Empty Gazes, United by Fear
I did lots of adventurous rabbitholing this weekend involving Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Nazi Germany and Courtney Love (again). They led me to this interesting and sort of remarkable curiosity, a cover of Pearl Jam’s “rearviewmirror” by semi-obscure band The Frogs.
I discovered this song by a series of turns beginning with my failed attempt to watch the Love-starring Straight to Hell, which led to looking up recent stories on Courtney (including the video of Courtney’s latest crazy onstage meltdown), and finally a video clip from the mid 90s where she describes going into the studio with Billy Corgan and a band he loves called The Frogs. I remembered hearing about them because one of their members toured with Smashing Pumpkins as keyboardist after Jonathan Melvoin died and I’d heard bits and pieces about them before.
I then started reading about the Frogs, who despite remaining relatively obscure throughout their career, seemed to be something of a “band’s band,” forming relationships with the giant 90s trio of Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and Pearl Jam. With the latter, this relationship was most interestingly (and oddly) cemented by Eddie Vedder deciding to include the Frog’s cover of “rearviewmirror” as the b-side to the “Immortality” single.
I don’t really care much about Pearl Jam in 2011 (though I’ve oddly listened to them more this year than in years past), but this cover is pretty awesome and injects a bit of calm and subtlety into a melodramatic song that, like much of Eddie Vedder’s writing, demands bombast. It also makes another case for Pearl Jam’s music potentialy sounding more compelling with, sad to say, a vocalist who doesn’t sing quite so, ahem, distinctly (ie, with the cheesily injected bombast of a mediocre rock opera singer).
