I missed grunge originally. The first album I ever bought was (no, it wasn’t Whigfield, how did you get in here?), ahem, was Nirvana’s Unplugged In New York, which is pretty much the definition of having missed grunge in all its original heavy-metal-met-punk-and-thrust-a-load-of-slightly-scared-kids-into-the-spotlight alternativeism. Still, it didn’t stop me picking it all up after everyone else had moved on. After a particularly lucrative birthday I indulged in three CDs – at the same time! – one of which I’ve forgotten and the other two were The Holy Bible by The Manic Street Preachers and Ten by Pearl Jam. Being slightly afraid of the infamous “most depressing album of all time” I started off with The Holy Bible. Just kidding.
Pearl Jam’s debut album remained glued in my exceptionally heavy and uncool walkman for about a year and was played whenever I walked anywhere, which seeing as I had a paper round was quite a lot. Its songs and its sounds are burned into my brain - the combination of groovy rock, angsty vocals and reverb-heavy, epic sheen having a similar effect on me as it did the lost and lonely back in 1992. Only I could pretend that the band were all mine, that I’d discovered them and that I was the coolest paper boy this side of south Birmingham.
Being late to the game, though, I had also missed the context. When Pearl Jam first appeared to the general public they seemed to come out of the blue, with a shiny and (for some) slightly too soft edged album that was aiming for stadium glory. Coming from a relatively small and defiantly alternative Seattle scene, this irked some of their fellow Seattle-ites. The media made a hell of a lot out of it, but it’s fair to say that Kurt Cobain had his problems with what he thought reeked of ambition. Pearl Jam founders Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard had, of course, been part of the original Seattle band of note (Green River) and Cobain’s monster album Nevermind was not without its own ear friendly production (something that would be admirably corrected by the time of the follow up, In Utero) but all this was a bit lost in the overall media picture.
But now the Jammers have presented us with a chance to rewrite history. As the first of what may well be numerous band tie-ins to celebrate their 20th anniversary (which isn’t even this year, how keen are they?), Ten has been re-released in three packages. The millionaire, how-much-you-must-be-joking package has the original album, a remix of the original album by Brendan O’Brien (or Ten Redux as it’s been called), a DVD of their MTV Unplugged show and a plethora of fan friendly stuff, including a copy of the original Ament/Gossard demo tape that Eddie Vedder added his lyrics to in order to prove his worth. I’m yet to find out if this is a copy of the actual tape and has the original demos on it (in which case any price is acceptable) or simply a blank tape (in which case it would sit in a box under my bed and do nothing forever). The other two packages are 1) the above shorn of the merchandise and 2) just the original album and the remix (plus a few unreleased tracks).
It is the remix, though, that puts in us in the DeLorean and sends us back to 1991 to meddle with the past. Brendan O’Brien produced the band’s second album, Vs, and aimed to ensure that their live, raw sound was captured on record. He has retrospectively done the same to their debut, having removed the swathes of reverb that made it just that little bit more acceptable to mainstream audiences (an addition that, by most accounts, the band were never too happy about in the first place).
The effect is nothing short of startling. They sound like they’re in a local club, not a stadium. The parts are crisp, clear and punchy in a way that harks back to their punk/metal roots. “Once” bites so much more, “Even Flow” grooves without sounding a bit like a svengali has had his hands on the production desk and “Why Go” rocks its ass off. Mike McCready’s solos and Stone Gossard’s rhythm parts benefit in particular – in short, you can hear so much more than you could before, in all its previously-veiled, edgy glory.
If this version of the album had been released originally, everything could have been different. Gees, this is heavy. I’ll let time-travelling Doctor Emmett Brown explain:
“You have to think fourth dimensionally! Nirvana may have knocked down the door to the mainstream, but it was Pearl Jam who got pulled through it....they were the mainstream, mega-selling poster boys of the alternative “grunge” scene. If their debut album had been as earthy as this then the globalisation of alternative rock may never have happened! And as a result the Britpop backlash to the ubiquity of American music, the success of Oasis, Blur and Radiohead and the whole scope of 21st century music would have been different! You have to come back with me Marty, we have to go back to the alternative 1991 and put things back as they were, otherwise there will be no Oasis! What? Oh, well, I suppose when you put it like that, yeah, let’s not bother.....”
Thanks, Doc. It’s probably worth remembering that, compared to their scene associates, Pearl Jam were always the most radio friendly (or at least mainstream rock friendly) of all the Seattle bands. Something like what happened may have happened anyway, but we’ll never know. All I know is that I’ll probably never listen to the original mix again.
So it turns out I didn’t really miss anything the first time round after all.
Posted In Features, Mar 29 2009.
Words - Martin