Soul Kitchen

It was a difficult time for aging rockers. New sounds were emerging from the unlikely musical hotbed that is the Pacific Northwest. Wild, unbridled sounds that appeared to owe no debt to The Eagles and Supertramp. Sounds that therefore must be stopped.

Ah, but this movement would prove less easy to sweep under the industry's carpet than punk had been a decade earlier. For one thing, this new breed of ruffian didn't look the part of the public menace. Safety pins were one thing; jeans and plaid jackets, frankly, appear threatening only if you are a tree.

'Alternative'

The media labeled it 'grunge' and proceeded to herd Pacific Northwest bands into one all-encompassing pen. They even worked out a compromise with those who feared being left behind: Your music is 'alternative,' the old guard informed the kids, ours is classic rock.

Bassist Jeff Ament remembers it well. Together with guitarist Stone Gossard, Ament had been at the frontlines of the nascent grunge scene, paying dues with Green River and Mother Love Bone. But, he insists, by the time the pair had recruited guitarist Mike McCready, drummer Dave Krusen and vocalist Eddie Vedder to form Pearl Jam, grunge was but a distant memory for them. Even if the media continue to tell a different story.

"I think I've become numb to that over the last 15 years," Ament says of Pearl Jam's enduring status as official grunge godfathers. "It really bothered me at first, to some degree, because I never felt like we were a grunge band. Stone and I did that when we were in Green River, but we always had aspirations to do something that was more than just one kind of thing.

"I think at that point we were aspiring to be a Led Zeppelin kind of a band where you could pick up your acoustic instruments or you could go out and rock or you could play a country song. I love all those bands we got mentioned with, but it never felt like we fit into that group very well. So the fact that they're still saying, 'The band that survived grunge' is kind of funny."

Fighting the industry

Yet, regardless of whether it's the sound or the label, survive grunge Pearl Jam has. This, despite getting caught up in the inevitable grunge backlash, going through a succession of drummers and very publicly fighting the music industry law only to have the law win.

Five years after its most recent studio album (a nearly completed new one will see release "before the next Guns N' Roses record," Ament jokes), Pearl Jam has maintained a loyal following through constant touring.

In that sense, Pearl Jam's profile reminds Ament of another classic-rock band.

"In some ways we've tried to model ourselves after The Grateful Dead," he says. "I think we spend a little bit more time on our studio records than they did, but they had a really cool thing going on -- how they treated their fans and how their fans treated them.

"We've been lucky enough that our core fans have always been there for us, whether radio and MTV have played us or not. That's pretty great existence in our book."

It is not, however, the DIY existence the band envisioned when Pearl Jam boldly stood up to Ticketmaster nearly a decade ago, accusing the megacorporation of controlling a music industry monopoly ... and ultimately going down to defeat in the courts.

"We saw something starting to happen with the industry and we called them out on it," Ament explains. "More than anything we wanted people to know where their money was going. And the one thing we did win about that was that they have to print on their tickets what the surcharge is.

"But we thought we were bigger than the industry at that point and said, 'We're going to go out and do our own shows.' We did about 10 or 15 shows that we built from the ground up and it just about killed us.

Jamheads

"So by the time we got ready to play shows on the next tour there really wasn't an option. If we wanted to play Chicago at any venue that held more than 500 people we had to play a Ticketmaster venue."

For the record, Ticketmaster is not the source for tickets to Friday's Corel Centre show. But then, local Jamheads likely already know that. Just as they know that their heroes were never grunge ... and should not be held responsible for the countless Eddie wannabes that spring up each year.

"Now, when I hear somebody on the radio that sounds like Ten-era Ed, I find it funny because they forget that Ed has about five other voices he can do. They just don't have the versatility he has, or the versatility our band has."

Pearl Jam enjoys the best of both worlds, can have its cake and eat it, too, whatever that means.

Playing Monday at Rexall Place, Pearl Jam is among the most popular rock bands in the world, yet one of the most enigmatic. They are rock superstars who somehow stay "underground."

Must be nice.

While responsible for a good chunk of the finest "angst-rock" ever made, Pearl Jam has done some strange things in its history. It flooded the market with live albums, recording, pressing and selling every single live concert. Pearl Jam therefore holds the record for live albums, or "official bootlegs," as they call them. It got tons of press for an unsuccessful battle with Ticketmaster, has seen a regular decline in album sales since the debut Ten in 1991, refused to make music videos, yet allows fans to record shows like the Grateful Dead did. Pearl Jam appears to have cancelled as many tours as it launched and hasn't had a hit worth mentioning in at least six years. The superstar might cry, "Oh, no!" The underground hero would probably sneer, "So what?" Take your pick.

Turn on the radio and you'll still hear such songs as Daughter, Jeremy, Even Flow and Better Man, though the band has had four studio albums in the long and strange years since.

Politically, Pearl Jam bats left and has been involved in almost every worthy cause imaginable. It endorsed John Kerry in the well-publicized, but unsuccessful "Vote for Change" concert series.

In April 2003, dozens of fans booed and walked out of a concert in Denver when Eddie impaled a mask of George W. Bush on his microphone stand.

For all this baggage, Pearl Jam can still sell out arenas and stadiums wherever in the world it plays.

"Where have they been?" seems to be the most common question leading up to its sold-out show on Monday. This is the band's first appearance in Edmonton since August 2003, when it drew 4,000 fans to the convention centre. They certainly could've played a bigger building, but in the words of the concert promoter, "They want the kids to mosh."

They did.

Eddie Vedder and his lads didn't grant any daily press interviews for this tour - underground bands do this to remain underground, superstars do it because they're just too busy, take your pick - so we'll have to muddle through the mystery and create a nice story from whole cloth.Or from a bunch of stuff found on the Internet, anyway.

The story of Pearl Jam is the stuff of urban myth. From the rainy burg of Seattle in the early '90s came a new sound called "grunge rock." At least two of the most famous Seattle bands epitomized this style, the other one being Nirvana. They're all dead now: Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden ... Pearl Jam carries the grunge torch alone, though at this point, its music has evolved far beyond the label.

The band formed in 1990 from the ashes of Mother Love Bone, whose singer Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose. Guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament were impressed by the work of a young singer named Eddie Vedder. Long story short: They hit it off, formed a band, scored a deal with Epic Records and changed their name from Mookie Blaylock - to avoid confusion with a basketball player who also happened to be named Mookie Blaylock - to Pearl Jam. Depending on who you believe, the name comes from a hallucinogenic condiment made by Eddie's grandmother; either that or it's a term for semen.

See? Sometimes it's better not to know.

The same could be said of Pearl Jam's lyrics.

Like Nirvana, Pearl Jam was one of the first modern heavy rock bands to incorporate tragedy into its music - and make it not only acceptable, but insanely popular. Its effects can still be heard today in one whiny hard rock band after another. At the time, it was fresh. These were not feel-good party anthems.

Pearl Jam's first hit, Alive, deals with incest and murder. Jeremy was inspired by the true story of a 16-year-old boy who committed suicide in front of his class.

Loss, abuse and confusion also are touched on in Even Flow.

You could become seriously depressed getting too deep into it.

The media jumped on the grunge rock trend with both feet, declaring the music of Pearl Jam, among others, to be "the voice of a disaffected generation." Eddie hit the cover of Time magazine at the height of his fame: Angry rocker, voice of a generation.

You may recall how angry everybody was. Nevermind may have burst open the gates, but Pearl Jam's Ten smashed them down forever.

I dimly remember the band's 1993 concert here as one of the best concerts of the year, if not the decade. The band certainly had a knack for connecting on several levels, viscerally, intellectually, emotionally, dramatically, and by all accounts, Pearl Jam's legendary live show is the real reason it's managed to remain superstars all this time. It's working on a new studio album set to hit sometime this winter, but it scarcely matters how it will sell or what hits it will yield.

Eddie and Co. have clearly discovered the secret of success: Concerts are not simply marketing tools to sell albums.

It's the opposite: albums are "promissory notes" that the band will come back and deliver a killer live concert (which you can then buy at www.pearljam.com at the low, low price of just $10 US each; oh, you clever, clever underground superstars).

By that tally, these guys owe Edmonton a few more.