Pearl Jam - C or D?

wikipedia

I went on NY radio today and debated Jeanne Fury about the merits of Pearl Jam vs. Nirvana. Vernon Reid called in to say we should have been talking about Soundgarden instead.

whoa!

I know, right? It was awesome. (And I kinda secretly agreed with him.)

lol cool

Hahah nice.

ha, awesome!!

I saw the doc tonight. Soooo much great early footage. Lots of laughs, a few sad bits, great overview of the last 20 years. Felt like a very well thought out loveletter, to the band, and to the fans as well. Feel like it's what Crowe should have been doing all along.

zmog, pearl jam fanboys, i have a bit of trivia for you...

There is the little tiny speck of a town that I visit often, maybe 20-30 times a year, about 35 miles north of San Francisco....

There is a little tiny store/bar/restaurant that serves as basically the only business in about a 10 mile radius.

I was in there the other day and had a much longer conversation than usual with the man who is often working there.

He is a musician, he was singing some perverted boogie woogie piano song and we started talking about music.

For some reason he brought up that in the early 90s, Pearl Jam stayed at a ranch nearby while record... and that Eddie Vedder wrote the song "Elderly Woman..." about the former owner of the store/bar/restaurant who has since passed.

Here's the website of the all-in-one convenience store/post office/bar/restaurant:
http://www.ranchonicasio.com/history.htm

Recording

For its second album, Pearl Jam felt the pressures of trying to match the success of its debut album, Ten. In a 2002 interview, guitarist Mike McCready said, "The band was blown up pretty big and everything was pretty crazy."[1] Vs. was the first Pearl Jam album to have production duties handled by producer Brendan O'Brien. It was also the band's first album with drummer Dave Abbruzzese, who had joined the band in August 1991 and toured for the album Ten. Rehearsals for Vs. began in February 1993 at Potatohead Studio in Seattle, Washington. The band then moved to The Site in Nicasio, California in March 1993 to begin recording. Abbruzzese called the tranquil recording site "paradise" while lead vocalist Eddie Vedder said, "I fucking hate it here...I've had a hard time...How do you make a rock record here?"[2]

Anyways, I have zero desire to listen to PJ at all but this song I don't mind.

Isn't "The Site" the same place that Fleetwood Mac recorded "Rumours"?

The second half of Backspacer isn't working for me today.

unperson:

listening to the podcast you did, vernon reid part is great...good discussion

but i think you're very, very wrong about nirvana's "legacy" being only shit like the vines and silverchair

i think you find nirvana at the root of a lot of people -- lots of people i know at least -- who make all kinds of music from electronic to punk to metal or whatever...it really was a galvanizing force for ppl who were -- as you say -- the right age...and i think people might have started out in little kids grunge bands but i know for me i would not be playing music today (in a hip hop band) if not for nirvana

Isn't "The Site" the same place that Fleetwood Mac recorded "Rumours"?

― Janet Snakehole (VegemiteGrrl), Wednesday, September 21, 2011 9:07 AM (3 hours ago)

Nope, that was The Record Plant in Sausalito. Close though!

m@tt otm

Yeah, I realize a whole part of unperson's "thing" is being deliberately contrarian and turning against easy, popular opinion, but he is just 100% wrong on that regard.

well, any hugely popular band is gonna have positive/negative impacts. nirvana's impact at this point is kinda like the doors.

i'm kind of over judging bands based on their "impact." they impacted nothing more than record labels search for copy-cat bands.

if it were up to nirvana their "impact" would have been the bands who they wore on their t-shirts when they played out... unless i'm mistaken these bands did not include silverchair and the vines. that was a record label decision. you can't blame nirvana or pearl jam for something that was out of their control.

the Smackdown debate was quite disappointing. If we're going to play the absurd who-had-cooler-record-collections game, then Jeanne Fury had to acknowledge Eddie Vedder's interest in Talking Heads, Split Enz, Sonic Youth, and Sleater Kinney.

and "Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I'm bored and old" sounded glamorous and jaded in the best way when I was nineteen; now it's just stupid, especially when the music attached to it such a (th)dud.

that song has a great thdud

Jesus Christ, Alfred.

Better songs on that record, gentlemen.

we are, after all, self-appointed judges judging more than they have sold.

"you can't blame nirvana or pearl jam for something that was out of their control."
i don't know if it's a question of control really but i feel like despite vedder's earnest progressiveness, pearl jam's music just appealed more to republicans on a spiritual level, and to the extent that this kind of conservatism is embodied in the music itself, there's a case to hold it against them.

wtf

that's twaddle

all i'm sayin is the right wingers at my school loved pearl jam, hated nirvana, except for the one who was into madonna and newt gingrich.

pearl jam's music just appealed more to republicans on a spiritual level

what does this even mean?

to the extent that this kind of conservatism is embodied in the music itself

How do you embody conservatism in music? Even on a formalist level -- if that's what you mean by "music itself" -- the worst PJ songs (sometime at the beginning of their career, to my ears) offer a tension between Vedder's vocals and the rest of the band that's exactly the kind of dialectic I want in music.

all i'm sayin is the right wingers at my school loved pearl jam, hated nirvana, except for the one who was into madonna and newt gingrich.

It must pain you that Rush Limbaugh uses "My City Was Gone" and McCain used "Running on Empty."

Vedder did 9/11

i mean spiritual because on a literal level the lyrics are quite progressive and i really don't understand how it could appeal to pro-lifers, so it must be on some deeper level, like whatever weird chemical it is in big macs that make them addictive.

well then blame the Big Macs that conservatives eat more than San Francisco liberals.

but... pearl jam are the big macs!

nirvana is in-n-out (this sort of breaks down given in-n-out's weird christian evangelism but...)

actually the in-n-out/mcdonald's thing does hold in other ways -- nirvana has a more limited menu, corresponding to, say a narrower range and smaller discography, but is generally of higher quality -- pearl jam certainly outsells nirvana and has more market penetration -- nirvana's fries are not as tasty, but are probably better for you.

::burp::

also, pearl jam's christmas single club = happy meal! is that thing still running? i sort of regret not getting the lifetime membership thing to the ten club and to mcsweeneys, because they both ended up delivering goods long after you'd think they would have stopped.

The thing is, is that everybody liked Pearl Jam.

it didn't seem like that when i was a little PJ fan in middle school -- lots of kids not into rock at all of course but even the rock kids seemed to be quickly moving into different factions (Nirvana kids, GNR kids, Metallica kids, lots of kids who liked all of the above but thought Pearl Jam wasn't as good as the others)

Well, I didn't mean that everybody liked them as much as they bridged a ton of the subcultures in my high school from the blue-haired kids to the AP students to the lacrosse team at a saturation point that I didn't really feel like the others did.

I think that Pearl Jam has done the major label arena-packing thing about as well as any band has ever done it. The live CD scheme alone was/is enough for me to defend them for life (remember when there were 200+ Pearl Jam CDs in the racks at Tower?), but the band has been really adept at pushing politics and new business models without alienating its base. And the bassist prints unique posters for each concert, which is really cool. Plus, very different setlists every night, good covers, good taste in the old acts it aligns itself with, etc. And the songs really aren't that bad. And the guitarists are really good. And so on.