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I wish there were a bit more consideration for the Herculean chore the band cut out for itself–inventing its own concert touring industry, just for starters. And I’m amazed at the misperceptions regarding the lifestyle of someone like Vedder. It’s fair to say that being a rock star is probably the easiest job in the world; Vedder’s trying to do about the hardest thing for someone in his situation, which is to not be one. He might occasionally look ridiculous, but ignoring the reasons behind Pearl Jam’s actions is extremely ungenerous. Decrying the tenor of the times is a millennia-old exercise, but these days any issue that threatens to be more complex than, say, Batman Forever does nothing but generate hostility.
“I think it just adds to consumer cynicism when it comes to government,” says Peter Schniedermeier, one of the owners of ETM, the alternative ticketing system Pearl Jam used for its truncated tour. While the Justice Department pointed to new competitors in the industry, the fact remains that exclusive agreements between Ticketmaster and most of the country’s major rock halls make a non-Ticketmaster tour of large venues just about impossible–as Pearl Jam has just convincingly demonstrated.
Rock ‘n’ roll’s deplorable lack of sexually explicit odes to homoerotic love is thankfully rectified with a new record called Pile Up, from Pansy Division. The band is an unadorned punk threesome led by Jon Ginoli, a Peoria native who recorded three albums with a group called Outnumbered during his years in Champaign. In those days his sexuality was a secret: “I couldn’t come out then, both for the sake of the other people in the band, who weren’t gay, and because I couldn’t imagine that anyone else would want to hear it, back then.” Now he’s a happy and very out queer in San Francisco who essays a raucous and bratty stripped-down pop made up of equal parts homopunk paeans to acts that remain illegal in many states and campy covers of sex blasts from the likes of Prince (“Jack U Off”) and Liz Phair (“Flower”). The band is in town this weekend for a pair of shows: an all-ages affair at the Fireside Bowl, Thursday, July 13, and an 18-and-over late show at Metro Friday. Given the detailed lyrics of Ginoli’s songs and the band’s exposure in the past year–touring with Green Day, being interviewed on MTV–not too many people still don’t know which way Ginoli swings. One of the few, as it turned out, was the band’s accountant, who happens to be Ginoli’s father. “He just found out what was going on,” Ginoli says. “It was very recently, actually. He was a bit shocked.”
