Steven Hyden - Long Road

As a music critic, the subject that has always interested me most is career arcs. I am particularly fascinated by bands. How do bands start and why do they end? Why do some bands crash and burn after only a few years and why do others last for decades? What are the dynamics at play between the singer and the instrumentalists? The songwriters and the non-songwriters? How are friendships and business partnerships balanced? How do you reconcile the weight of history with the constant churn of the present?

If you pay close enough attention, patterns emerge. Bands tend to rise and fall for the same reasons. Every rock band that has ever broken up has, in some way, reenacted the story of the Beatles, a phenomenon gradually undone by deteriorating interpersonal relationships, bruised egos, and unrequited artistic ambitions. The particulars of their biography are now rock clichsthe conniving business managers, the creative and emotional split between the core duo, the talented underling with a backlog of songs that he cant get on the records, the hurt feelings left unexpressed, the girlfriends, the drugs. The Beatles not only profoundly influenced the idea of becoming a band but also the idea of unbecoming a band.

The Rolling Stones, meanwhile, are the model for bands who decide not to break up, ever. The value of knowing your role within the band, the power of conceding that your lead singer is the benevolent dictator, the ability to manage your disappointments and resentments for the greater good of grossing hundreds of millions of dollars on the roadthese are the lessons of the Stones.

There are other role models. U2 invented the idea that you can remake a European post-punk band into a stadium-filling Americana act, and then remake yourself again into a post-modern dance-rock group. This mold was adopted by scores of would-be biggest band in the world candidatesColdplay, the Killers, Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystemin the twenty-first century. Theres also the Grateful Dead, who proved you could fill stadiums by cultivating an unpredictable live show and approaching albums with bemused indifference.

And then theres Pearl Jam. What is the Pearl Jam mold? You could define it as a combination of the aforementioned rock-band molds, though the specifics beyond that are jumbled and counterintuitive. Pearl Jam has committed to going the distance like the Stones, and their singer could be described as a kind of benevolent dictator within their inner power structure. But Pearl Jam is also a band in which every member writes songseven the drummer!which gives them a degree of parity thats uncommon for a band of their stature.

Since the turn of the century, Pearl Jam has been frequently compared to the Grateful Dead, due to the thriving community of devoted fans who collect bootleg recordings and pore over the bands every onstage utterance. But the Dead for years operated on the fringes of American culture without an omnipresent radio hitthey didnt become an actual pop success until the final decade of Jerry Garcias life, with the 1987 single Touch of Grey, which, to the chagrin of veteran Deadheads, made them exponentially more popular. Pearl Jam, however, had tremendous radio play at the beginning of their career. Over the course of their first three albums, they were more like U2, in terms of mainstream ubiquity. And then they turned into a cult band buoyed by a passionate counterculture.

Imagine Bono evolving into Jerry Garcia. You cant. It defies logic. And yet that approximates a rough sketch of Pearl Jams development in their first decade.

The fact is that Pearl Jam is an anomaly. Most bands start small and achieve their greatest success by their third or fourth album, after which they slowly come to rely more and more on revisiting, repackaging, and reissuing their most beloved music. But Pearl Jam became the biggest band in America within two years of forming in 1990, propelled by the monumental sales and cultural impact of one of the best-selling debut albums in history, Ten. And then they slowly, and deliberately, reinvented themselves, all while maintaining their level of success. Only that successcommercial and artisticwould come to be measured primarily by live shows instead of record sales and hit singles.

The result is a strange, incomparable dualitya band that plays stadiums while having almost no media profile; a mega-selling act who, for most of their history, has ignored and even antagonized corporate rock radio; a group of superstars who function like an underground act; a famous institution hiding in plain sight. Like I said, an anomaly.

The Beatles are the sixties rock band most often associated with the baby boomer generation. While they subsequently appealed to all generations, the Beatles come with a lore that flatters the grandiosity of the boomersthey are the greatest band, were told, and have been centered in media narratives about contemporary history (like so much of boomer culture) for the better part of sixty years. Pearl Jam, the band who willingly evaded the spotlight and now feels a little overlooked in discussions about the best American rock bands, is similarly definitional for Generation X, the middle child demographic that is