PEARL
JAM PLAYS A FAMILIAR TUNE
BY RICHARD PACHTER
rpachter@wordsonwords.com
There was a bit of a tailgate party going on in the MARS
Music Amphitheater
parking lot Wednesday night. Rather than ribs and chicken
wings, the
attendant SUVs, minivans and the like were cooking up Pearl
Jam's first
album, Ten,
vintage 1991.
Anyone expecting to hear the band's latest release, Binaural,
or any of its
immediate
predecessors, would have been disappointed, as the debut
collection uncannily echoed throughout the lot.
Onstage, however, it was another story. The night's
set was drawn mainly
from later
albums, with a few exceptions. The sold-out audience didn't
seem
to mind. They responded predictably upon recognizing anything
familiar from
radio airplay.
Frontman Eddie Vedder wore white. The rest of the band -
guitarists Stone
Gossard and Mike McCready, bassist Jeff Amnet, and the latest
drummer,
ex-Soundgarden
percussionist Matt Cameron - could have slipped into the
audience unnoticed.
Some critics fault Pearl Jam's compositional abilities, citing
their uneven
and somewhat repetitious oeuvre. In fact, there was a lack
of textural
variety in Wednesday
night's set. The songs from Binaural,
including
"Breakerfall" and "Nothing As It Seems"
were nearly identical to the recorded
versions.
Pearl Jam may be something of a throwback in these days of
samples, ersatz
rock hip hop and electronica, but there was nothing iconoclastic
or
anachronistic about their performance. The playing was fresh
and energetic
and they clearly fed off the crowd's enthusiasm
But such
journeyman work deserves presentation equal to the performance.
It's a little surprising, given Vedder's adulation of The
Who's Pete
Townshend, that he hasn't steered Pearl Jam toward a bigger,
or at least
fuller concert presence.