The personal significance of Pearl Jam's twentieth anniversary is that they became my first favorite band shortly after the release of Ten and have been one of my favorite bands ever since. And I'm not 30 yet, so this band has been a major part of my life for 2/3rds of it. Beyond that, I'm interested to see the Pearl Jam Twenty documentary but in no rush, and in the meantime have enjoyed digging into the 2-disc soundtrack.

The challenge facing Pearl Jam as far as assembling a soundtrack for a biography of the band is that almost any shape it could take already exists in their enormous discography. It could've been a career-spanning best-of, but there's already Rearviewmirror. It could've been a rarities collection, but there's already Lost Dogs. It could've been a live album, but there are literally hundreds of those already commercial available. So the soundtrack ends up being all of the above, a grab bag of ephemera that's mostly of interest to fans only, although as a fan I have no problem with that.

3/4ths of the Pearl Jam Twenty soundtrack is live, running the gamut of "SNL" and "MTV Unplugged" appearances to random concert performances of a random assortment of songs, which I can only imagine were picked because video footage of those performances was used in the film (although it's fun to have a reminder of how laughably awful "Bu$hleaguer" was). Of particular interest to me are the 4 tracks on the first disc from the brief Jack Irons era, which I'm a huge fan of and has been woefully underdocumented in the band's official live releases, which started up just after he was replaced by Matt Cameron.

But really the fun stuff is the demos on the first half of the second disc. The two Temple of the Dog demos are hardly revelatory, but fun to hear because I love that album as much as a lot of Pearl Jam albums. A couple pre-Ten demos that never became proper songs are interesting to hear, and Mike McCready's home demo of "Given To Fly" is beautiful. But the best is "Need To Know," Cameron's demo that contains virtually all of the music for what later became Pearl Jam's last great song, "The Fixer," and is a great window into how much creative input he's had into the band's later years. As a lifelong fan, even I know how inessential and fleetingly interesting this stuff is, but I would still happily listen to a whole album of demos like this, which I imagine will come down the pike at some point. By comparison, I listened to a few tracks from the Nevermind reissue the other night and quickly got bored and put on something else; Nirvana was great but I was always a Pearl Jam guy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 12, 2011 at 7:59 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.