The Imaginary Pearl Jam Box Set: 4 Drummers In 4 Discs
I started playing drums when I was 10 years old, right around the same time I bought Pearl Jam's Ten and they became my first favorite band that I was really hardcore obsessed with. So they ended up being the way I kinda learned that drummers were usually the most expendable member of a rock band, the role most frequently replaced. Pearl Jam had an almost Spinal Tap-like history with drummers in their first decade of existence, with five different touring drummers, four of which played on albums (Matt Chamberlain had a brief tenure in the band in 1991 that consisted only of some live shows and the "Alive" video). Since then, Matt Cameron has settled into his longterm role, which he was probably destined for ever since he played on the band's early instrumental demos, and in a couple weeks Pearl Jam will release their 5th album with Cameron, Lightning Bolt. Before him, no one drummer was with the band for more than 2 albums.
Dave Krusen, Matt Chamberlain, and Jack Irons all left Pearl Jam of their own volition, although the first two probably didn't have any sense that they would soon become the biggest band in the world. I wouldn't say it's a total Pete Best situation, but it's still crazy that that happened not once but three times. The only drummer they fired, Dave Abbruzzese, was a happy-go-lucky guy with a soul patch who never seemed to fit in with the band, and over the years the story has come out that he wasn't really into the band's battle with TicketMaster, that Eddie Vedder hated him, mocked his drummer magazine covers, and wrote "Glorified G" about his gun ownership.
Pearl Jam Twenty, the documentary about the band released a couple years ago, delves deep into some aspects of their history, but makes a joke of how quickly and vaguely they dispense with "the drummer story" in a scene that runs under 2 minutes. After "Eddie told us to ask Mike about the drummers," Mike McCready runs through their names and as little backstory as possible, saying literally nothing about Dave Abbruzzese, and making the requisite Spinal Tap joke. After it all, Eddie makes a quick comment, almost sounding like it's just then occurring to him for the first time that changing drummers was no small thing: "When we'd have to switch, let's say a drummer or something, you do it out of survival mode. It's just like removing an organ, and when you remove the drummer, you're removing, like, the heart. So it's like a heart transplant."
After my recent 'box sets' of themed playlists of Superchunk's and Elvis Costello's discographies, I wanted to break Pearl Jam's catalog up by drummer, because that's how I really think about the band. After every heart transplant, the rhythmic character of the band shifted, and the way the drummer locked in with the guitars and drove the songs changed. I wouldn't say they were a completely different band in each lineup, but I've always been acutely aware of the differences.
The Imaginary Pearl Jam Box Set: 4 Drummers In 4 Discs
Disc 1: Dave Krusen, 1990-1991 (Spotify playlist)
1. Release
2. Deep
3. Porch
4. Brother
5. Even Flow
6. Breath And A Scream
7. Alive
8. Hold On
9. Once
10. Wash
11. Garden
12. Alone
13. Why Go
14. Black
15. State Of Love And Trust
16. Jeremy
17. Yellow Ledbetter
Disc 2: Dave Abbruzzese, 1991-1994 (Spotify playlist)
1. Corduroy
2. Rearviewmirror
3. Not For You
4. Hard To Imagine
5. Better Man
6. Glorified G
7. Whipping
8. Animal
9. Spin The Black Circle
10. Rats
11. Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town
12. Go
13. Blood
14. Tremor Christ
15. Daughter
16. Crazy Mary
17. Leash
18. Pry, To
19. Last Exit
20. Immortality
Disc 3: Jack Irons, 1994-1998 (Spotify playlist)
1. Given To Fly
2. In My Tree
3. Do The Evolution
4. Black, Red, Yellow
5. Brain of J.
6. Leaving Here
7. Mankind
8. I Got Id
9. Who You Are
10. U
11. MFC
12. Red Mosquito
13. Lukin
14. Faithful
15. All Night
16. Smile
17. Wishlist
18. Hail, Hail
19. Present Tense
20. In Hiding
21. The Long Road
Disc 4: Matt Cameron, 1998-present (Spotify playlist)
1. Greivance
2. Can't Keep
3. Mind Your Manners
4. The Fixer
5. Undone
6. Big Wave
7. Light Years
8. You Are
9. Johnny Guitar
10. Gods' Dice
11. Love Boat Captain
12. World Wide Suicide
13. Breakerfall
14. Supersonic
15. Get Right
16. Sad
17. Thumbing My Way
18. Insignificance
19. I Am Mine
20. Man Of The Hour
21. Sleight Of Hand
22. Gone
One reason I wanted to do this is that each of those four incarnations of the band has a roughly equal share of their best songs, even though their tenures had vastly different lengths. Dave Krusen's brief stay produced their biggest album, as well as some pretty famous non-album cuts -- I was able to fit pretty much all of Ten on the Krusen playlist, minus "Oceans" and the "Master/Slave" interludes that bookend the album. Meanwhile, Matt Cameron has presided over the band's large but spotty 21st century output. And Abbruzzese and Irons each played on 2 albums that are chock full of great songs.
Dave Krusen was the drummer for Pearl Jam's most 'classic rock'-sounding period, and sometimes it's hard to say how much that had to do with his playing, which is expansive and detailed but not flashy per se, and how much it had to do with Rick Parashar's production, which is far more cavernous and old-fashioned than the sleeker Brendan O'Brien production on almost every album that followed. O'Brien's remix of Ten a few years ago (from which I used "Once," to avoid the "Master/Slave" intro), illuminated things a little bit, but not too much.
Dave Abbruzzese probably isn't that significantly different from Krusen in playing style, and in some ways seemed like more of a flashy muso cheeseball, with splash cymbals and way too many tom toms and all that. But he was with the band as they transformed into something much more versatile and, often, more aggressive. As fun as it is to make fun of the dude's soul patch, he kinda killed it more often than not, backing up some of their punkier material with the right energy and throwing all these perfect little fills and flourishes into songs that Matt Cameron now plays live a bit more simply and blandly.
Jack Irons is kinda my favorite of all the Pearl Jam drummers. No Code was their strangest album, and the one that kind of signaled their sharpest commercial decline in their long, slow downward slide into cult heroes, and it was the last time they really felt like the center of my musical world. "In My Tree" is sometimes my all-time favorite Pearl Jam song, and is just completely unlike anything that they would've been able to do with any of their other drummers. And even a lot of their more traditional rock tracks with Jack Irons just had these beautiful loose grooves, he really just had an incredibly unique feel -- he was the band's drummer when they backed Neil Young on Mirror Ball, and Neil raved about his drumming in interviews.
I've always been kind of ambivalent about Matt Cameron becoming Pearl Jam's longest running and probably permanent drummer. He's obviously incredibly talented, but he was also such a perfect drummer for Soundgarden, who played a major role in shaping their sound, that it's hard not to notice that he's not quite as good a fit for Pearl Jam. The fusion of his style with the band's brought some interesting new sounds on Binaural and Riot Act, but since then he's kind of been a workmanlike foil for their blandest instincts. Still, they've recorded some really great songs over the last 15 years and it was fun to cherry pick fromsuch an inconsistent period and remind myself of how awesome Pearl Jam can still be. They've made a lot of long boring songs lately, but I focused on the shorter tracks, which meant that with each 'disc' I was able to fit more songs into 80 minutes than with the last. Actually, Pearl Jam have always been unable to rid their albums of filler, which makes them a great band to make compilations of. This isn't all of my favorite songs of theirs (one, "Satan's Bed," features a drum machine from a session Abbruzzese couldn't play, and a few other tracks were too mellow and acoustic to warrant inclusion), but it's most of 'em.
Dave Krusen, Matt Chamberlain, and Jack Irons all left Pearl Jam of their own volition, although the first two probably didn't have any sense that they would soon become the biggest band in the world. I wouldn't say it's a total Pete Best situation, but it's still crazy that that happened not once but three times. The only drummer they fired, Dave Abbruzzese, was a happy-go-lucky guy with a soul patch who never seemed to fit in with the band, and over the years the story has come out that he wasn't really into the band's battle with TicketMaster, that Eddie Vedder hated him, mocked his drummer magazine covers, and wrote "Glorified G" about his gun ownership.
Pearl Jam Twenty, the documentary about the band released a couple years ago, delves deep into some aspects of their history, but makes a joke of how quickly and vaguely they dispense with "the drummer story" in a scene that runs under 2 minutes. After "Eddie told us to ask Mike about the drummers," Mike McCready runs through their names and as little backstory as possible, saying literally nothing about Dave Abbruzzese, and making the requisite Spinal Tap joke. After it all, Eddie makes a quick comment, almost sounding like it's just then occurring to him for the first time that changing drummers was no small thing: "When we'd have to switch, let's say a drummer or something, you do it out of survival mode. It's just like removing an organ, and when you remove the drummer, you're removing, like, the heart. So it's like a heart transplant."
After my recent 'box sets' of themed playlists of Superchunk's and Elvis Costello's discographies, I wanted to break Pearl Jam's catalog up by drummer, because that's how I really think about the band. After every heart transplant, the rhythmic character of the band shifted, and the way the drummer locked in with the guitars and drove the songs changed. I wouldn't say they were a completely different band in each lineup, but I've always been acutely aware of the differences.
The Imaginary Pearl Jam Box Set: 4 Drummers In 4 Discs
Disc 1: Dave Krusen, 1990-1991 (Spotify playlist)
1. Release
2. Deep
3. Porch
4. Brother
5. Even Flow
6. Breath And A Scream
7. Alive
8. Hold On
9. Once
10. Wash
11. Garden
12. Alone
13. Why Go
14. Black
15. State Of Love And Trust
16. Jeremy
17. Yellow Ledbetter
Disc 2: Dave Abbruzzese, 1991-1994 (Spotify playlist)
1. Corduroy
2. Rearviewmirror
3. Not For You
4. Hard To Imagine
5. Better Man
6. Glorified G
7. Whipping
8. Animal
9. Spin The Black Circle
10. Rats
11. Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town
12. Go
13. Blood
14. Tremor Christ
15. Daughter
16. Crazy Mary
17. Leash
18. Pry, To
19. Last Exit
20. Immortality
Disc 3: Jack Irons, 1994-1998 (Spotify playlist)
1. Given To Fly
2. In My Tree
3. Do The Evolution
4. Black, Red, Yellow
5. Brain of J.
6. Leaving Here
7. Mankind
8. I Got Id
9. Who You Are
10. U
11. MFC
12. Red Mosquito
13. Lukin
14. Faithful
15. All Night
16. Smile
17. Wishlist
18. Hail, Hail
19. Present Tense
20. In Hiding
21. The Long Road
Disc 4: Matt Cameron, 1998-present (Spotify playlist)
1. Greivance
2. Can't Keep
3. Mind Your Manners
4. The Fixer
5. Undone
6. Big Wave
7. Light Years
8. You Are
9. Johnny Guitar
10. Gods' Dice
11. Love Boat Captain
12. World Wide Suicide
13. Breakerfall
14. Supersonic
15. Get Right
16. Sad
17. Thumbing My Way
18. Insignificance
19. I Am Mine
20. Man Of The Hour
21. Sleight Of Hand
22. Gone
One reason I wanted to do this is that each of those four incarnations of the band has a roughly equal share of their best songs, even though their tenures had vastly different lengths. Dave Krusen's brief stay produced their biggest album, as well as some pretty famous non-album cuts -- I was able to fit pretty much all of Ten on the Krusen playlist, minus "Oceans" and the "Master/Slave" interludes that bookend the album. Meanwhile, Matt Cameron has presided over the band's large but spotty 21st century output. And Abbruzzese and Irons each played on 2 albums that are chock full of great songs.
Dave Krusen was the drummer for Pearl Jam's most 'classic rock'-sounding period, and sometimes it's hard to say how much that had to do with his playing, which is expansive and detailed but not flashy per se, and how much it had to do with Rick Parashar's production, which is far more cavernous and old-fashioned than the sleeker Brendan O'Brien production on almost every album that followed. O'Brien's remix of Ten a few years ago (from which I used "Once," to avoid the "Master/Slave" intro), illuminated things a little bit, but not too much.
Dave Abbruzzese probably isn't that significantly different from Krusen in playing style, and in some ways seemed like more of a flashy muso cheeseball, with splash cymbals and way too many tom toms and all that. But he was with the band as they transformed into something much more versatile and, often, more aggressive. As fun as it is to make fun of the dude's soul patch, he kinda killed it more often than not, backing up some of their punkier material with the right energy and throwing all these perfect little fills and flourishes into songs that Matt Cameron now plays live a bit more simply and blandly.
Jack Irons is kinda my favorite of all the Pearl Jam drummers. No Code was their strangest album, and the one that kind of signaled their sharpest commercial decline in their long, slow downward slide into cult heroes, and it was the last time they really felt like the center of my musical world. "In My Tree" is sometimes my all-time favorite Pearl Jam song, and is just completely unlike anything that they would've been able to do with any of their other drummers. And even a lot of their more traditional rock tracks with Jack Irons just had these beautiful loose grooves, he really just had an incredibly unique feel -- he was the band's drummer when they backed Neil Young on Mirror Ball, and Neil raved about his drumming in interviews.
I've always been kind of ambivalent about Matt Cameron becoming Pearl Jam's longest running and probably permanent drummer. He's obviously incredibly talented, but he was also such a perfect drummer for Soundgarden, who played a major role in shaping their sound, that it's hard not to notice that he's not quite as good a fit for Pearl Jam. The fusion of his style with the band's brought some interesting new sounds on Binaural and Riot Act, but since then he's kind of been a workmanlike foil for their blandest instincts. Still, they've recorded some really great songs over the last 15 years and it was fun to cherry pick fromsuch an inconsistent period and remind myself of how awesome Pearl Jam can still be. They've made a lot of long boring songs lately, but I focused on the shorter tracks, which meant that with each 'disc' I was able to fit more songs into 80 minutes than with the last. Actually, Pearl Jam have always been unable to rid their albums of filler, which makes them a great band to make compilations of. This isn't all of my favorite songs of theirs (one, "Satan's Bed," features a drum machine from a session Abbruzzese couldn't play, and a few other tracks were too mellow and acoustic to warrant inclusion), but it's most of 'em.
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on Friday, October 04, 2013 at 12:10 AM.
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