1996: Pearl Jam, No Code
By Kasey Anderson
August evenings last longer in the Pacific Northwest. The sun lingers in the sky until almost nine o’clock, sometimes later. It’s easy on those nights to forget that September lies ahead; that soon the sun will be tucked deeper each day behind sheets of rain, until it disappears completely into an endless expanse of gray.
Some years though, the seasons’ colors blend until time becomes almost imperceptible, or at least irrelevant. The summer of 1996 was like that. I will admit that perhaps my perception of time owed more to chemical intercourse than it did any delay in the onset of dusk but, regardless of the reason, days and dates didn’t matter much to me then. One date I did have circled on my calendar (or rather, written in a composition book; I wasn’t really a calendar-keeping kid) was August 27: the day Pearl Jam was due to release their fourth album, No Code.
I was (and still am) an unabashed, unapologetic Pearl Jam fan. It has at times been popular to be so, and then there have been times when it felt like there were only a few of us remaining in the world. At no point, however, has it been “cool” to be a Pearl Jam fan. From the beginning, Eddie Vedder’s earnestness and the band’s insistence on wearing their Classic Rock influences so proudly on their sleeves made Pearl Jam an easy mark for cynics, critics and scenesters. Even now, looking around the pit at shows (I’ve seen the band 33 times), I often feel like I’m at a college football game, surrounded mostly by men who’ve long since graduated but can’t let go of their glory days on the offensive line, or Greek Row. I digress, but my point is this: even in 1996 — after the wave of megafame had crested and the band had publicly battled Ticketmaster, started its own mobile pirate radio station out of Vedder’s van (which he used to travel between gigs while the rest of the band flew), and championed acts like Mudhoney and the Fastbacks, installing them as perennial tour openers — it was not cool to listen to Pearl Jam.
Luckily, I’ve never much given a shit what is or isn’t cool when it comes to the art I love, and have been surrounded for most of my life by friends of similar orientation. My closest friend as a teenager was named Eric, and we were nearly inseparable; both submerged deeply in obsessions with basketball, guitar, and a somewhat less-than-scientific approach to experimentation with narcotic combinations. The day No Code was released, Eric and I took his black ‘89 Nissan D21 to Music Millennium to get our copies of the album. We each bought a CD, but also bought a cassette so we could listen to it in the truck on the way back home. What I heard — at least what I thought I heard at the time — was a band breaking up.
Creative control of Pearl Jam had long since shifted from Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament (whose musical relationship pre-dated Pearl Jam by nearly ten years and two previous bands) to Vedder, who penned the majority of the songs on the band’s third album, Vitalogy. (The album’s liner notes credit all five members on most songs but it’s widely known that Vedder did the bulk of the writing.) Gone was the collaboration that marked Pearl Jam’s first two albums, Ten and Vs., the latter of which sold 950,000 copies in its first week. The success of those albums had been unsettling for Vedder, as had encounters with fans who disregarded all boundaries between themselves and the singer, a few going so far as to force their way into his home. Vedder reflexively withdrew from the spotlight, and the band’s increasingly untenable relationship with fame informed Vitalogy with a palpable nervous, almost paranoid energy. An ill-fated 1995 tour in which Pearl Jam attempted to avoid any dealings with Ticketmaster hadn’t improved matters. Following that debacle the band, sans Vedder, made a record with Neil Young (Mirrorball) and subsequently toured as Young’s backing band, underscoring whatever internal fault lines may have existed (Ed did sing on a couple of Mirrorball tracks but didn’t accompany Pearl Jam on the tour).
When Pearl Jam reconvened in early 1996 to finish their fourth album, their relationships were — according to their own accounts in hindsight — fractured at best, though they were still functionally a band. No Code reverberates with that tension; it is an album of regret and resignation (“Sometimes,” “Present Tense,” “Red Mosquito,” “Habit”) but more than that, it’s an album of self-imposed isolation (“Who You Are,” “In My Tree,” “Off He Goes,” “Lukin”), odes to the solace found in solitude. It is a beautiful record, truly, whether in spite or because of the circumstances under which it was made. While it may not be the first pivotal record for Pearl Jam, No Code is the best, and perhaps the most important; it’s the record on which the band finally sloughed off the more arena-friendly tendencies displayed on Ten and Vs. and leaned into the weirdness and experimentation hinted at on Vitalogy. The No Code sessions were marked by a looser, more unpolished approach to arranging and recording the songs, and the result is an element of improvisation woven throughout the album that sits in direct contrast to the band’s previous work; an element they’d never so perfectly capture again.
No Code is also, for better or worse, the record that ushered out a significant portion of Pearl Jam’s record-buying audience. It was the first Pearl Jam album to fall short of multi-platinum status and, to date, has sold fewer copies than Vs. did in its first six months of release. To those who exited the bandwagon, No Code simply didn’t sound like a Pearl Jam album. Not enough fist-pumping choruses, not enough brawny Gossard riffs or blistering McCready solos, not enough… Pearl Jam. Or rather, maybe, too much Eddie Vedder.
While there were indeed some indications that Vedder’s hand had once again heavily guided the band throughout the process of making the record (and however much that concerned me, as a fan worried his favorite band might split up), I loved the record at first blush, and love it just as much today.
I distinctly remember hearing “Off He Goes” for the first time in Eric’s pickup, driving from Music Millennium back to the neighborhood where we both lived, the windows of the truck rolled down and the late summer air filling the cab as we shouted in elation, moved by the beauty of the song but not yet familiar enough with the lyrics to sing along. “Off he goes with his perfectly unkempt hope,” Vedder sang, assuming the role of both narrator and subject. As a sixteen-year-old fan, it sounded to me like a breakup letter.
Pearl Jam played only 33 shows in 1996, the fewest they’d ever played behind an album’s release. They played even fewer in 1997, effectively taking the year off but for a handful of gigs opening for the Rolling Stones. What seemed like an inevitable parting of ways became simply a pause, a recalibration; a chance for the band to examine its approach to recording, touring, and promotion. They returned in 1998 with Yield, an album that recalled their earlier, more “accessible” records. I reckon those of us who stuck around long enough to buy that record are still here, still at as many shows as we can get to every time the band goes on tour. In fact, my relationship with Pearl Jam has now outlasted most other relationships in my life. I first saw the band in 1993; I was at the Fan Club-Only Moore Theatre shows in 1995; my dad took me to Oakland in 1997, for my 18th birthday, to watch Pearl Jam open for the Stones (his favorite band); and so on, through the years. I still have the poster from that 1997 show, framed and hung in my home along with a few other things that remind me of my dad, who passed away a couple years ago.
As for Eric, we’ve been estranged for nearly twenty years, having lost track of each other the way friends sometimes do, and having both lost track of ourselves down parallel comorbid paths. Hell, I can count on one hand the number of friends I have left from my teens and twenties, and the Portland we grew up in exists only as a memory so faded and unrecognizable I wonder if I didn’t dream it up during one of those endless summer evenings.
Pearl Jam is still standing though, somehow, and the members of the band haven’t yet become the sad caricatures of their younger selves so many do over the arc of a career that long. No Code remains my favorite record of theirs and whenever I listen to it, I remember riding in Eric’s truck, the two of us trying to sing along with songs we didn’t yet know.
Kasey Anderson is a gradually retiring songwriter whose final album, To the Places We Lived, will be released in 2023. Prior to that, he’ll release Vibromonk Sessions Vol. I, a collection of solo acoustic recordings. Kasey currently works as the Director of Development at the Alano Club of Portland, the oldest and largest nonprofit organization in the country offering cost-free supports and services to people in or seeking recovery from substance use and mental health disorders, disordered eating, trauma and grief. Kasey lives with his wife and daughter in Portland, Oregon, though he has been threatening to move every month for the last five years.
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