The 1999 song that gave Eddie Vedder faith in pop again: “That was kind of uplifting”
Of the original grunge cohort, only Pearl Jam was soldiering on at the cusp of the millennium.
Of the ‘Big Four’, the Seattle underground’s heyday was largely struck dead the moment Kurt Cobain violently took his own life in 1994. Soundgarden and Alice in Chains trucked on for another album in the ensuing years, but Pearl Jam seemed destined to enter the classic rock canon, whatever their feelings about the tag.
There was always something of a 1970s arena edge to the Ten stars, spiritually connected to Led Zeppelin’s strut that Nirvana had avoided like the plague.
The charts were rapidly changing. Britpop began its Cool Britannia jamboree in no time over in the UK, and the Lollapalooza MTV takeover was shoved aside for nu-metal, R&B, hip-hop, and the peaks of the manufactured pop industry. By the 1990s’ close, could Pearl Jam ever hope to conquer the Billboard 200 as they had with Vs, Vitalogy, and No Code?
Perhaps more to the point, did they need to? It could be argued that rockist elitism needed a shoeing after spending decades enjoying an undisturbed critical paradigm as the pinnacle of popular music’s expression. The fact that 2000’s Binaural was kept from the album top spot by Britney Spears’ Oops!… I Did It Again was met with zen magnanimity by Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder at the time, however.
“I don’t like to condemn something I don’t understand,” Vedder confessed to Rolling Stone Australia. “You know what was interesting? The ‘Last Kiss’ single was something that was recorded at a soundcheck and given away as a Christmas single on 45 vinyl to a small amount of people, friends or fans of the band, and it kinda took off on radio.”
It was Vedder’s idea to grapple with the old Wayne Cochran number. First cut in 1961 and later covered to massive success by J Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers, an infrequent play on Pearl Jam’s 1998 tour eventually resulted in a slapdash live recording at their Constitution Hall soundcheck in Washington DC. As Vedder said, the band saw the little jam as a low-key release, gifted to fans during the festive season and spent a few thousand dollars on its mix.
But it grew. Radio rotation began to play ‘Last Kiss’ up and down the States, pushing the Christmas afterthought as a fully-fledged single in June 1999 and featured on that year’s No Boundaries: A Benefit for the Kosovar Refugees charity compilation, helping raise $10 million for Kosova relief. For such a noncommercial single lacking all the usual promo pizzazz, ‘Last Kiss’ hit number two on the Hot 100, validating Pearl Jam’s purpose in pop’s new dawn, as well as reaffirming their instincts to stick to their guns.
“That was kind of uplifting,” Vedder concluded. “Or at least it re-instilled some faith that a good song can cut through, even though there’s no dancers on stage when we do the song, or video to go with it or anything like that. That helped me feel like all was not lost or something, at least in our world here.”
