, but Eddie does it anyway. This is Pearl Jam at its most stadiumesque.
