as a backdrop, but not entirely relevant to this post, I've been listening to a lot of the first three albums lately. Primarily Vitalogy, but all of them. and bootlegs from the period.

Listening to the Britxon bootlegs from '93, I'm thinking about how the audience would have responded to some of the Vs. songs, which they hadn't heard on a studio album. Lyrics in Animal such as "5 against 1" clearly exhibit a sense of Pearl Jam as a collective opposed to the machine. In lieu of Dave getting kicked out about a year after these shows, it's amazing to see how such a dissolution of the collective could occurr, and the Vitalogy album being written and recorded meanwhile.

Also, statements such as "I'd rather be with an animal" are a bit disturbing, and I've never quite understood the appeal of this song--assuming it's a sexual reference. I guess it's open to inerpretation, and the point of it is commentary on their reception by the media nad subsequent commodification.

Still, the journey from Ten to Vs. to Vitalogy is a peculiar one. It certainly confirms that Ed was deranged and working out a lot of personal and public issues within himself, not always in the most sane of representations. And, then seeing where the journey landed them in a public battle with Ticketmaster, probably somewhat representative of their general beef with how corporations controlled and dictated certain things from them. Factor in Ed's relationship with Dave (they got tattoos together) and Cobain's suicide-- No Code seems like a rather logical turn given that their new drummer enabled a lot of the experimentation they took on that album which probably again was a calculated internal subversion of the machine they could not legally conquer.

Not sure of the point of all this other than observing and commenting on the history of the band. Ike

You should go to the park or something.

and I mean this not in a way to beef, and I'm uncertain if its the chicken or the egg though I obviously indicate the way I'm leaning, but your avatar and the annoying looking cartoon in it seems to always preclude your smart ass posts. Merry Christmas, sinter klaus

Didn't you meet a chick on this message board?

I should go to the park or something.

I would love to have been around in the 'early days'.

I saw them in '93.

i saw them in '93 too



on mtv

I think the transition between early and mid Pearl Jam is lyrically metasticized in 'Last Exit'

... as in some ways Last Exit was (at the time) the border song between the land of Lollapalooza-Ten-Singles Sndtrck-ToTD-Cobain Living-VS and the land of Not for you-corduroy-merkin ball-jack irons-and the unkown.

Ive always thought this way.

you make a good point.

my only problem with this is that so many of the Vitalogy songs were written in their finished form before Cobain and the ending of the 94 tour in april. maybe corduroy was the only song not performed before the end of it--even the rough sketch of immortality that showed up in boston was thematically the same as the album version (in response to Kurt).

also, the themes on Vitalogy explored the same territory as Vs. with just as much outright rejection. vitalogy just had more songs about it, specifically. but it certainly could have been an indicator that if the demands on them didn't change, they would change so the demands wouldn't be there. but that's somewhat the benefit of hindsight.