Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, December 3, 1993 TAG: 9312030108
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: EXTRA-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEVE KNOPPER KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The Seattle quintet Pearl Jam - reluctantly - has inherited that grand expectation. It's surprising that Eddie Vedder can still walk with 35 years of rock tradition stacked on his shoulders.
"Whether Eddie Vedder likes it or not, Pearl Jam is the first band of the post-punk era with a chance to reunite those pieces into a whole," writes Manuel Mendoza, a music critic for the Dallas Morning News. "What he and his followers might do with that power remains to be seen."
Don't hold your breath.
Pearl Jam's "Vs." (Epic) is a good record with lots of moaning disenchantment swirling around catchy electric guitars. It sold 950,000 in its first week on the racks, the Morning News reported, and shot to No. 1.
These are impressive numbers for a band on its second album in two years. But Pearl Jam has no greater chance than Garth Brooks, U2, R.E.M., Metallica, Sinead O'Connor, Meat Loaf or Dr. Dre of reuniting an entire culture.
There are too many pieces. MTV, which is the most effective arbiter of music tastes among young people, can't tie everything together under one hip umbrella. Since Elvis, Bob Dylan and the Beatles, rock has quietly broken down into dozens of subgenres, and dozens more. One could make a case that either Bruce Springsteen's 1984 "Born in the U.S.A." or U2's 1987 "The Joshua Tree" was the last record almost every rock fan agreed on.
Today, cable-television companies are preparing to put 500 channels in every family's home. And fragmentation - of music and pop culture - has become the norm. The model of one youthful nation under a Rock King is as dead as Elvis.
Too many observers, unfortunately, apply that long-outdated model to today's music landscape. The inevitable conclusion can be frustrating: There just isn't One Big Thing. Even the Lollapalooza tour, the highest-profile representative of alternative music, dragged almost 30 bands (including Pearl Jam) of wildly varying styles around the country over the past three summers.
So in comes Pearl Jam, whose "Generation X" poster-boy status is largely a process of elimination. Nirvana, of course, put abrasive punk rock into the mainstream by selling 8 million copies of its 1991 album, "Nevermind." Pearl Jam followed closely up the charts with its debut album, "Ten."
But there were a couple of key differences. On "Ten," unlike "Nevermind," you can hear all the words. Vedder, unlike Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, can shout and sing. Rhythm guitarist Stone Gossard writes excellent melodies - one of the prerequisites for pop success. And lead guitarist Mike McCready's licks are familiar, the kind of sounds passed down from Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters to Keith Richards to Aerosmith to Guns N' Roses.
Also, by most accounts, Eddie Vedder sounds like the kind of guy you'd want living next door. Sure, he and buddy Jack McDowell, the Chicago White Sox pitcher, brawled in a bar last week; that stuff isn't quite on par with Cobain and his wife, punk shrieker Courtney Love, allegedly shooting heroin during her pregnancy.
On the syndicated radio show Rockline last month, Vedder gave out his home phone number to quash rumors he had died of a heroin overdose. (Publicists dubbed it the "Eddieline.") He wooed rock traditionalists by sitting in with the three living Doors at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and by singing Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" at the Dylan tribute last year.
Pearl Jam's music is hard enough to be hip and familiar enough to stomach. It also reflects traditional rock 'n' roll alienation - peppered with specific references to contemporary issues, like pregnant teens, drug abuse and gun control.
"Vs." is full of tension, but the tension isn't the sound of the band members knocking against each other. Throughout Nirvana's second album, "In Utero" (released a month before "Vs."), the three musicians sound like they want to kill one another. On "Vs.," Vedder's moaning choruses - especially on "Daughter" - politely step aside for McCready's traditional guitar solos.
Pearl Jam isn't sarcastic or rude or even flip - which are the prototypical punk characteristics. In one sense, the band is comparable to Billy Idol's early-'80s punk band Generation X: playing songs with punk sounds but geared toward pop success. Of course, the fact that Nirvana is openly spiteful of such success and Pearl Jam grudgingly accepts it doesn't make either band's music any better or worse.
Rock 'n' roll has undergone an unusual - or very traditional, depending on how you look at it - change over the past two years. In 1991, most radio programmers shunned music that didn't sound polished and familiar. Since then, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soul Asylum, Metallica and the Lollapalooza tour have tapped the "Generation X" market in a commercially viable way.
The claim that no good music exists today has never been valid. In 1993, with Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Blind Melon and Soul Asylum dominating the charts, such a philosophy is especially reactionary.
So hard-rock aficionados have two choices: They can search desperately and fruitlessly for the One Big Thing. Or they can simply pick the bands they like, buy the albums and go to the shows. There's plenty for everybody, and what's wrong with that?
by CNB