Pearl Jam - Twenty


BY BURAK ŞAHİN (IR/IV)
burak_s@ug.bilkent.edu.tr

Everything started with Mother Love Bone.

Last week, we were finally able to watch the documentary on Pearl Jam that marks their 20th anniversary. The movie's release date here was almost a month later than in other countries, and I also couldn't understand why it was shown at only one screening. However, looking back over the last two decades through Pearl Jam's eyes and songs made for a great evening.

The movie starts with the Mother Love Bone days, and theband's frontman, Andrew Wood. The future Pearl Jam members Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard began making grunge music with Wood, and Mother Love Bone was little by little becoming famous. But then, things went wrong. Wood died of a heroin overdose in 1990. In the movie, the band members speak of his death with tears in their eyes. But at that moment, Eddie Vedder appears in the documentary, just as he had turned up in real life in 1990.

It happened this way. The former members of Mother Love Bone were trying to find new things to do. One day, a demo featuring Eddie Vedder's voice reached them. They couldn't believe that Vedder was for real, and almost immediately invited him to join their new band. Pearl Jam thus began to take shape around 1990. In those early days, Eddie Vedder was shy. But after the band started to play in small clubs in Seattle, Vedder suddenly started to shine on stage, and drew a great response from audiences. The growing process had just begun.

They called themselves "Pearl Jam," a grunge rock band. At the time, people--even the TV reporter shown in the film talking about the band's success--didn't know anything about grunge. But when Pearl Jam started touring in Europe, the band was a big hit. Although Eddie Vedder was still too shy to do an interview, he was able to perform in front of 60,000 people with supreme self-confidence.

Nonetheless, everything didn't go as well as they would have liked. Comparisons began to be made between Pearl Jam and Nirvana, and the music industry tried to create a rivalry between Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder, which never actually happened. Moreover, Pearl Jam showed that they didn’t take the music industry system for granted. The band got into a battle with the Ticketmaster company over high ticket prices. Also, they got drunk at an MTV night, with Eddie Vedder shouting "F**k you MTV." Stone Gossard said about that night, "That was the birth of NO."

In 2000, tragedy struck, when nine people were crushed to death in the crowd during Pearl Jam's gig at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. The accident affected the band deeply. They stopped for a while, asking themselves, "What are we doing?" The scene in the film that shows Eddie Vedder crying on stage for the victims is hard to watch. Vedder talked about the tragedy in an interview: "The hardest moment was the day and the day after. You couldn't go 30 seconds without thinking about it. After a week, you could maybe go a minute without thinking about it. After a month you could maybe go three minutes. You were constantly brought back there."

The documentary continues with live performances and ends with "Just Breathe." The director, Cameron Crowe, did an excellent job. He shows the band's worst times, as well as the best. It's not like an ordinary movie or documentary. We are upset when the tears run down Eddie Vedder's face; we sing along with "Better Man" as the people in Madison Square Garden shout the songs. This 20-year anniversary documentary is one of the best possible presents for Pearl Jam fans.