I got a bomb in my temple that is gonna explode

November 14, 2013 3:21 PM

Songs from Pearl Jam's 1991 debut album Ten, stripped of all but Eddie Vedder's vocals: Once. Even Flow. Alive. Black. Jeremy. Oceans. Release. Apart from highlighting Vedder's unique voice, phrasing and harmonzing, these vocal mixes expose some interesting studio effects applied to his voice (on 'Even Flow', for example).
posted by paleyellowwithorange (38 comments total)

These pair nicely with a compilation of Eddie Vedder falling on stage.
posted by Beardman at 3:29 PM on November 14, 2013 [5 favorites]

Here it is with the music added back in.
posted by turbid dahlia at 3:39 PM on November 14, 2013 [3 favorites]

When Ten was first released, it was one of my favorite albums. (It should be noted I was young)

I bought subsequent Pearl Jam albums, but none of them had the same indescribable magic of Ten.

I wish I knew what caused that album to be so uniquely good, in my mind.

Looking forward to listening to these. Thanks for posting!
posted by probu at 3:40 PM on November 14, 2013 [4 favorites]

I bought it when I was young too. Their first three records are masterpieces, but probably only because they're pretty much bonded with my DNA by now. If I hadn't heard them before, and listened to them now, I doubt they'd do much for me.
posted by turbid dahlia at 3:42 PM on November 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

Man, how many times have I heard Even Flow by now .... possibly in the thousands. But I never caught that "Hey man can you spare a dollar?" bit.
posted by mannequito at 3:43 PM on November 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

That's because by the time it rolls around you're already headbanging too hard.
posted by turbid dahlia at 3:45 PM on November 14, 2013 [4 favorites]

I'll just leave this here.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:46 PM on November 14, 2013 [2 favorites]

Brendan O'Brien's remixed version of Ten was what made me reconsider these songs again. It's much, much, much better. If, like me, you liked Vs. and Vitalogy, but found Ten to be simultaneously murky and overly shiny, it'll be right up your alley.

Try his mix of Porch. It pretty much takes the '91 mix out behind the woodshed and steals its lunch money.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 3:53 PM on November 14, 2013 [5 favorites]

This needs the Songsmith treatment, just like the best thing ever created by MetaFilter
posted by sideshow at 3:57 PM on November 14, 2013 [7 favorites]

1.) How are these (vocal-only mixes) made?
2.) I remember playing Ten for some 8th-grade classmates a few months before it was all over the radio, and they were like "this isn't bad" and then Pearl Jam become popular and everyone was into grunge and I was like people are so lame. I'd probably read about it in Alternative Press or Tower Records' instore magazine.
3.) It's not an album I go back to, unlike a lot of other music I listened to at the time.
posted by unmake at 4:07 PM on November 14, 2013

I am going to edit the wailing in the Jeremy bridge into a separate clip by itself. Then I will make it my mission in life to have it replace the Rick-Roll, particularly for use in contexts where men are complaining about minor problems.

As in:

X tweets: United still won't refund my ticket! They are a horrible company and you should all know it.

I tweet: Tough break bro. But this might help you fix it (link).

And then right on cue: "WAAAAAAAAAAAA-OOO-O O-O-OOOOOOOOO!!!"
posted by MeanwhileBackAtTheRanch at 4:09 PM on November 14, 2013 [14 favorites]

I remember around the time Ten was huge hearing a mix a friend who worked at a studio had made where they pulled out the vocals. So reverse of this really.

Really amazing how boring the songs are without Vedder.
posted by lumpenprole at 4:14 PM on November 14, 2013

MeanwhileBackAtTheRanch: "And then right on cue: "WAAAAAAAAAAAA-OOO-O O-O-OOOOOOOOO!!!"

This isn't a good idea. You don't want this to happen to you.
posted by team lowkey at 4:29 PM on November 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

1.) How are these (vocal-only mixes) made?

I assume they're from the master tapes.
posted by jimmythefish at 4:30 PM on November 14, 2013

Man, what a year 1991 was for music: Ten, Gish, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Green Mind, Nevermind, Loveless...
posted by gottabefunky at 4:34 PM on November 14, 2013 [12 favorites]

Just watched the Pearl Jam 20 documentary a while back, and it reignited a long-dormant interest in the band. I like Vedder a lot, and even if a lot of their middle-career stuff didn't really connect with me, it's been fun to go back and listen again. Ten came out at a pretty wild, fun time in my life, and so I still love it, but there's a lot of good to be found throughout their catalog.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:37 PM on November 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

I love the way they're matched up to the videos. Also, some of those performances look completely amazing.

Can't wait for the August and Everything After iso tracks.
posted by ob1quixote at 4:49 PM on November 14, 2013 [2 favorites]

This takes me back to that summer. 19 years old, camping and kayaking in the Alps. Off to share this link to a few people.
posted by arcticseal at 5:17 PM on November 14, 2013

Man, what a year 1991 was for music: Ten, Gish, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Green Mind, Nevermind, Loveless...

Metallica's Black Album..... ROFL

I went to see some tour, like Monsters of Rock or some shit in 1991. The tshirt said:

METALLICA
MEGADETH
ANTHRAX
SLAYER
featuring special guest Alice in Chains
AIC stole the goddamned show. I never even heard of them, and I stopped at a mall on the way back to buy the cassette (no cd player in my car, heh) of Facelift.

Anyway, Pearl Jam's 10 was an amazing album compared to everything else you might usually hear on the radio at the time and I continue to be amazed and how awesome it is.

And yeah, that was a great year for music.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 5:27 PM on November 14, 2013 [3 favorites]

Man, what a year 1991 was for music

I know, right?
posted by Sys Rq at 5:29 PM on November 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

God, look how beautiful Eddie is in that Jeremy video. That hair. Mmhmm.
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 5:33 PM on November 14, 2013 [6 favorites]

AIC stole the goddamned show.

Yeah, they were just awesome. Dirt remains one of my favourite albums, and Facelift is almost as good.
posted by jimmythefish at 5:46 PM on November 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

I loved Ten when it came out. Wore out my copy. Strikes me as a little self-indulgent now, but hey, they were young rockers back then.

The only thing I hate about Ten isn't really Pearl Jam's fault. It was becoming a Dad and suddenly being awash in bottles, car seats and baby toys whose logos I'd see 25 times a day and, well, six solid years of the same earworm every goddamn day.
posted by middleclasstool at 6:36 PM on November 14, 2013 [4 favorites]

Here it is with Garfield. Without Garfield. With Garfield singing Vedder's lyrics. With Vedder singing Garfield's lines. With Jon as Vedder, saying nothing. With Odie as Neil Young singing duets with Vedder who is now a probabilistic function of Garfield and Tom Petty.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:34 PM on November 14, 2013 [3 favorites]

Fan-club-member-only GA SRO tickets to see them Nov 30. CAN'T WAIT!
posted by hippybear at 7:46 PM on November 14, 2013 [2 favorites]

I was working at "Record Town" at the mall and got TEN on a whim. I didn't like it at first but it grew on me really fast--within a week, I was literally singing my way through the entire album as loud as I could. Rolling Stone (yeah, we sold music magazines, too) had a great review of the album and bio of the band (though all I remember is that it focused on Eddie and mentioned him being a surfer).

I remember thinking that AIC was like a heavy-metal band that stopped with the guitar solos to rebrand as grunge for the market. I could never get into them or that high-pitched shrilly voice of Soundgarden (may as well have been Queensryche).
posted by whatgorilla at 9:42 PM on November 14, 2013

I've got a date with Eddie and the boys this Saturday.
I hope I can see him falling on the stage from way back where I'm sitting in the section of the Olds.
P.S.: Eddie's ukelele album is wonderful.
posted by Dr. Zira at 9:55 PM on November 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

Also: a year or two later, at Lollapalooza (91? 92?) in Orlando some friends walk up with a skinny little 5'6" guy who looks and is dressed just like Vedder (leather coat from the video and all--in FL heat). I laughed and told him he looked just like Eddie Vedder--turns out it was him. They went off and smoked him out.
posted by whatgorilla at 9:55 PM on November 14, 2013

middleclasstool: "six solid years of the same earworm every goddamn day."

Evenflo....farts arrive like butterflies...
posted by Dr. Zira at 9:57 PM on November 14, 2013 [3 favorites]

With Odie as Neil Young singing duets with Vedder who is now a probabilistic function of Garfield and Tom Petty.

On screen!
posted by petebest at 5:07 AM on November 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

That remixed version of Porch is everything I ever wanted when I was 15.
posted by Brainy at 6:38 AM on November 15, 2013

Grunge was a strange aesthetic. I still don't get it. And I'm from the PNW.
posted by ChuckRamone at 6:47 AM on November 15, 2013

As a friend of mine opined sometime around 15 years back, "there's no way Pearl Jam can look at the cover art of Ten without cringing with embarrassment".

Ha, indeed. Like a poster for bad cable show or something.
posted by Rykey at 2:37 PM on November 15, 2013

Listening to Lightning Bolt and then Ten, and a lot of concert recordings in the 20+ years since, then, I realize that in the Ten era, they would have recorded Lightning Bolt songs at a MUCH SLOWER TEMPO.

I mean, you should hear how fast they play Even Flow these days... It's hardly even the same song!
posted by hippybear at 3:33 PM on November 16, 2013

The OKC show was amazing. It's not just a band that's 20 years older, it's a band that's 20 years better. The songs they did from Ten (Evenflow, Alive, Jeremy, Black, Porch) sound like completely different songs - really fantastic and fresh at these faster tempos. The set list they're doing on this tour is huge, and they seem to be mixing it up a lot from city to city. We didn't get Daughter or Given to Fly but we got State of Love and Trust and Supersonic (preceded, of course, by lots of Sonics v. Thunder banter...Jeff Ament actually put on a Kevin Durant Sonics Jersey). They closed out our show with Alive, Baba O'Riley and Yellow Ledbetter. Dallas apparently got Rockin' in the Free World (with Carrie Browstein and Annie Clark!) the night before.
posted by Dr. Zira at 12:41 AM on November 17, 2013

Yeah, PJ doesn't have a standard set-list. They write one up every day before the show, and it will always be wide-ranging and eclectic. B-sides and deep cuts always feature. Heck, at one show, they even did Bugs from Vitalogy. Part of the joy of seeing Pearl Jam is, you NEVER know what you're going to get.
posted by hippybear at 7:46 AM on November 17, 2013

Dr. Zira: "The set list they're doing on this tour is huge"

Yeah, this fact kind of gets lost on people who haven't seen the band live in recent years. I was listening to an interview with Mike McCready on SiriusXM the other day, and he said the band has a library of around 180 songs to choose from for live shows -- not just songs that they've played at some point (that number must be well over 500) but songs they could credibly drop into a set list for any show.

With all the concerts they've done over the years, there are still songs they wrote a decade ago that they're playing for only the second or third time, and the songs they do play more often evolve over time as the band experiments with new arrangements that transform them to the point where they barely resemble the studio recordings. Any night you go to see them, you're hearing a pretty unique mix of studio tracks, B-sides, and of course a few covers thrown in.

I've only been able to see them live three times (2003/State College, 2009/Philly, 2013/Pittsburgh) but with the official bootlegs and thriving unofficial bootleg community, I feel like I've seen them a hundred times, yet it never gets stale. There aren't many bands you could say that about these days.
posted by tonycpsu at 8:13 AM on November 17, 2013

Well that would explain the big blue book Eddie had on stage with him.
posted by Dr. Zira at 10:00 AM on November 17, 2013