Pearl Jam doesn’t sound anything like the music I’m currently into, yet they remain and forever shall be my favorite band. They are my band equivalent of a first love, the group whose music provided the soundtrack to my formative years. Oddly, I didn’t actually get into them until well after their time as Billboard and MTV champs had passed. You remember when they put bootlegs of 72 shows from their 2000 European/North American Tour for sale in big box chain stores? That’s around the time I first became a fan, and I remember rushing to Best Buy to comb through every bootleg, positive I needed to get there early to beat the crowd. Yeah, I was there for over 30 minutes, and not a single other person walked up to look at one of the bootlegs the entire time.
Pearl Jam actively retreated from the spotlight, but still sell out every arena they play, and scored cross-over hits on their last two albums with the songs “Just Breathe” and “Sirens.” Now, they’ve gone viral, withThe Hollywood Reporter carrying the following headline early this morning: “Pearl Jam Takes on ‘Frozen’ Hit ‘Let It Go.’” The video comes from the band’s concert in Milan, Italy yesterday, and in truth THR was simply re-posting an article from Billboard. As the day has progressed the story has appeared as brief articles on pretty much every pop culture site I read (e.g., CinemaBlend, HitFlix, ScreenCrush).
This is clearly a testament to Frozen‘s popularity: even the last remaining icons of grunge music have covered “Let It Go” now!” It’s also a reminder that Eddie Vedder, the guy you might have had posted to the inside of your high school locker, is now old enough to have 6- and 10-year-old daughters, each of whom likely drove him as crazy with their love of Frozen as did countless daughters for countless other parents, rock stars or not.
Here’s the thing, though: all Eddie really did was sing a couple of lines from “Let It Go” during the bridge of a performance of Pearl Jam’s “Daughter”:
Pearl Jam has played some crazy covers over the years. A couple of years ago at a Halloween night concert in Philadelphia they returned for one of their encores dressed up like Devo from their classically awful “Whip It” music video, and then they actually played “Whip It” all the way through, right down to Vedder cracking a whip on beat with the music. A couple of years before that they did their version of Stevie Wonder’s “Someday At Christmas” for a fanclub-only Christmas single. So, even though “Let It Go” is absolutely outside of Vedder’s current range it actually wouldn’t be that shocking to see them take a stab at it, probably re-arranged and rock-ified.
Instead, this just turned out to be something which Pearl Jam knows very well: a tag added to the bridge of “Daughter.” On Vs., the studio version of “Daughter” just fades out at the end, but in concert it keeps going for a while, Eddie adding in lyrics from other songs or simply doing call-and-response chants with the crowd while the band keeps playing the trippy beat. They’ve been doing that almost as long as they’ve been playing the song live, Eddie famously adding a couple of lines of “American Pie” to it during a 1994 Saturday Night Live rehearsal performance. In fact, someone actually compiled together “Daughter” tags played in concert between 1993 and 1996, the most notable of which is a brief bit of The Beatles’ “Across the Universe.”
Prior to “Let It Go,” the most unexpected tag they ever added to “Daughter” was probably Madonna’s “Ray of Light,” which you can see at the 57 minute mark in the following bootleg video of the entire 1998 Chicago concert. In fact, this is a double-dipper, as they segue into a bit of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” after “Ray of Light”:
The most definitive tag probably comes from the 2000 tour, which is the tour that started with a festival show where 8 fans were trampled to death. The band was so shaken by the event they almost broke up, and in their first show after the tragedy Eddie used the “Daughter” tag to re-purpose the lyrics of the obscure Dead Moon song “It’s OK” to form a verbal contract with the crowd that not only was it okay for the band to keep going but no one at the show was hurt:
In fact, if you listen closely right before the video of last night’s performance of “Let It Go” cuts off the band was about to kick into a rendition of “It’s OK.” To my ears, it almost sounds as if Eddie lost his nerve, fearful of the high notes awaiting him in “Let It Go” or perhaps simply unable to remember the rest of the words. I like to think that this all happened just because one if not both of Eddie’s daughters simply asked/dared him to sing a little bit of “Let It Go” at one of his shows.
So, there you have it, a brief history of Pearl Jam’s “Daughter” tags to help you better understand what to make of this so-called “cover” of “Let It Go.” Yes, it is surreal seeing an Idina Menzel song coming out of Eddie Vedder’s mouth, however briefly, but come on, the dude’s got young daughters. Not even the off-spring of Pearl Jam are immune to Frozen‘s charms.
