Jam Sessions

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, when seemingly millions of grimacing twentysomething white guys in backward baseball caps walked the earth feeling sorry for themselves, Pearl Jam was a dominant musical force. Capitalizing big-time on Generation X’s burgeoning fury, the band’s raging 1991 debut album, Ten, filled with dour, tormented songs, sold nearly 10 million copies in the United States alone. Pearl Jam had struck a chord.

Identified by lead singer and former San Diegan Eddie Vedder’s baritone growls and wails, Pearl Jam both defined and transcended the joyless music movement known as grunge, which traded ’80s flash for ’90s malaise but kept the power chords. Pearl Jam and fellow “grungers” Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Hole and a few others ruled the charts for a few years, but grunge never recovered from the 1994 suicide of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. Subsequently, Soundgarden broke up, Alice in Chains’ Layne Staley died of a drug overdose, and Hole’s Courtney Love (Cobain’s widow) went Hollywood, then loopy.

Grunge imploded, and all those flannel shirts everyone wore in the ’90s became garage rags. But somebody forgot to tell Pearl Jam. Despite the demise of the gloomy genre that spawned the band, Pearl Jam has survived and still sells lots of records and concert tickets. Yet some music fans look at PJ as an oldies act, and those anthems of angst (“Alive,” “Jeremy”), which chronicled Gen-X’s deep resentment toward its baby-boomer parents, are played almost sentimentally now on such throwaway pop-culture TV shows as VH1’s I Love the 90s.

That indignity doesn’t faze Vedder, 41, who’s come far since he was an amiable classic-rock aficionado who surfed Windansea and worked as a roadie for the Bacchanal in Kearny Mesa and the Open Air Theatre at San Diego State University. Vedder, who also fronted a San Diego band in those days called Bad Radio, has become a multimillionaire with a family of his own, but he remains the brooding, reluctant rock star. He still takes himself, his band and the world too seriously.

Thing is, he wasn’t known as a demonstrably distraught young man when he lived here. By most accounts, he was far more good-natured and optimistic than his gloomily intense Pearl Jam stage persona and lyrics suggest. His personality seemed to change dramatically in a few short years. Maybe moving from San Diego to Seattle will do that to you. But the quick transformation has led some to believe Vedder’s persona is an act.

In his defense, Vedder had some things to be angry about. Like so many in his generation, he came from a broken home. Shuttled back and forth from San Diego to Chicago as a kid, Vedder was a year old when his mom divorced his dad. He was raised by his stepfather, who he thought was his birth dad until he was 13. The news came as a shock.

To his credit, Vedder—who’s an effective lyricist but doesn’t possess the innate melodic sensibilities or songwriting knack of Cobain—managed to channel his childhood pain into something worthwhile. Pearl Jam’s drab, guitar-heavy songs, which are rooted more in classic hard rock than punk, aren’t everyone’s cup of coffee, but they do rock, and they can be cathartic, even therapeutic, for the disenfranchised.

A powerful if hulking and musically limited band, Pearl Jam has been a bit overvalued from the get-go by critics and the public but continues to make music that moves many. The latest album, simply titled Pearl Jam, has been called the band’s best in a decade. The first single, the anti-war “World Wide Suicide,” is the fastest-charting song of the band’s career. Vedder said recently that he and his 22-month-old daughter sing the cheerfully titled tune together backstage on the current tour. Just gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling inside, doesn’t it?

These days, there’s an inevitable nostalgia associated with a Pearl Jam concert. That’s what happens when a group is so closely attached to a cultural movement that has come and gone. Not sure how wistful one can or should get for an era of music whose chief legacies are anger, sadness, self-destruction and suicide. But hey, whatever rocks your world.

Break out your flannel and your best reality-bites sneer when grunge’s sole survivors storm Cox Arena July 7. Sonic Youth opens. For more information, call 619-594-0429.

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