The grunge is all right

Very few documentaries capture the enduring power of rock. It’s actually a hard trick to pull off, because rock isn’t supposed to last. It’s supposed to burn out, like the Sex Pistols (though even they failed to let dead dogs lie). “Hope I die before I get old” was Pete Townshend’s creed long ago — before becoming old himself and not dying. Yet Townshend’s band, The Who, was featured in the best rock doc ever, The Kids Are Alright. Another classic is The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s document of The Band’s last concert in 1978. Both films look back through a mirror into the past, and how it shapes the present.

Now comes Twenty, Cameron Crowe’s affectionate 2011 look back at two decades in the life of Pearl Jam. Immediately what comes to mind is: “What?? Twenty years since the album ‘Ten’? Seventeen years since they played the Folk Arts Theater? That makes me… old!”

The band is older, wiser, sometimes grayer, Eddie Vedder now resembling (I swear) Jeff Bridges’ Dude character in The Big Lebowski. But that’s actually a compliment.

Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder (right) plays ukulele for director Cameron Crowe.

Band friend Crowe narrates that he was there pretty much from the start, having located in Seattle at a pivotal moment: 1989, when grunge was not yet grunge, but a slacker version of L.A. metal in the form of Green River and Mother Love Bone; when singer Andy Wood was the fledgling scene’s Dave Lee Roth, full of bombast and enough confidence to inspire other bands to hammer out their own sound. According to Chris Cornell: “We had a chip on our shoulder, we felt like if it came from New York or Chicago or Minneapolis or Athens, it was probably better, but there was this attitude of ‘Somehow, we will persevere.’” The rainy Seattle weather meant more time indoors, listening to music, rehearsing and, well, partying too much­: Wood was the first heroin casualty of the grunge scene.

From thence sprang Soundgarden and the rhythm section of Pearl Jam; all they needed was a singer. Enter a brooding San Diego surfer with a notebook of words and a caseload of issues. Vedder slapped his vocals on the demo tape that was circulating around Seattle, and something immediately clicked.

Crowe really must have been a fly on the grunge wall, because he managed to Hoover up priceless early footage (such as Pearl Jam’s second-ever gig) before turning the whole scene into a rom-com movie called Singles (band members had cameos). The mystique of Pearl Jam extended to music videos, which they refused to do, until they did, Jeremy adding further to the mystique — Vedder all crazy-eyed and intense. Grunge had broken. Pearl Jam were MTV darlings.

But not really. They always had one eye to what was cool and not cool. Crowe lets the band tell their own story, and you begin to see a spirit of camaraderie — the very meaning of “band” — that will later extend to taking a stand on music industry issues.

Mostly, though, it’s a gas just to see early footage of the band: Vedder in a series of high-altitude stage dives that would be unthinkable now; the band drunkenly melting down at an MTV Singles Party live performance; touring “the world and elsewhere,” as Spinal Tap’s Harry Shearer might put it. (Actually, the Spinal Tap similarities extend beyond Pearl Jam’s hair length and fondness for guitar solos: the band had an endless series of drummers, none of whom exploded onstage, before settling in with Matt Cameron.)

But the band Crowe seems to draw the most parallels with is The Who, and Twenty at times comes across like an homage to The Kids Are Alright. Vedder is shown singing Baba O’Reilly, the classic Who crowd-mover. He apparently worshipped Townshend (Gossard has said that “Ten” reflects “Eddie’s love of ‘Quadrophenia’”), perhaps in part because of the Who guitarist’s soul-baring lyrics about family matters (Townshend penned “Tommy” about a boy without a father; Vedder’s dad was not really his dad). One touching moment in Twenty shows Vedder touring the film crew around his home, stopping at a wall of framed celebrity photos: he shows one of himself and Townshend in an onstage hug; he touches the picture, then starts tearing up a little.

Of course, The Who and Pearl Jam shared another unfortunate legacy: both bands have had fans die at their concerts. For The Who, it was a 1979 show in Cincinnati in which rabid fans stampeded the stage, leading to 11 dead fans (and later, tasteless T-shirts reading “I’d Walk Over You To See The Who”). For Pearl Jam it was a concert in Roskilde, Denmark, 2000, that left nine fans dead in a stage rush. The band

Rearviewmirror: Cameron Crowe’s Twenty is a great document of two decades of Pearl Jam, whether you’re a huge fan or not.

stopped touring for years.

There’s a lot to enjoy in Twenty, even if you’re not a huge fan. There’s guitarist Stone Gossard showing off his Grammy — moldering in a creepy basement resembling the one that Jaime Gumb frequents in Silence of the Lambs; there’s Vedder getting booed and flipped off while donning a rubber Bush mask for a 2005 performance during the height of the Iraq War; and there’s just the joy of seeing this band having a great time onstage — wrestling, crowd-surfing, falling, rising again. In The Kids Are Alright, there are moments that just lift you up, because it’s a document of four guys not just playing rock ‘n’ roll, but being it, onstage, moment after moment. Twenty has a few such moments.

Vedder is the dominant figure here. Photogenic, chameleon-like, he scares the hell out of his bandmates by swinging from overhead stage lights during long guitar solos. “He could have killed himself a number of times,” muses Gossard. “That would have been more than I could take.” But you end up seeing integrity in Vedder’s madness: “He saw the band as going out in a van, touring the country, paying dues,” recalls Cornell. “He was not a guy who wanted that kind of overnight success.” Yet that’s what they got. And to Vedder, it was sometimes bittersweet. Yet he wasn’t one to reach for a needle or a shotgun.

You’d not be alone, though, in wondering: “What has Pearl Jam been up to for the last 10 years?” Their much-publicized battles with Ticketmaster and record labels in the late ‘90s led to an under-the–radar approach to music: their albums sold less, but were more accessible to fans. They became like the Grateful Dead, in some ways: fans collected bootlegs, tracked their tours and movements, quitting work to follow the band — the band being the thing that mattered above all. It’s amusing to see Gossard rue the fact that Vedder likes to change the set list every night: “We could just kill the audience — kill ‘em! — by opening with these five songs, and Eddie’s like, ‘No, no, I think we’ll start with this…’ And you’re like, ‘God! Let’s play a hit!’” (Admits Eddie: “It would be a lot easier to play a similar set each night... yet we can’t find it within our hearts to do it.”)

A lot has changed since grunge was new. The fashions keep returning. The music hasn’t dated as much as people might have thought. And Pearl Jam is still around — after Mother Love Bone, the Creed, Nirvana and Soundgarden have packed it in. They’re still alive.

Just as Vedder vowed long ago.