Pearl Jam - Riot Act
On November 12, 2002, "Riot Act", the seventh studio album by the band "Pearl Jam", was released.
The beginning of the twenty-first century presented "Pearl Jam" with the most difficult existential and emotional test in its history. In June 2000, during the band's performance at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark as part of the Binaural album tour, nine fans were crushed to death in the front row. The tragedy left Eddie Vedder, Stone Gossard, Mike McCready, Jeff Ament and Matt Cameron heartbroken and shaken to the core, and the band seriously considered disbanding and ceasing to perform. About a year later, the September 11, 2001, attacks occurred, which changed the face of American society beyond recognition and led to a wave of militant nationalism and an impending war under the administration of President George W. Bush. Out of this double fracture, personal and national, the band came together in February 2002 at Studio X in Seattle with producer Adam Kasper, who had worked with them in the past and even produced Cameron's parent band "Soundgarden," and with their veteran mixing wizard Brendan O'Brien.
(Photo: Make Lemons)
The five-piece band was joined on this album by a sixth member who has become an integral part of their sound to this day, keyboardist Kenneth Gaspar, known as Boom Gaspar. Vedder met Gaspar while surfing in Hawaii and admired his playing of the Hammond B3 organ and Fender Rhodes, and invited him to Seattle to participate in sessions that were recorded mostly live in one room to capture the band's natural rawness. The album was dedicated in the typewritten lyric booklet to three musical giants who passed away that year, the legendary "Who" bassist John Entwistle, who was the band's childhood hero, the pioneering "Ramones" bassist Dee Dee Ramone, and jazz legend Ray Brown.
The album opens with "Can't Keep", a hypnotic, tense song born on Vedder's ukulele and worked into a full band sound, with Cameron's tribal, rolling drumming leading a declaration of intent about refusing to give in to despair and wanting to continue living to the fullest. It is immediately followed by the album's second single "Save You", a punky, seething energy bomb born from a guitar riff by McCready developed with Gossard and then in a band jam. The song features Vedder in one of his most exposed and angry vocal performances, as he cries out in frustration and compassion for a close friend sinking into self-destruction and addiction.
The emotional heart of the album beats powerfully on the third track "Love Boat Captain", written from a spontaneous improvisation session by Vedder and Gaspar in the studio. The song directly and courageously confronts the Roskilde disaster through the chilling line about nine friends we will never know who were taken two years ago today, and combines a quote and homage to the Beatles classic with the simple call that love is all we need in the face of giant corporations and global chaos.
Cameron, who became one of the band's most prominent songwriters on this album, contributed the music to the dark and winding "Cropduster", on which Vedder clothed a gloomy ecological and political parable, and then comes "Ghost", the rhythmic and rough Ament wrote about escaping from a suffocating media reality to the freedom of music and the roads. From here the album moves on to its leading and most successful single "I Am Mine", which Vedder wrote in a Virginia hotel room in 2000 in the quiet moments before the band's first performance in the United States after the disaster in Denmark. It is a moving and comforting existential anthem about inner autonomy and freedom of thought in a world beyond our control, adorned with a melodic and vibrating guitar solo by McCready and warm organ layers by Gaspar.
The intimate atmosphere intensifies with the acoustic ballad "Thumbing My Way", one of the most beautiful and fragile songs in the band's catalog, in which Vedder's warm voice is accompanied by gentle acoustic guitar picking, brushed drums and Boom Gaspar’s muted Hammond organ, in a quiet prayer for forgiveness and coming to terms with loss. It is immediately followed by the album's most experimental and original piece "You Are", recorded at Space Studio in Seattle. Cameron created the song's mesmerizing sound by running his rhythm guitar through an electronic drum machine that created a choppy, funky, psychedelic effect, while also writing most of the lyrics, which deal with the healing power of love.
The second half of the album heads into the band's most poignant political and social territory. Cameron is solely credited with the lyrics and music of the dense stoner-rock "Get Right," followed by Vedder's head-on attack on corporate greed in the short, bouncy "Green Disease," which likens predatory capitalism to a contagious disease. Ament leads the claustrophobic, psychedelic "Help Help," which opens with hypnotic drumming and describes a sense of modern suffocation and alienation, before the band unleashes their most controversial track yet, "Bu$hleaguer." Over a dark, menacing guitar riff by Gossard, Vedder delivers a satirical, polished spoken word that mocks President Bush as someone born on third base and likens administration leaders to detached war profiteers. During the 2003 tour, Vedder performed the song wearing a rubber mask of the president, a move that caused a huge media storm in the United States.
The musical journey comes to a three-fold, chilling conclusion. The heavy, explosive blues of Ament's "½ Full" centers on a fiery, unrestrained guitar solo by McCready at its peak, followed by "Arc," a one-minute experimental vocal piece in which Vedder layers his own voice into overlapping vocal lines, without any instrumental accompaniment. Written as a shamanic lament and requiem for the nine fans who perished in Roskilde, the piece was performed by Pearl Jam only nine times on the 2003 tour - once for each victim - and left off all official bootlegs out of respect for the fallen. The album closes with the dark, nocturnal soul ballad "All or None" by Gossard and Vedder, in which Gaspar's caressing Hammond organ and McCready's weeping guitar solo accompany Vedder in a melancholic resignation to reality.
The album cover also bears a special artistic stamp. Ament photographed two rusty metal skeleton dolls in the form of a king and queen wearing crowns, created by Seattle metalsmith Kelly Gilliam, alongside interior shots by renowned photographer Danny Clinch and graphic design by Brad Klausen. Upon its release, the album topped the Australian charts, reached number five on the American Billboard charts, and signed the band's historic recording contract with Epic Records. Looking back, "Riot Act" stands as one of "Pearl Jam"'s most honest, courageous, and diverse artistic documents, an album in which a band on the brink of the abyss chose to look directly at the pain and turn it into living, kicking art.
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