Tuesday, April 15

Alltel Pavilion at Walnut Creek

At least part of this event’s appeal was the pairing of former Ticketmaster-challengers Pearl Jam and their uber-political openers, Sleater-Kinney, within the Orwellian corporate environs of Alltel Pavilion. (“Alltel” is such an entity that the spell check feature on my computer doesn’t even underline the word; is it an accepted member of the English language, probably bought by the company itself?) Basic human needs like water will cost you at least $4 after you’re herded around like a cow at the most expensive slaughterhouse in the world. The pavilion is managed by Clear Channel, a company that will probably start breeding and harvesting its own workers in a decade. To make matters more interesting, our country just finished wreaking “justified” havoc in Iraq, and Mr. Vedder has created some recent controversy by impaling a mask of Herr Bush on a microphone stand at the first show of the tour. I was curious to see what sort of conflicts would arise with the aforementioned ingredients in this not-so-liberal state of ours.Well, I failed on one count, because I missed Sleater-Kinney. All I experienced of them was Carrie Brownstein and Corrin Tucker’s caterwauling amplified through the Alltel Pavilion parking lot, an incongruous soundtrack for all the “gettin’-fucked-up” imbibing going on among the tailgates of Jeep Cherokees. Once inside, after finding our seats, we sat down as Richard Hell’s “Blank Generation” blared through the PA … an irony lost on many attendees, I would wager.

When Pearl Jam took the stage with “Release” and “Even Flow,” two “deep cuts” from their debut Ten, I really wanted to like them again. And for a few brief moments of the first song, they proved to be the best at what they do. Eddie Vedder, whose deep vocal warblings spawned a multitude of mediocre neo-grunge bands (Creed, Candlebox and worst of all, Collective Soul), has refined his voice into a versatile instrument capable of some truly enviable skills. He definitely was the high point of the band, most of whom looked really bored, except lead-axe-man Mike McCready, who took every possible opportunity to take a cookie-cutter, guitar-magazine-column solo. The man whose blazing leads once set fire to the kindling of my early-’90s adolescent confusion now succeeded in boring me out of the concert.

Things started to get interesting once Vedder strapped on a guitar and led the band through an admittedly powerful version of “Not For You,” a hymn to the admittedly powerful vigor that flows through the veins of disenchanted youth. But it was not to last long; hard as I tried, I couldn’t justify sitting through the rest of the set just to end up being herded out of the venue with the same bovinian mass. As Vedder sang, “All that’s sacred/Comes from youth/Dedications/Naive and true … I still remember/Why don’t you?” I realized with a shock that some of these songs were over a decade old. I also realized that the blind, frustrated anger I once cherished as an asset had been replaced, for better or worse, by a more cultivated cynicism. Evolutionary inevitability, or just a sign of the times?