Of the Earth

I’ve got a copy of Pearl Jam’s Live at Third Man Records, joining Jack White’s vinyl subscription service in time to ensure its delivery and then cancelling the service as soon as the record arrived in the mail (I love White and the White Stripes just fine, but not enough to stay enrolled). All told I think it cost me about $60 if I remember correctly, which in retrospect is only about $10 or so more than vinyl copies of Gigaton when you factor in shipping costs. Plus Third Man featured a photo book, a pin, a patch, and a 45″ of Eddie Vedder solo singing “Out of Sand” in the Third Man Records booth. But the main reason I wanted the record, apart from the small and intimate show with the odd setlist: “1/2 Full,” “Let Me Sleep,” “Hard to Imagine,” “Pendulum,” was the inclusion of a blistering rendition of “Of the Earth” with Jack White and Mike McCready dueling lead guitars.

Live at Third Man came out in 2016, but the live debut of “Of the Earth” occurred in Dublin, Ireland in 2010, five or so years after the song was first mentioned in an MTV article previewing the self-titled Pearl Jam record in which Jeff Ament compared it to Peter Gabriel, Genesis, Sleater-Kinney, and the Who. I’m not qualified to judge any of those comparisons in any way, or to any other band, but I can describe how it sounds to me: brawny, chunky, stomp-y. It’s a bit of a beast of a song, with minimalist lyrics, and with a proper jam at the end, I tend to believe this song would dominate any studio album it was assigned to. A centerpiece. Which may be why, even though Ament mentioned it as a current favorite to MTV, it didn’t make that record, or Backspacer, which it may have also been attempted for. Since its live debut, gosh, so for about 10 years, fans have been waiting for a studio release. When it didn’t show up on Lightning Bolt people then turned to wishing and hoping for Gigaton. But while I think the tune would fit better on Gigaton than any other record, it wouldn’t fit given how many of the songs on the new album are packed full with Ed’s singing, and “Of the Earth” hearkens back to an earlier era of PJ songwriting in that respect.

So, “Of the Earth” is a misfit. A Lost Dog, if you will. Like “Hard to Imagine” it’s been attempted multiple times in the studio, never panning out or even attaining b-side status. Hopefully, if there is a Lost Dogs 2, we’ll get to hear one of the studio takes, but in the long, long meantime, we’ve got bootlegs and the Third Man record.

Album: Live at Third Man Records
Songwriter: Eddie Vedder (lyrics & music)

Cold Confession

I think I initially started writing this post about five years ago. Now that Gigaton is nearly upon the world, I had a hankerin’ to write about Pearl Jam, and it being easier (for me) to write about older songs that brand spanking new ones, I thought maybe I’d try and work on a few from Backspacer and Lightning Bolt and assorted odds and ends. Looking at my “Cold Confession” draft, I saw that it was a rant not terribly dissimilar to the one that made up my review of the “Fixer” so I scrapped it, and will instead just write about the song.

Prior to the release of the self-titled record, there was a Rolling Stone article previewing the record a little bit while the band was still in the studio. Among the songs mentioned by title were “Of the Earth,” “2×4,” and “Cold Concession.” “2×4” surfaced as an instrumental some time ago (I downloaded it along with a slew of demos from that era but have no idea what happened to those files, sadly); and “Of the Earth” was rumored to have been attempted again for Backspacer, and has been played live a number of times though no studio version has ever leaked; but the correctly titled “Cold Confession” leaked in the early 2010s alongside a song called “Let It Ride.”

“Cold Confession” sounds like a seance in the way similar to “Indifference,” though Eddie’s singing is a whispery, worried growl that to my ears is unlike any other performance I can think of. After a few strummed chords reminiscent of “Crazy Mary,” the song unfolds rather sparsely, built atop an organ baseline and a truly interesting drum part from Matt Cameron that elevates the song above what could have ended up a dirge. At a certain point, even good songs must get culled from a project if they don’t fit, and I can’t see this song fitting the Avocado record whatsoever, at least not in this arrangement. But it’s a strong enough song that it could’ve set the tone for its own set.

I don’t know what the decision was back in the day to stop releasing non-album, original b-sides, but it’s a shame there wasn’t a surprise EP of this and other material. But I suppose once they determined it wasn’t going to make the record, they abandoned efforts to finish the track, and once such things are in the past and the band goes forward, it might be tough to find time to look backward rather than forward.

Album: n/a
Songwriter(s): ?

Can’t Deny Me

Yes, the artwork looks like Rage Against the Machine’s Battle of Los Angeles. Yes, there’s an element of “more cowbell” butt-rock in the bluesy grooves. Yes, the lyrics are a little ham-handed and obvious. Still, though it’s only been a day, “Can’t Deny Me” is growing on me. My four year-old even said “I love this song all the time! So there’s that.

I had no idea when I decided out of the blue to write a new post for this blog a couple nights ago, that this song was in the pipeline. When I saw that it was the new Ten Club single, I thought it was a nice surprise for the single to be a new original song for once, but that was it. Now it’s officially the lead single for a new, as-yet-untitled Pearl Jam album, and that’s exciting.

I sent a friend of mine a message “Happy New Pearl Jam Song Day” and he responded that he’d heard it, but wasn’t too crazy about it. That seems to be the gut reaction on the message boards too, and it’s how I felt with the song coming out of my phone’s tinny speakers. But it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out over time, and whether people will stick to their stubborn first impressions or give it a fair shake.

For the past year or so I started to wonder if the band would record a new album again, and then anticipated that if they did, it was going to have to be a response in some way to the new Trumpian political era, just as Riot Act and Pearl Jam were to GWB, and Backspacer and Lightning Bolt to the Obama presidency, both its hopefulness and the absurd backlash and recalcitrance to it. “Can’t Deny Me” is clearly, very clearly about Trump, and takes some predictable, if deserved potshots. While I think I prefer “Mind Your Manners” sonically and lyrically, bluntness is about all Trump deserves, and the biggest middle finger you can give a fascist is simply your presence. As much as the current administration loves to pretend opposition either doesn’t exist or isn’t worth addressing in a respectful way, showing up to say ‘we will not be erased’ is both important and a legitimate rejoinder to the soul fucking nullity that is the GOP these days.

Musically, I can get with Ed’s screaming, energetic delivery, which lifts the kind of predictable (but not quite predictable) boogie of McCready’s music. If it seems a little obvious at first, I’d counter that so are a lot of Pearl Jam songs in different modes, from “Worldwide Suicide” to the as-yet-unreleased “Let It Ride.” It’ll be interesting to hear the song in the context of the rest of the album.

Album: n/a
Songwriter(s): Mike McCready (music) / Eddie Vedder (lyrics)
Single Release: March 10, 2018

Listen Here.

Santa God

Oh, the anticipation of Christmas morning, unwrapping presents that mysteriously appear under the tree, gifts from that weird, omnicscient fat guy Americans refer to as Santa Claus.  That’s what Christmas is like for the children who celebrate it, at least until they learn that their jolly toy-bestowing benefactor is not real.  It’s hard to imagine (cough) that that type of innocence can still be maintained in this age of overwhelming media, but somehow, it is.  “Santa God” is slight in nature, but surprisingly touching in its simplicity. In some ways, “Now we’re grown and so complex / In a world that can’t relax / Even though he was a lie / We all were satisfied”, tells more effective truth than the band’s more “serious” songs.   And the parallels between the innocence of believing in Santa Claus and in the mysteries of rock and roll fandom are not insubstantial.

On the eve of the release of Backspacer, there are those fans still desperately clinging to that old-fashioned, pre-mp3 leak time of unwrapping a shrink-wrapped CD or vinyl album on the day of its official release.  And there are those who can’t wait, who raid the parents’ closet early to get the toys, which are no less fun to play with, but who also are left with the feeling that something was lost.  But still, there are few bands left today who still inspire that nostalgic feeling of anticipation conjured on “Santa God”, where every new song feels like a gift wrapped in a bow.

Foldback/Thunderclap/Harmony

I’ve wrestled with including these three instrumentals from the Touring Band 2000 film on this blog, mostly out of sheer laziness with not wanting to have to find them in the movie and figure out which was which. But through the wonders of the internet, it is possible to find strictly audio, labelled versions of these pieces, and because of popular demand, I’m giving them some solid listening. That the songs were titled, even though they sound very much like the demoed candidates for Binaural that they were, also makes them indispensible for this blog’s ambitions. Because of films like TB2K and Single Video Theory, plus a wealth of pre-album release interviews, we know that material such as these three instrumentals is constantly brought into sessions. Some of it gets put on hold indefinitely; some turn into fully realized songs on later albums. “Foldback”, “Thunderclap”, and “Harmony” each received the strange fate of ending up as montage music on a DVD. Through some clever triangulation and research between my own crumbling memory, Given To Wail, and an old Rumor Pit, I’m fairly confident in matching titles to the instrumentals.

According to GTW, the longest of the three tunes is “Thunderclap”, a broad and expansive tune that sounds more in keeping with the band’s work on Yield than Binaural (unless you count “Of the Girl”, which was supposed to have been attempted for Yield anyhow). When I first heard My Morning Jacket’s “Gideon”, I immediate thought of “Thunderclap”. Listening to them side by side, the two songs are astonishing in their similarities: a breezy guitar figure backed by tom-heavy drums, eventually underscored by a few well placed strums. “Thunderclap” is accomplished and lovely, and the imagination reels at what it would have sounded like completed, with lyrics. What I believe to be “Harmony” is the heaviest number, a crunching rock song that betrays a possible Matt Cameron writing credit, as the second half sounds remarkably like Soundgarden. It also would have proven a challenge to accompany with words, though its moody atmosphere makes it a worthy backing for imagery. “Foldback” is the slightest of the three and sounds like wistful Vedder tunes like “Wishlist” and “Untitled”. The playing here is relaxed to the point of not being completely in time. What all three prove beyond doubt is that the band has grown in its songwriting abilities enough to create music that is evocative without words. When a band’s relative castaways demonstrate more character than most radio acts’ hits, it just goes to show how much more there is to music than capturing the zeitgeist. These instrumentals were never “finished”, per se, but still found their own avenue to listeners’ imaginations.

State of Love and Trust

If I had to guess at where I was the first time I heard “State of Love and Trust”, I’d have to guess it was in a high school gymnasium in Worcester, MA, early on a Saturday morning during an indoor track meet in the dead of winter. One of my older sister’s friends, who was also on the team, made me aware of the Singles soundtrack, letting me borrow the cassette for my walkman while he listened to Pantera or Iron Maiden or some such. “Breath” was great; Chris Cornell’s “Seasons” was revelatory; but “State of Love and Trust” beat them all. Along with “Wash”, the title “State” adorned my Pearl Jam stickman t-shirt, so finally that mystery was solved. Here was yet another amazing song by my favorite band that didn’t even make it onto their own record. And I was pretty damn sure it was good enough; it quickly became my favorite Pearl Jam song in the days before Vs., back when it was somewhat easier to choose.

Inspired by the movie, “State of Love and Trust” is another Vedder song about relationships and fidelity, though the most striking lyrics are of the protagonist aiming a gun at his head, which has subsumed the larger picture. They’re also the easiest lyrics to pick out, likely the only ones I could manage when I was 13. But to me, at that age, I took the images of potential suicide non-literally, the way I would “want to die” after getting rejected by a girl I had a crush on, and the way I would subsequently write a poem about it. The media made such huge assumptions and oversimplifications (as they always do) when reporting on the “alternative” music scene, that the music was overly dark, depressing, troubled. But it wasn’t to me.

The hyper-passionate bent of bands like Pearl Jam drew me in partly because everything else on the radio seemed devoid of feeling. Of course, there was plenty of passionate music being written at the time that was more difficult for a somewhat rural teenager to track down, but of what I was exposed to, Pearl Jam was it. “State of Love and Trust” made me think that other people in the world cared as much about… well, anything at all, as I did. Whatever it was that was working the character in “State” up so much that he had a gun to his own head, even if I didn’t know what it was, meant that there were things worth caring about. The gun was never the point. Fifteen years on, the lyrics in “State” are no longer that interesting to me. But they don’t need to be; how one relates or doesn’t relate to a song is always in flux. Now it’s Ament and McCready’s melancholy yet aggressive music that retains its impact, somber and quick, the same way Cameron Crowe’s Singles still manages to affect via tone despite what now feels like over-earnestness and naivete.

Let Me Sleep

At the time of its release as the first Ten Club Holiday Single, some Boston-area DJ who still had the wherewithal to set an honest-to-goodness needle to an honest-to-goodness record played “Let Me Sleep” over the airwaves some time during the holiday season. I don’t remember if I actually heard the song at that time, but news that it existed spread word-of-mouth, and I was made aware that Pearl Jam had written their own original Christmas song. Again, as a young ‘un, this fairly blew my mind. Bands could do that? I had no idea. In my increasingly angsty mind, I imagined that “Let me sleep / It’s Christmastime” translated to “Let me sleep through this sucky suckfest of a holiday”, but I’m not so sure anymore.

 

The music for “Let Me Sleep”, penned by Mike McCready, sounds to my ears closest to “Hummus” of all things, somewhat apropos as the Christmas story originates in the Middle East. The sound is distinctive, a swift rolling guitar figure backed by wood block percussion, and a nice little evocative lyric. The key line to me now is “Let me dream / It’s Christmastime”, not so much “I don’t want to be bothered”, but more “I want to return to the same kind of excitement and wonder I used to feel”. It’s neither cynical nor, God forbid, ironic, traits which every piece of music and art was supposed to boast according to the media at the time. It’s an earnest longing for innocence, a theme well established throughout the Pearl Jam catalog, holiday or no.

Long Road

Simplicity doesn’t always mean simple.  “Long Road” accomplishes with a small handful of chords and clean, direct writing, what armies of rock bands often strive for but ultimately never grasp: sheer beauty.  I remember a critic’s quote from years ago that claimed that for all of Pearl Jam’s success and formidableness as rock band, it had never produced a song that was truly pretty. Whether or not that was true at the time, it is my belief that even the staunchest critics/dismissers of Pearl Jam, if pressed, could acknowledge that “Long Road” is indeed pretty, maybe profoundly so.  It’s also my belief that the very reason the song is so lovely and moving is that is doesn’t appear to be trying hard to that way. It simply is.

It’s no coincidence that “Long Road” has quietly infiltrated film and television, from the gorgeous rendition with the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan on the Dead Man Walking soundtrack to an episode of Scrubs, probably without most casual listeners realizing who they were hearing. The song has also been covered by Michael Stipe, among others, and was performed by Vedder, McCready, and Neil Young as part of the post-9/11 tribute concert, America: A Tribute To Heroes.  It was performed than with good reason: the song is an enormous comfort.  Sung from the point of view of a dying man (or woman), “Long Road” bravely, though not without some sadness, confronts the inevitability of death. Abetted by a ringing D chord and Neil Young’s mournfully sweet pump organ, Vedder’s elegy is joins “Come Back”, “Man of the Hour”, and others in its basic theme, but ultimately resonates, at least for me, on an even truer level.

Man of the Hour

I’ll begin with a sidenote: Mudhoney’s Steve Turner has released several worthy solo albums, the best among them called Steve Turner & His Bad Ideas, on which the riff of the closing track “Move Ahead” has always reminded me heavily of “Man of the Hour”. Or maybe that isn’t so much of a sidenote after all. One of the many reasons why “Man of the Hour” fascinates me is that it doesn’t sound like anything else Ed or the band has ever written. It sounds like a lot of other bands/writers, yet it remains fundamentally and thoroughly Pearl Jam. Of course, the central guitar figure is 100% Vedder; speed it up and you get “MFC”, “Sad”, “Rearviewmirror”, et al. But it’s where the song takes that bit of melody over the course of 4 minutes that I find profoundly moving, with or without Tim Burton’s Big Fish (mostly without, as I’ve only seen the movie once).

To contradict myself completely from my thoughts on “Thumbing My Way”, the mirroring between Vedder’s guitar and vocal melodies is one of the song’s greatest strengths*. Why? Well, it’s difficult to quantify what makes one melody “better” than another, as in all things it really comes down to taste.  But to my ears, “Man of the Hour” possesses a stronger link between the spirit of the lyrics and their musical setting.  If the song were simply a theme without words, it would convey similar notions on grief and loss.  As it stands, we get a perfectly subtle vocal performance from Vedder, as well as some of his most touching lyrics.

After an exquisite, simple and direct first verse, Mike McCready’s slide guitar starts to add a bit of color (and, as it were, dolor).  The slide, like its pedal and lap steel bretheren, and the whole violin family of instruments, is remarkable in its expressiveness because of all musical contraptions it can best imitate the range of inflections of the human voice.  Notice when any popular music song is described as “weepy”, it either features strings or a sliding instrument. “Man of the Hour” is decidedly weepy.  For a song that was written and recorded in a relatively short amount of time, the band is absolutely locked in, knowing just when to enter or fade, and how best to serve the song’s purpose. The second verse builds in intensity, with Matt Cameron’s judicious drumwork, a few rhythm chords, and the now ubiquitous harmonized vocals.  Listen closely for organ and cello, which also buttress the mood without drawing too much attention to themselves.

Live versions of “Man of the Hour” do hold a slight advantage, however, despite the fresh and perfectly seasoned work in the studio (neither over- or under-produced), namely the octave leap Vedder performs on the lines “He was guiding me / Love, his own way”, which never fails to give me chills.  As a tribute to father/son bonds, a subject to which Vedder is no stranger through both real and surrogate, it’s difficult to match.  And as a metaphor for dying, the gentle yet dramatic “As the man of the hour / Is taking his final bow / As the curtain comes down” (recalling the drawing of hospital curtains) is honest and crushing.  “I feel that this is just goodbye for now.”  For now. For now.

*Notice also the “rusted sign” connection between the two songs. Do it!