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I READ AN INTERESTING BOOK RECENTLY,
Live Dead by John Brackett, with quite an intimidating subtitle: The Grateful Dead, Live Recordings And The Ideology Of Liveness. Brackett’s argument is that the Dead’s early concert albums (like Live Dead itself) weren’t purely live, as they were augmented by studio overdubs, and with crowd noise mixed down. What Deadheads increasingly prized over the years were not necessarily better, but indisputably more real, warts’n’all recordings of entire live shows. Consequently, the racks of Dead bootleg tapes on the shelves were soon joined by hundreds of official live CDs, that made capital out of reproducing raw experience.
This month, MOJO is proud to finally award Pearl Jam the front cover they’ve long deserved. We’re also thrilled to include with our magazine a CD of live Pearl Jam tracks culled from their catalogue of over 500 live albums. Like the Grateful Dead, these rich and varied live sets showcase a band committed to unmediated connections with their fans. Pearl Jam are one of those rare, stadium-sized bands whose popularity has never compromised their authenticity – and how they’ve managed to sustain that for three and a half decades is at the heart of David Fricke’s exceptional cover story. When he first heard Quadrophenia, Eddie Vedder tells Fricke, “I felt more understood by that record than by teachers, family or peers.” Maybe that’s how you felt when you first heard Ten, too?
Being alone, there’s a certain dignity to it
Big shout out, if I may, for the fitting tribute by Andrew Perry in honour of the late, great Kevin ‘Geordie’ Walker of Killing Joke (and side-projects Murder Inc, The Damage Manual, K÷93) [MOJO 364]. His sudden passing has hit me and no doubt many others who avidly followed the band for well over four decades. He was an enigma insofar as he always gave the impression of looking uninterested on-stage while he produced a wall of sound which few, if anyone, in the music world could recreate. The last time most of us saw him play was at the Royal Albert Hall in London last year, a gathering of 5,000 or so diehards desperate to hear those first two albums live once more – little did any of us know it would be the last time the original line-up would appear on-stage.
The nearest I got to meeting him was at Manchester Albert Hall the year before, as he played Change during a soundcheck. Tantalisingly, we spotted him outside the Royal Albert Hall three hours before the final show. He realised he’d been clocked and, quick as a flash, he was gone, back through the stage side door he had come from for a crafty cig… That summed Geordie up to a tee, he didn’t really do t
