![]() Dave Abbruzzese is so crucial to this sound, this version of the band, his splash cymbals and the wildness of where he places the bass drum. Here is everything this band did well, and yes it’s dated beyond belief, but this is the snapshot of that time – not a bunch of 50somethings pretending to be in their 20s, actually a bunch of young kids in their 20s giving us the music we craved at the time. Next up is State of Love and Trust (which appeared on the Singles soundtrack) a straight-ahead pop-rock song, arriving like a whiff of 90s rock radio.īut it’s on Alive, the centerpiece of the band’s debut album that the Unplugged gig really gets properly going and really makes (proper) sense as a spiritual reckoning for me and many from my generation. And now, its actual second-coming – since it was only ever available as video footage for so long – it is such a reminder of the time and place. But it was second-coming stuff at the time. And it’s all very dramatic and just a tiny bit twee. The guitars frame the voice, the drums are malleted punctuation with cymbals crashing like waves. So there’s some messy bleeds and murkiness and that occasionally over-zealous but extraordinarily colourful drumming from the best drummist they ever hadis never not-great but sometimes it does blur in under the acoustic guitar lines.Īlso – for all my attacking of Vedder as a poison-throated singing-influencer, he nearly stole the fucking show at a Sting and Peter Gabriel gig I attended (STING! AND PETER GABRIEL!) he is in spectacular voice here, right from opener, Oceans, his wee poem he wrote about surfing ( “a little love song I wrote about my surfboard”). Fuck those fans! And fuck that band.īut what’s this? They’ve just released the Unplugged album officially as audio – finally?Įven better, they haven’t tried to “fix” it. Collectors buying those cardboard-sleeve rip-off concert bootlegs. Guys that thought it was as important as any classic rock and better than a lot. There are about 2,500 Pearl Jam live albums – all these silly official bootlegs of the same songs over and over and over and the thing more frightening than Pearl Jam’s eventual mediocrity was always the rabid fan-base. And Pearl Jam’s song that said as much was either blasting from the speakers or ringing in my ears wringing from my ears… ![]() ![]() And if I had a few too many beers – only once or twice – I could put it on autopilot and it would mostly miss the walls as it arrived back up the driveway. And I had a huge blue Volvo with 200,000+ kms on its clock. I had the first album with a bonus five-track cassette-tape EP. But back when Pearl Jam released its first two albums, and this Unplugged concert – which arrived right in the middle – I didn’t think they were shit. And yes, I was Team Nirvana all the way, or at least until April of 1994. Sure, we had a few chats about Nirvana and Pearl Jam being the 90s version of the Beatles/Rolling Stones conversation, because this was before Blur and Oasis. ![]() Eddie Vedder with his weapons-grade laryngitis – making enough bad music himself but having undue influence on the awful Nu-Metal Years where the Creeds and Stainds of that world gargled marbles and spat out cliches. ![]()
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