Pearl Jam’s Vs. gets the 30th anniversary vinyl treatment, could be time to trade in the CD

By Steve Newton

I recently scored a 30th anniversary vinyl copy of Pearl Jam‘s second album, Vs.

That got me thinking of that time back in ’93 when I scored a copy on the format of choice at the time, the compact disc.

I even dug up my old Vs. review:

“The band has decided to rock out a bit more this time,” I wrote, “as can be heard on the opening track of Vs., ‘Go’. A three-minute riff-o-rama driven by head-snapping snare and sporting the wildest Pearl Jam guitar freakout ever, the song is a quick signal that the group hasn’t let the huge success of its major-label debut soften its gritty resolve to make a racket.

“Fans of Pearl Jam’s slower material will dig singer Eddie Vedder’s languid evocations on tunes such as ‘Daughter’, ‘Dissident’, and ‘Rats’, and the plaid-shirted grunge fans should howl happily along to ‘Blood’ and ‘Animals’, but in my books the hook-filled boogie of ‘Glorified G’ and ‘Rearviewmirror’ is what really make Vs. worth a dig into your purses.”

For the youngsters out there, and those who don’t recall, it was around the time of the release of Vs. that Pearl Jam, on a rocket ride to fame, took a pronounced step away from stardom.

“Probably around our second or third record, we started pulling back,” Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready told me in 2003. “Eddie wasn’t very comfortable with how everything had blown up; he wasn’t very comfortable in his skin, and a lot of that was to do with the press and how big we had gotten. So we made a conscious decision: ‘Hey, we’re not gonna do any more videos, we’re not gonna do this and that. We’re gonna hold back.’

“And had we not done that,” he continued, “we might not be around; I wouldn’t be talkin’ to you right now. We might have been just totally overblown by the whole thing.”

Thank god Pearl Jam did the right thing 30 years ago. Now it’s your turn. Trade in your CD copy of Vs. and order it on vinyl. Or cassette, if you’re into that. Call it an early Christmas present to yourself.

To hear the full audio of my interviews with Pearl Jam guitarists Mike McCready and Stone Gossard subscribe to my Patreon page, where you can eavesdrop on over 400 of my uncut, one-on-one conversations with the legends of rock.