After 23 Years, Pearl Jam Has Become The Standard Bearer of Rock

Pearl Jam was huge back in the 1990s, embodying the grunge alternative rock scene coming out of Seattle at the time. But they’re still around and keep making good music. In fact, this quote comes from Rolling Stone:

“Unlikely though it seems, the grunge survivors are now — Bruce Springsteen excepted — America’s foremost torchbearers of classic rock.”

Pearl Jam has always hadn’t a different streak than the other acts coming out at the time, being less metal than Soundgarden or Alice in Chains, less punk than Nirvana, more cross-over appeal than Stone Temple Pilots. And without a doubt, the band had enormous success, filling up places like Madison Square Garden for multiple nights in a row. Indeed, Pearl Jam has been declared by some as the most influential and successful band of the 90s.

But for those that watched the scene at the time, it’s small wonder that Pearl Jam is the last band standing from the era. They eschewed the standard business model, never really making music videos and boycotting Ticketmaster for their monopoly of music venues. They also cognisantly tried to be role models, with no band member hitting the news waves because of drug use or the like.

The heyday of grunge music (a term Pearl Jam apparently doesn’t much care for) ended around 1996, with it being said that by 1999 the scene was completely irrelevant to modern music, with pop music coming back into the forefront.

Pearl Jam kept making music, always evolving and growing, and putting on concerts that have been compared to Grateful Dead shows, with fans being steadfastly dedicated to the band. Their concerts were so famous, with them regularly playing covers of Neil Young, Pink Floyd, The Beatles and others, that with the advent of Napster and other file sharing mediums, concerts were recorded by fans and posted for others to download.

In sharp contrast to Metallica, who sued Napster (and paid a heavy toll with fans as a result), Pearl Jam started recording their concerts and selling the CDs. As a result, Pearl Jam has perhaps the largest collections of music available of any band ever.

An interesting point about the band is that they have always released their albums on vinyl, even before record players started making a comeback among hipsters.

The members are now in their 40s, but Pearl Jam, and frontman Eddie Vedder, have consistently produced music, including the entire soundtrack to Into the Wild and were nominated for a Golden Globe for their song for Big Fish, along with 15 Grammy nominations. Vedder even releasing an album with the ukulele.

This song, ‘Future Days,’ is one of the most beautiful songs to come from their last album, Lightning Bolt.