Mr. Faded Glory - Pearl Jam: Twenty

I'm nostalgic about the 1990's. It's not that I miss high school. At fucking all. As a graduate of the Rio Vista High School Class of '97, I can say with absolute certainty that those four endless, hellish years I spent in that house of horrors the city fathers for some reason called an institute of learning were definitely some of the worst of my life... and I once lived in a shed in the middle of the Washington state woods with an insane hippie chick.

I'm sentimental about the music, I guess, but I didn't know that until I watched Cameron Crowe's wonderful documentary Pearl Jam: Twenty. Crowe was given extraordinary access to a band that has outlived the "grunge" pop-culture craze which practically haunted every band to come out of Seattle in the wake of Nirvana, and indeed is the last of those bands still touring and recording with their original line-up (minus Pearl Jam's bizarre list of former drummers, recounting in a very funny, This Is Spinal Tap-sampling montage) - Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Mother Love Bone, Hole... all gone. The film is a little too exhaustive in closely chronicling the band's timeline, and it comes at the expense of incisive insight into the band's in-fighting and personality clashes. Still, to see this great American rock band's life captured like this, and by Cameron Crowe (whose second feature film, Singles, featured members of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden in cameo roles), is an amazing experience.

I can't imagine anyone under the age of 25 or so really appreciating this film or even understanding it. Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chili Peppers... these bands were the soundtrack to my wretched high school years. Did I mention how much I hated high school? (I did? Really? Shall I beat that shit right into the ground? I was unpopular, insecure and had few friends. I'm grateful for all that, looking back... I know too many people whose high school years turned out to the best years of their life. I like to think that mine are still ahead of me.) Pearl Jam: Twenty is clearly for Pearl Jam fans, but it reflects the shifting realities of an entire generation.

I turned 33 years old on November 22, 2011. Typing that sentence was not quite as painful as I thought it would be, but it's still a reality I'd like to somehow negate. As George Clooney's character said to Sam Rockwell's Chuck Barris in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind; "You're 32 years old, and you've achieved nothing. Jesus Christ was dead and alive again by 33. You better get crackin'." He could be talking about me, or damn near everyone I went to high school with. Or almost anyone my own age. Mine is a generation full of late-starters... I don't know why, but it might have something to do with Pearl Jam.

I'm kidding. Kind of. In an indirect way, it's all Eddie Vedder's fault. For a very, very short while I sang in a garage band, and one of the songs the guitar player insisted I sing was Pearl Jam's "Alive." So I did, quite a few times, but I guess I was trying too hard to sound like Eddie, I didn't really have the "self-balls" (as the guitar player told me) to be a frontman for a band at the time, so they fired me. Oh well. Early success didn't really turn out too well for Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin or Robert Johnson, did it? And life ended badly for Andrew Wood, as well.

The story of Pearl Jam exists in the shadow of the influential Seattle band Mother Love Bone. That band featured future Pearl Jam members Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard, and its lead singer was a fireball named Andrew Wood. Amazing archive footage reveals Wood as a charismatic, glam-influenced frontman, relentlessly "on." Wood's tragic death at age 24 from a heroin overdose still affects the surviving members of Mother Love Bone. Stone Gossard thought his career was over, but he approached Mike McCready, a Seattle lead guitarist, who insisted that Stone hook up again with Jeff Ament. The founding lineup is complete when they hear a demo recorded by a San Diego surfer and musician, who laid his vocals over one of Stone and Jeff's instrumental tracks. According to the film, the song would end up being the haunting, bluesy ballad "Footsteps." The singer, of course, was Ed Vedder.

Circling back to that abortive attempt to start a band in high school: on at least one occasion, the guitar player would put on Pearl Jam and tell me that this was how I should be singing. The problem: despite the countless soundalike ciphers that would follow, only Vedder really sings like Vedder, which is how it should be. We were handicapped by ludicrously high expectations, and I was hamstrung by my crippling shyness and insecurity. I'm somewhat happy to report most of that shit has been sloughed away - mostly by life itself, partly by film school... you can't be a withdrawn loner and expect to get any movies made. Well, you can, but they'll be really shitty movies.

Watching Pearl Jam: Twenty made me wish I'd been far more hungry and confident in high school - but that's probably the most common regret in America. (Aside from the Democrats nominating John Kerry in 2004 - we really should've stuck with Howard Dean.) I've come a long way from the core group of "alternative" rock bands I used to endlessly listen to from 1992 - 97; I discovered Tom Waits, delved deep into the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Neil Young and jazz greats like Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk. I was gripped by a bizarre urge to the get to the bottom of the Great American Blues Myth, and studied up on Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and all the monstrously brilliant men and women who shared the stage with these people (including Charley Patton, who happens to be the proto-Jimi Hendrix. Playing the guitar with your teeth? Upside down? Around your back? Charley did it all first.) Lately I've been listening to the new Black Keys single "Lonely Boy" and the Trent Reznor/Karen O/Atticus Rose cover of "Immigrant Song" over and over again, but this movie has reignited my love of Pearl Jam, and my appreciation of the music of the 90's.

My favorite scene: at the band's tenth anniversary concert in Las Vegas, Eddie Vedder sang the great Mother Love Bone song "Crown of Thorns." The story of Mr. Faded Glory, a somewhat death-obsessed worldview, and a love that leaves me alone. Vedder acknowledged the past with that performance, and the song has remained in their concert set list ever since. You can disagree with their politics - and indeed, they're not exactly known for their crowd-pleasing sense of humor (take the much-booed rendition of Vedder's protest song, "Bu$hleaguer," featuring a George W. Bush mask impaled on a microphone stand as Vedder intones the not-that-clever lyrics while pouring alcohol in the mask's mouth.), but they scaled back their career, and have survived.

Twenty years. Holy fuck. Love it.