Unpacking the Pearl Jam concept album that was never made
Ah, the concept album… home to some of the best and worst records of all time. Although many artists have made brilliant conceptual projects that have made people take them seriously as artists, there are just as many people who have tried their hand at telling a story, only for everything to fall apart when they get to sequencing the album. Since Pearl Jam has been one of the premiere rock acts of their time, though, how have they ever made a concept album before?
While every artist will approach their work however they want to, all of Pearl Jam’s heroes have gone down the conceptual road at least once. Mike McCready had confessed to being a big fan of Pink Floyd, and Eddie Vedder’s borderline obsession with The Who all point to making the kind of rock opera fans would love.
We even got the testing ground for what a Pearl Jam rock opera would sound like way back on their debut. They may have been split apart, but the songs ‘Alive’, ‘Once’, and the B-side ‘Footsteps’ all make up a trilogy that Vedder called ‘MamaSon’, but the band didn’t feel comfortable tackling any thematic elements until the 2000s.
After spending most of the late 1990s trying to move as far away from their arena rock sound as possible, the band’s art-rock direction seemed to be a bit hit-and-miss with fans. These were the same guys responsible for some of the biggest anthems of their generation, so what were they doing trying to embrace their inner Talking Heads?
Since most fans felt a little shortchanged on works like Riot Act, Pearl Jam was meant to be the band’s step back into the rock sphere. When you start looking at what Vedder was talking about on the project, there may have been a brilliant concept album hidden between the grooves that no one ever caught on to.
Vedder was never shy about his politics, and now that America was heading off to war, this album felt like a firsthand account of what war was like from someone on the ground. Compared to the band’s other songs that took on politicians, tracks like ‘World Wide Suicide’ and ‘Inside Job’ seem to come from the perspective of a man lost in Iraq slowly piecing together what he signed up for.
Every song may not have been written around a concept, but they fit nicely. The album opener ‘Life Wasted’ was written shortly after Vedder attended the funeral of Johnny Ramone, but the theme of never going back and feeling like he’s wasting his life could easily apply to someone who’s trapped in a cycle of violence overseas.
While Vedder later said that there was no set story to get out of the album, he felt that the pieces did line up a little too well, telling Rolling Stone, “It seemed like, wow, you could really make a sculpture out of this. I can admit now that it’s not, but it could have been.”
If the band had embraced their operatic tendencies, they may have been able to make the kind of concept record that would make Pete Townshend proud. Vedder already had his finger on the pulse of what many Americans were feeling, and if he had stuck the landing, it could have been a cultural touchstone for rock fans in the same way that Tommy or The Wall were decades before.
