Note: Vedder’s comment about Tibetan suicide attacks is double funny cause he’s such a simp for every CIA-invented “progressive” cause, ie. Tibet, for one, and when would he ever “call bullshit” on a homegrown GLADIO-style terrorist op? Such a tool.


Let’s consider how fantasy stacks up next to reality. There’s a bootleg going around called Eddie Vedder—Walks On His Own, and it’s compiled from a variety of solo outings, B-sides, and warm-up slots for Pearl Jam. The album is all edited together with crowd noise to sound like one fan’s dream version of a complete show, starring the man whose voice launched a thousand gonad-herniating faux-grunge rockers, the kind you can’t go six minutes without hearing on CFOX. It’s not bad. And it features enough tasty covers to rise above the artist’s shortcomings, be it the insufficiency of his own material, such as the brazenly emotive and strained "Dead Man", or the wearying effect of his vocal delivery.

In contrast, Vedder’s first solo show proper, on Wednesday at the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts, relied as heavily on Vedder’s solitary studio experiments (a large handful of numbers from the recent Into the Wild soundtrack, "Goodbye" from the A Brokedown Melody movie) as it did on much-needed covers and unusual picks from the Pearl Jam catalogue. Chief among them, amazingly, was a powerful take on James Taylor’s "Millworker", an artful protest song where incisive lyrics cut deep, especially compared to Vedder’s gauzy poetics. Bruce Springsteen’s "Growin’ Up" was also aired, after the crowd cajoled Vedder into reciting a particularly filthy line from Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (it’s a long story). "Springsteen would never say anything like that," said Vedder, once the offending words had left his mouth. "That’s why he’s the Boss and I’m just an employee."

The Beatles’ "You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away" also roused an audience that was prepared to blow their hero, no matter what he did, including when he fucked up—twice—during the pretty "Guaranteed" from Into the Wild, and then immediately afterwards in the intro to "No Ceiling". It was that kind of show, though. Vedder promised intimacy, and that’s what we got, all 2,000 of us, as he took his time between songs and ambled around a stage decorated with a circular throw rug, a Corona beer crate with a kick-pedal attachment (it was never used), a table, and an enormous statue of a bat. He also stopped to read a couple of items from the Vancouver press that got his blood boiling. One related to the removal of the Device to Root Out Evil art installation in Coal Harbour ("Why should the city pay to do that," he pondered. "Why don’t they just let God do it?"), and the other concerned China’s announcement that exploding Tibetan monks might attempt to disrupt the Olympics. "If they say something about suicide attacks, I’m calling bullshit," he said, before belting out an impressive acoustic version of the Pearl Jam B-side "Drifting".

There were significant problems with the show, mostly related to the weakness of either Vedder’s or the Pearl Jam material. The alt-rock icon hauled out an electric ukulele for "Goodbye", but the song needs a better chorus more than it needs such an aimlessly alien treatment. All the same, after two encores, both Vedder and his faithful fans walked away happy, leaving, I’m guessing, only one audience member with a marginal preference for that Walks on His Own bootleg.

Georgia Straight, April 2008