How the Grateful Dead set a “template” for Pearl Jam to copy
Every band is going to have their fair share of musical blueprints throughout their career. Anyone can look at bands like Led Zeppelin and The Beatles and try to build on the foundation they started with, but Pearl Jam had a much more communal idea in mind when developing their sound.
Because listening to every one of their early albums, it’s practically a love letter to the 1970s in many respects. The riffs are almost punk in their delivery, Stone Gossard’s licks feel like their ripped straight from Pete Townshend’s or Jimmy Page’s playbook, and whenever Eddie Vedder opened his mouth, there were pieces of his soul that were coming out of the speakers the same way that Roger Daltrey and Jim Morrison used to do when rock and roll was going through its golden age.
But Vedder never envisioned the band being the kind of rock gods everyone else idolised. Mike McCready is certainly one of the greatest guitarists of the grunge era, but even with all of the Stevie Ray Vaughan licks he could cram into a single song, there was never a point where he seemed to draw attention to himself the same way Eddie Van Halen did.
Every one of them was a regular guy who happened to have an extraordinary job, and Vedder wanted to make sure he kept it that way. Most people wanted to put them in their alternative rock box whenever they released a new record, but listening to their output in the 1990s, the anthems on Ten don’t sound an awful lot like the strange moments on Vitalogy, nor do they have the sonic diversions that appear on No Code.
Vedder was intentionally trying to decommercialise his band in a lot of ways, and while that wasn’t the best in the rest of the band’s eyes, Stone Gossard knew the Grateful Dead had done well that mentality, saying, “The Grateful Dead are definitely a template to be understood in regards to this band, and not because we sound like them. The Dead were one of the first bands to create their own universe, do their own thing and keep going forward. The reason we’ve been successful is we haven’t looked back too much.”
The overlap of Deadheads and Pearl Jam fanatics are probably not as big as the band would have hoped that they would be, but it’s easy to see what they’re talking about. Even if not every one of their artsy projects was treated with the same reverence as Ten, they also never showed a desire to live in the past. That’s half the reason why every new album feels like a new adventure in some ways. They could make stadium rock like Lightning Bolt, but there would also be strange musical detours like on Gigaton.
What really helps that idea is the band’s decision to change up the setlist every single night. No one really knows what they’re going to be in for during a Pearl Jam show, but while everyone can expect to hear a song like ‘Alive’, the idea of them pulling out old rarities alongside the new stuff really helps fans to appreciate different sides of their sound they would have never have heard otherwise.
Are there people that are still going to hold onto the old music like a sonic liferaft? Absolutely, but Pearl Jam isn’t looking to please any of the purists in the audience. They had a much better time riding the waves of their success wherever they would take them, and even if it didn’t make for chart hits, they could look at their projects and still be proud of what they accomplished along the way.
