Pearl Jam Month: Vitalogy
by Zane Ewton
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About halfway through "Spin the Black Circle," track two of Vitalogy, Eddie Vedder screams:
pull it out...a paper sleeve
oh, my joy...only you deserve conceit
i'm so big...a-my whole world
i'd rather you...rather you...than her
spin, spin...spin the black circle
...and then you realize, he gets it. The members of Pearl Jam are as stark raving mad about music as you are. Instant Connection.
For a teenage kid with a severe Zeppelin obsession, Pearl Jam was a natural progression. They could have fit in 1974 just as well as they fit in 1994. With Vitalogy, Pearl Jam started to run away from the spotlight. The success of Ten and Vs primed the band for that exalted title - biggest band in the world. I'm not sure anyone knows what that means, but it seems to mean a lot to Bono.
It did not mean anything to Pearl Jam, and they took steps to avoid it. With Vitalogy they began to alienate the fairweather fans. It did not take much. The record includes a few offbeat indulgences, but sticks to the meat and potatoes rock. It also includes several of the band's most enduring, and melodic songs.
Much of the perception of Vitalogy has to do with everything but the music. Pearl Jam stopped making videos. MTV was even still playing a few music videos at the time. Pearl Jam stopped doing interviews. It does not take much to read into the lyrics of "Pry To" to understand how Vedder was feeling at the time - "P R I V A C Y...is priceless to me." They took on Ticketmaster in a court case that dragged for a few years, and kept the band off the road. If you have waded through Ticketmaster service fees lately, you can see the case was not a roaring success. In the midst of the trial, Pearl Jam released their most self indulgent album yet. It had a few weird songs on it, and the packaging did not fit in with the rest of your CD collection.
Every step Pearl Jam took away from the mainstream only intensified the love of their core fans. The kids that needed this music, and need this band, to give them an identity and a little understanding. Grunge was on its last legs by the time Vitalogy was released. Its leaders were dead, or working very hard to get dead. In a music scene that was never about good times and scoring chicks, life was getting very dark. Pearl Jam was never a luminescent beacon of hope, but they were the closest we had to feeling better about life.
Pearl Jam was best known for songs about troubled youth, and not being able to get over it. Vedder's search for P R I V A C Y took his lyrics somewhere else. They were vague, but full of interesting images and phrases. The words bite with violence, supported by some of Stone Gossard and Mike McCready's most aggressive guitar playing. "Last Exit," "Spin the Black Circle" and "Satan's Bed" are ugly, explosive rock songs. Much of Vitalogy has an edge the band was never able to reclaim. At the other spectrum, they could strip down into something gorgeous like "Nothingman." Pearl Jam's musical range was crucial for their survival, and helped create multidimensional albums.
Vitalogy was the sound of Pearl Jam shouting from the window, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore." From that point, they have done everything their way. Only with an album as alarming, vicious and beautiful as Vitalogy could they get away with it.
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