![]() ![]() Um, there’s… “In The Ghetto,” “Joe” by Inspiral Carpets… can’t think of many more. He has “a pillow made of concrete?” What else could this song be about? It probably just escaped me because I haven’t heard many songs before about homeless people. ![]() Now that I know what the song’s about, I don’t know how that opening line escaped me so many times. Maybe he’ll see a little betters, any days Rests his head on a pillow made of concrete again With that in mind, “Even Flow” is a tribute to the other Eddie and his daily struggles. The two became acquaintances until Vedder came back from an early tour and found out that the homeless man had died. The other Eddie had fallen on hard times after serving in Vietnam and was now living under the Seattle Viaduct. ![]() Vedder wrote the song about a man he met, also named Eddie, during the band’s early days. But then it turns out that Eddie Vedder wrote the lyrics to “Even Flow” about a homeless man and you find out the song has more meaning than you think. “Even Flow” is probably one of those songs that likely doesn’t inspire a lot of thought when it comes to the lyrical content. When discussing the song, McCready claimed that they had to do the song in 70 takes because Gossard was never satisfied with the guitar takes for the song. ![]() Few were better than Gossard in the riff department. Who wouldn’t be able to rock out to a solo where McCready just blisters through his pentatonic scale before playing triplets with machine gun precision? Grunge still provided plenty of great air guitar moments, and McCready’s solo is one of them. To all the people who claimed that grunge killed the guitar solo, I present to you… this. And all that comes before Mike McCready’s freakout of a solo. In the bridge and outro, we get the ascension being quickly followed by those chunky eighth notes before we go back up the octave. For one, the standard guitar slide then ascension to the next octave isn’t the only way the song is played. The riff could go on forever with its slides between F and G and it would still be a good song, but Pearl Jam add plenty of tricks up their sleeves to prevent this from being boring. I mean, it’s like a locomotive, the way it just maintains momentum throughout the song. Not even “Alive” or the other songs on Ten could knock it down. Pearl Jam never had another greater riff than this. Let’s just get into the part you were all wanting to hear about: that riff. And finally, it inspired an Adam Sandler comedy routine that wasn’t excruciating. The song also provided a surprising amount of meaning for what is supposed to be a stupid song to rock out to. The song was the source of one of the greatest grunge guitar riffs of all time, quite possibly the greatest riff Stone Gossard ever put out. It provided us with arguably the most distinctive vocal performance of the year. #21 peak (June 6, 1992), 6 weeks on chart If you wanted to know what other Pearl Jam there was in 1992… But I didn’t end up including the song in the top 20 of my year-end rankings because I decided I’d had enough Pearl Jam to handle. “Alive” is a very good song, with more great guitar work from Mike McCready and brooding but impassioned vocals from Eddie Vedder. I hope you’re happy for deciding that “Addams Groove” and “Wildside” were more worthy of chart success than “Outshined.” But anyways, Pearl Jam broke through early in 1992 with “Alive,” a dark tale about Vedder finding out that his father was not his biological father, to put it mildly. Thanks Billboard, for screwing Soundgarden and Alice In Chains this year. Pearl Jam scored three year-end hits on the Mainstream Rock chart, more than the other three “big four” grunge acts of 1992 combined. But for all that has been said about Nirvana changing the world, it was their biggest rivals that were the most successful grunge band on the rock charts in 1992: Pearl Jam. Granted, it was already a thing, but it became a phenomenon the moment “Smells Like Teen Spirit” crossed over into the mainstream, with Nevermind dethroning Michael Jackson’s Dangerous as the biggest album in America. 1992 was the year grunge really took off. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |