Some crankypants Austin American-Statesman columnist took in his first music festival this weekend, when he attended the Austin City Limits Festival, his hometown’s muddy three-day extravaganza that featured Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews Band, and a slew of other bands. Most festival reportage tends to gloss over the hinkiness of events like these—the gradual deterioration of the venues’ PortaPotty army, the dust-flecked food, the shirtless bros who turn their favorite bands’ sets into a campfire singalong—but Ken Herman went right into the mud, and wound up slinging some of his own! More »
Coming to this season of the PBS live-music show Austin City Limits: Pearl Jam! The Heartless Bastards! Frequent ACL guest Willie Nelson, whose 1975 appearance is in the picture at left! The Dave Grohl / Josh Homme / John Paul Jones supergroup Them Crooked Vultures! And more, so be sure to check your listings and set your DVR. [Austin Music Source / Official site] More »
Our look at the closing lines of the week’s biggest new-music reviews continues with a roundup of reactions to Pearl Jam’s ninth studio album Backspacer, which was released via Target and the band’s fan club yesterday: More »
Over the weekend, rumors that alt-rock stalwarts Pearl Jam were going to release their forthcoming album (their first one that won’t be released via a Sony Music subsidiary) via Target percolated all around the Internet, thanks to a Cameron Crowe-directed video shoot that was apparently set to double as a commercial for the album’s availability at the big-box retailer. After the news sent the blogosphere into an NDA-violating tizzy, Pearl Jam’s manger Kelly Curtis gave Billboard the scoop on Backspacer, which will come out this fall. If Curtis’ prediction bears out, the Target deal will only be one piece of cloth in a retail quilt that will include indie stores, the band’s fan club, and an as-yet-unnamed cell phone company: More »
Pearl Jam will be the first musical guest on the Conan O’Brien-hosted incarnation of Tonight. Not that NBC executives really care, what with them being too busy slobbering over Jay Leno’s Big Glass Of Warm Milk That Had Better Not Result In The Cancellation Of Law & Order Or I’m Going To Be Pretty Flicked Off. [AP] More »
Pearl Jam, the Dave Matthews Band, the Beastie Boys, and Kings of Leon are at the head of the 130ish-artist lineup for the Austin City Limits Festival, which takes place in the Texas capital’s Zilker Park from Oct. 2 to Oct. 4. Tickets are $185; the genre-spanning bill also includes Lily Allen, the Supersuckers, Daniel Johnston, a bunch of blog bands, and the Jack White/Allison Mossheart superishgroup The Dead Weather. And the Toadies! Full lineup after the jump. More »
Facebook, as you probably know, is a social-networking site that allows its users to basically fall down a rabbit-hole of whiling away time that could otherwise be spent outside, or curing cancer, or even, I don’t know, reading. One of the odd customs of the social-networking site involves bestowing presents upon others–sending friends virtual birthday cakes, martinis, that sort of thing. The presents sent from friend to friend have grown more esoteric as the site’s population has mushroomed, and one of my favorite gift-giving opportunities is Old School Seattle Rock, which involves the sending and receiving of bands from the golden age of Sub Pop Rock City. Yesterday I was thinking about maybe sending some Fastbacks to a pal, and I wondered, “Hmm, what could the most popular bands on this site be? Pearl Jam has to be No. 1, right?” Well, not really! The top five (as of this writing): More »
Since they’ve been a hot topic around here lately, you might like to know that Pearl Jam has been tabbed as one of the headliners of the Outside Lands Festival, a three-day festival taking place in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in late August. The lineup is, to say the least, eclectic: Tom Jones, the Black Eyed Peas, Raphael Saadiq, the Dead Weather, Incubus, M.I.A. and the Dave Matthews Band are also on the bill. Something for everybody, I guess. Full lineup after the jump!
Pearl Jam‘s Ten was recently reissued, and the $200 limited edition version had a ludicrous slew of extras (though it would be kinda cool to have the original Vedder audition tape); even the basic edition includes an entirely new mix of the album. Most publications took the opportunity to review the album as a chance to look back on Pearl Jam’s career, or on the legacy of grunge. Critics who tend to run with a mainstream rock kinda crowd generally gave the album high marks, but the more muso members of the commentariat took a different view. For one thing, not having really kept up with the band’s career in the last decade, they tended to see Ten as a sort of singular achievement and almost treated it like a reissue from some long-dead band. In a way, that makes sense, of course: for those like me who hit adolescence with Pearl Jam, the album is as irrevocably consigned to the past as The Goonies. But it got a very different treatment than other reissues.
Pop quiz: What was the biggest Modern Rock hit from Pearl Jam‘s Ten? The answer is “Jeremy,” which peaked at No. 5 in 1992. But if we brought the recent reissue of the 18-year-old album into the mix, the answer would not be “Jeremy,” “Even Flow,” or “Alive”—it would be “Brother,” a bonus track that was released to radio and has topped the Modern Rock chart for the past two weeks. Surprisingly, “Brother” is only the band’s fourth Modern Rock chart-topper, and it joins an odd lot: 1993’s “Daughter” (also a Mainstream Rock No. 1), 1996’s “Who You Are,” and 2006’s “World Wide Suicide.”
