I Fixed Your Album: 'No Code' did not have to be Pearl Jam's 'difficult' album...or did it?

A more accessible Pearl Jam record in 1996 still wouldn't have saved alt-rock.

The conventional wisdom that Kurt Cobain’s 1994 suicide ended grunge music has never been accurate. The bands forefronting the alt-rock cultural explosion of the early 1990s, though obviously traumatized by the tragedy, would nonetheless thrive for a little longer. For instance, Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy and Soundgarden’s Superunknown — widely considered creative peaks for both bands — both came out in 1994. The real end, at least for alt-rock as it had existed till then in the collective brain-space, was 1996, and its demise was not climactic or cinematic; it just deflated like a tired balloon.

By 1996, several of the decade’s biggest bands were at crossroads or standstills, confronted with changing trends and competing against the legions of sound-alike acts that were saturating airwaves with sanitized versions of the music that had been so exciting in the first half of the ‘90s: your Candleboxes, Collective Souls, Everclears, Bushes, Seven Marys Three, Better Than Ezras, Verve Pipes and so forth.

The major alt-rock releases from established bands in 1996 tell a fascinating story — of restlessness, indecision, exhaustion, trauma, addiction, aging and in general the fleeting nature of all human endeavor, creative and otherwise. Ya know? Soundgarden followed Superunknown with Down on the Upside, an uneven collection that had some winners but mostly sounded like exactly what it was: the unfocused work of a band that was out of gas. Stone Temple Pilots, themselves widely derided as Pearl Jam knockoffs, followed the grunge-lite blockbuster Purple with Tiny Music...Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop, an unsteady collection of glammy guitar-pop that has aged well but was received indifferently at the time. Pinkerton, Weezer’s follow-up to their much-loved “blue album,” was temporarily a career-ending disaster before being slowly embraced as a foundational emo text.

Metallica, meanwhile, returned with their first new music in a half-decade, during which mainstream culture had moved away from their brand of virtuosic but increasingly pop-savvy thrash-metal. Load, and its 1997 companion Reload, found the band controversially de-mulletted and tapping unconvincingly into the hard-rock zeitgeist, which manifested in two bloated albums’ worth of generic radio filler.

R.E.M. followed an early-‘90s trifecta of commercial triumphs — Out of Time, Automatic For the People, Monster — with New Adventures In Hi-Fi. It’s an understated but eclectic collection that has become a pillar in a catalog which, for unclear reasons, seems to have left a curiously small footprint in recent rock history. Michael Stipe now describes it as his favorite R.E.M. album (and depending on the day, it’s my second or third), although it was, again, greeted with a shrug.

I would argue the chilly reception had less to do with the album itself than the band’s choice of “E-Bow the Letter,” a dirge-like duet with Patti Smith, as its lead single. This was still a time when the first single could launch or sink an album. Had they issued a more accessible track — “Bittersweet Me,” say — it’s possible New Adventures would have been greeted, accurately, as the far superior, sonically adventurous successor to Monster. When a band would pick a “challenging” lead single, either by miscalculation or by being deliberately obtuse, the story then becomes one of departure, of obstinance, even if the subsequent album is less “difficult” than is implied. C’mon, it has “Electrolite.”

‘Do not resuscitate’

Exactly the same thing was happening with Pearl Jam, who two weeks earlier had delivered their fourth record, No Code, which might be the most 1996-ass album of them all. They had previewed the release with “Who You Are,” a meandering drum-circle singalong that bricked on rock radio — a bewildering choice when there was an obvious killer single, “Hail Hail,” sitting right there. The band was transparent about wanting to scale down its audience, and “Who You Are” did the trick; No Code sank quickly from the charts and was widely considered a letdown by fans and critics.

That disappointment was compounded by a sense at the time that it was crucial for Pearl Jam to release an album that affirmed its Pearl Jam-ness. Or maybe I’m projecting; I was a little young for the original grunge explosion and didn’t become obsessed with them until after Vitalogy came out, so naturally I wanted my new favorite band to affirm its status as the biggest group in the world and continue being as cool to the rest of the world as they were to me.

Pearl Jam, and Vedder in particular, had other ideas. He had bristled against the machinery of ‘90s rock stardom apparently from the moment the “Jeremy” video started blanketing MTV. They stopped making videos altogether, which was unthinkable at the time. They declined all interviews. (A very weird, anonymously sourced Rolling Stone cover story in 1996 had attempted to puncture Vedder’s enigma without actually talking to him.) At the height of their popularity, they were almost impossible to see in concert thanks to an attempted boycott against Ticketmaster that left them without a lot of places to play. (The closest they came to Michigan on that tour was a college fieldhouse in Toledo.)

Pearl Jam’s inaccessibility was usually the first thing brought up in any article written about them, and by the mid-‘90s it had become a punchline throughout pop culture. In The Brady Bunch Movie, an otherwise unmemorable I.P. revival from 1995, a character described a girl who apparently didn’t want to have sex with him as “harder to get into than a Pearl Jam concert” (classy!). A 1996 Simpsons episode involving extraterrestrial sightings around Springfield featured a cutaway gag that showed Jimbo, one of Bart's schoolyard bullies, holding a sign that read “Alien dude: Need two tickets to Pearl Jam.”

For several years, what the band was supplying did not meet the public demand. Alt-rock radio was so desperate for Pearl Jam material that programmers would turn non-singles and even non-album tracks into hits. (“Yellow Ledbetter,” a b-side from Ten, went into heavy rotation three years after the release of the album on which it was not — unthinkably, in retrospect — included.) Eventually that demand was going to evaporate, and No Code represented the moment when all the standoffishness finally caught up with them.

I have a memory of being on a car trip with my family in 1996, when I successfully fought my brothers to keep the radio tuned to a Grand Rapids rock station that was carrying a special front-to-back, pre-release broadcast of No Code. About an hour later, having surrendered a significant chunk of drive-time air to a record of moody introspection, Eastern-psychedelic wandering and mid-tempo balladry, the DJ said what everyone was thinking: “That didn’t really rock.”

He was right. No Code did not, in the conventional sense, rock. It contains a few classics — such as “In My Tree,” “Hail Hail” and “Present Tense” — but otherwise finds the band restrained to bluesy jamming, frail lullabies and (gulp) spoken-word poetry. The album was greeted with indifference by pretty much everyone. The title, which is medical jargon for “do not resuscitate,” began to seem like a painful metaphor to those of us who, for whatever reason, felt as if we had a personal stake in its performance. 

Most artists become irrelevant by outliving their trendiness, but No Code is the rare example I can recall of a band at its peak deliberately scaling down its audience. Relieved of much of their cultural baggage and now comfortably situated outside the mainstream, the band remade itself as a touring juggernaut with a ravenously loyal following that built slowly in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Its later albums have scored occasional crossover hits, but the band operates largely as an economy unto itself, perfecting the art of audience engagement and drawing a roadmap for artists looking to ease gracefully and independently into middle age. In retrospect, No Code was an act of career suicide that had the ironic and improbable effect of turning Pearl Jam into an institution.

Some Code, though?

So then a tantalizing counterfactual hypothetical emerges: What if No Code was a more conventional — and by Pearl Jam standards, better — album for 1996? Which is not to say it isn’t already good; I do have a lot of affection for No Code, but I doubt very many Pearl Jam lifers, or even the band themselves, would claim it was their best work. It has not aged badly, nor have the years revealed it as some overlooked masterpiece. It’s a fascinating, messy album that was probably exactly what they needed to release at the time.

But if Pearl Jam’s fourth album was more on-brand, what might have happened? The critic Steven Hyden asks a similar question in his 2021 book “Long Road: Pearl Jam and the Soundtrack of a Generation,” which is, what if Yield, the much more accessible album they released in 1998, had come out in 1996 instead? In either case, they surely would have maintained their radio presence a bit longer. This might have even happened just by releasing “Hail Hail” as the lead No Code single. But those other bands were still stagnating, and alt-rock was still on the wane, still diluted by nth-generation soundalike acts, as younger people (and MTV) flocked to genres like nu-metal, hip-hop and teen-oriented pop. Whether No Code simply anticipated this shift or actually hastened it is an interesting question. I think a little of both.

Either way, it’s still fun to imagine an alternate-universe No Code, less in terms of impact than composition. For this exercise, my second attempt at playing Album God, I’m rebuilding No Code using the songs from the album and anything else from around that time. I say “around that time” rather than “recorded specifically for this album” for reasons that will become clear shortly (and will require explanation). 

Runtime is not an issue with No Code. Released in the heart of the CD era, we’re not necessarily optimizing for vinyl — even though the band might have argued otherwise. When all 11 studio albums are ranked in order of length*, No Code, at 49:27, lands exactly in the middle. (The longest, Gigaton, clocks in at 57:06; the shortest, Backspacer, my favorite of the band’s later albums, is a tight 41:35.) No Code had 13 tracks, including the minute-long “Lukin.” My version ended up with 12 and, get this, clocks in at 49:26, which makes it one second shorter than the original album. Hell yeah! Once I saw that, I knew this Album God’s work was done. So with that, I’ll share the tracklist/playlist and then I’ll have some shit to justify. 

My tracklist:
1. All Night
2. Hail Hail
3. Black, Red, Yellow
4. Who You Are
5. Falling Down
6. Dead Man
7. I Got Id
8. In My Tree
9. Habit
10. Lukin
11. Present Tense
12. Off He Goes

On the off chance anybody reads this, I imagine there being some “what the fuck?”s. So let’s untangle this.

1. ‘All Night’ > 2. ‘Hail Hail’
The best-known non-album tracks from No Code had already been released as b-sides: “Dead Man” and “Black, Red, Yellow.” Both great, both deservingly included in my revised version of the record. But the rarities collection Lost Dogs, released in 2003, confirmed that the band was sitting on another all-timer. Not only does “All Night” belong on our new No Code, it should open the god-danged thing.

It begins as a standard-issue high-energy Pearl Jam album opener along the lines of “Go,” “Last Exit” or later leadoff tracks such as “Breakerfall,” “Life Wasted,” etc. Now, I understand the whole point of No Code was to fix something that wasn’t broken — hence the simmering burner, “Sometimes,” that would ultimately open the album. But across its three-odd minutes, “All Night” evolves into something really cool and unusual, as Eddie starts layering vocal melodies on top of each other, repeating and stretching out the word “night” ad infinitum. There’s an excellent Rock Pause right in the middle. Those layered vocals close out the song, remaining front-and-center in the mix as the music fades away, which sets the stage beautifully for “Hail Hail,” perhaps my all-time favorite second track on a Pearl Jam album.

And “Hail Hail” is perfect right where it is. No notes.

3. ‘Black, Red, Yellow” > 4. ‘Who You Are’
Everyone who has ever heard “Black, Red, Yellow” has wondered, correctly, why the hell it wasn’t on the album. Let’s fix that and put her right up top. This is a delightfully offbeat little power-pop gem apparently written in tribute to Dennis Rodman, the Chicago Bulls star who befriended Eddie (before eventually befriending Kim Jong-Un). There's great imagery in the lyrics: “Vehicles swerving”; “Freud walking the sidelines”; “Hormones firing like a 50-foot Roman”? Gold. It does something great where a guitar solo would normally be, which is that the band leans into an instrumental bridge and slowly ups the intensity, and instead of a ripping lead, there’s a garbled voice recording. It turns out this was an answering machine message Rodman left for Eddie, which to my knowledge has never been transcribed.

When I saw Pearl Jam at Wrigley Field in 2016, Rodman came onstage with the band and lifted Eddie onto his shoulders while the band played “Black, Red, Yellow,” all of which I later watched on YouTube because it happened while I was in line for beer.

Then let’s put “Who You Are” at No. 4, which is a great spot for some experimental, if not representational, fuckery.

5. ‘Falling Down’
Lost holy-grail Pearl Jam songs don’t get any more lost or holy than “Falling Down,” which was performed once, at Red Rocks in 1995, and then disappeared, only to accrue mythology as it circulated on bootlegs. Nodding to its place in the band’s lore, that performance was later included on a fan club single, although there is no indication it was ever recorded in a studio.

The version I’m including here is representative of what MIGHT have been, what could exist in the version of the multiverse where they did record it in 1995 or ‘96. The draft they performed is clearly unfinished, but the bones of a Pearl Jam classic are there: that indelible guitar motif, the opening verse (“Something... to remember me by”), some excellent and purposeful jamming in the middle. There’s not much of a chorus I can discern, but presumably that would have gotten more flesh as they kept developing it.

Hyden’s book makes a persuasive case that this moment represented a major turning point. Exhausted from the demands of touring and disillusioned by the burden of being a culturally important band, Pearl Jam was on the verge of falling apart. In “Falling Down,” they probably recognized they were holding something that could be broadly accessible when finished — a song that would join “Black,” “Daughter” and “Better Man” as another of their fine mid-tempo crowd-pleasers — and said nah. Hence, a “challenging” fourth album with a weird single, a deliberately scaled-back platform and 25 years of working on their own terms.

Would “Falling Down,” and presumably an extended shelf-life in the cultural mainstream, have for sure broken them up, thereby unwriting the last two decades of Pearl Jam’s self-determined success? Again, it’s impossible to say. But since we’re prioritizing bangers, “Falling Down,” in its imaginary finished form, belongs on album-god No Code.

6. ‘Dead Man’
Great folky, spooky b-side (from the “Off He Goes” single) that belongs on the album. Fits well into a cool-down section in the middle, if not right alongside another ballad.

7. ‘I Got Id’
Yeah, I know. Here’s where I need to bend the timeline a little, but I think I can make the case. “I Got Id” (aka “I Got Shit”) was a minor radio hit in late 1995/early 1996, almost exactly halfway on the chronology between “Vitalogy” and “No Code.” They recorded it with Neil Young, when the non-Eddie members of Pearl Jam were his backing band on the 1995 album Mirror Ball. It appeared in December of 1995 on Merkin Ball, referred to as an EP but only containing two songs: “I Got Id” and “The Long Road.” In a version of the timeline when they’re not being difficult, I propose Pearl Jam recognizes “I Got Id” as a keeper and holds it for the next album. It comes out as a single whose b-side is “The Long Road,” which goes on to attain the same status as a revered show-opener that it enjoys today.

Bit of a stretch? Perhaps. But “I Got Id” is a classic that deserves a proper place on an album, far superior to some of the “rockers” they ultimately did include. Its position as an exact midpoint between Vitalogy and No Code makes it a bridge between two phases that would have eased the transition from early- to mid-period Pearl Jam. Plus, having Neil Young playing guitar on a Pearl Jam album would’ve kicked all sorts of ass. True, several members of the band don’t play on “I Got Id,” but Jack Irons, who would join the band for No Code and Yield, does.

Plus, “Red Mosquito,” which was included on No Code, was also written more than a year before the album came out. I don't know. If the gods in this alternate universe rule against “I Got Id,” I’ll swap in the eventual Yield opener “Brain of J,” because they the band been performing it as early as 1995 in more or less its final form.

8. ‘In My Tree’ > 9. ‘Habit’
Putting “In My Tree” right after “Who You Are” on the original track sequence does it a huge disservice. It’s a top-10 Pearl Jam song — in my mind, a more nuanced and developed version of “Corduroy,” at least thematically. But to the less-engaged listener, the feeling it produces is “oh great, two weird world-music-sounding ones in a row.” At least that’s what I thought as a teenager. But even now, that transition feels off somehow. Let’s give “In My Tree” some space, just like the song’s narrator. “Habit” totally rips and belongs in the lead-up to a kickass closing run of songs.

10. ‘Lukin’ > 11. ‘Present Tense’ > 12. ‘Off He Goes’
“Lukin” is brilliant — a whole musical world inside a minute-long blast of scabrous yet approachable garage-punk. (I once had an aggressively unfriendly kitten named Lukin who, in the manner of most country-ass cats, lasted about a year.) Its transition into “Present Tense” on the original album is [*chef's kiss]. “Present Tense” seems crafted for no other reason than to be the second-to-last song on a ‘90s rock album, but its placement at fourth from the end on No Code makes sense in that the album does lose most of its steam after that. But at track 11, it’s magnificent, a soaring, conclusive statement that summarizes the journey and looks tentatively forward.

And “Off He Goes” is such an obvious closer that it irks me to think about it in the middle of the album. It took me years to warm up to this song — with a subtly brilliant construction that eventually eschews the verse/chorus structure of its first half — but the real sadness of it is probably illegible to anyone not old enough to have lost friends. It would have worked as a thematic bookend on No Code, with its story of hope stifled by reality, the uncertainty and impermanence of everything. But alas.

‘I miss you already…’

So the cutting room floor is pretty full here. Let’s go through the available tracks that didn’t make it...

“Sometimes”: Great but only works as an opener.

“Smile,” “Red Mosquito”: Both of these songs, strictly speaking, do rock, although they’re kind of dull, right? No disrespect to any of the musical greats who deploy harmonica successfully, but my ears recoil at the sound of it, so I’ve never been able to get into “Smile,” which places it front and center. And “Red Mosquito” is just sort of a loping blues jam that doesn’t really go anywhere. So we’re getting rid of them in favor of some non-album tracks — “Black, Red, Yellow” and “All Night” — that both rock and kick ass, which is definitely not the same thing.

“Mankind,” “Don’t Gimme No Lip”: Stone Gossard has always been my favorite member of Pearl Jam — the quiet, unassuming guy who is secretly the architect of the whole operation. Eddie eventually took over the band, but my dude wrote “Alive,” “Even Flow” and “Black” and co-wrote several of the other songs on “Ten,” so he’s basically responsible for the whole thing happening. He is not, however, a great singer. He isn’t bad, but he has no business singing lead vocals in a band whose singer is Eddie goddamn Vedder. Would you have Ed O’Brien as the sole vocalist in a Radiohead song? “Mankind” — the superior of the two Gossard-sung tracks recorded for “No Code” — is a sturdy slice of power-pop that might have been great if Eddie sang it, but it’s kind of a sore thumb on the album.

“I’m Open,” “Around the Bend”: Safe to say nobody will miss these, right?

Well, that concludes our (my) album-god reconstruction of No Code, which I’ll title Some Code.

*And because I’m so proud of matching runtimes to WITHIN ONE SECOND and because I did the work, I’ll now list Pearl Jam’s albums in order of length, from longest to shortest:

Gigaton (57:06)
Riot Act (54:09)
Vitalogy (54:50)
Ten (53:21)
Binaural (52:02)
No Code (49:27) / Some Code (49:26, bitches!!)
Pearl Jam (49:21)
Yield (48:14)
Lightning (46:58)
Vs. (46:07)
Backspacer (41:35)

As always, please do not feel welcome to share your thoughts in the comments, because you are not.