“Has There Ever Been a Song to Begin with a Guitar Solo Other than ‘Red Mosquito’ by Pearl Jam?”

It’s entirely possible that “Red Mosquito,” track eight on the band’s fairly unheralded fourth album No Code [and of course getting the royal treatment on the great Live on Two Legs (1998)], is Pearl Jam’s most important song. Now, it being a great song, in my opinion, does not distinguish it in any way within this band’s catalogue, as Pearl Jam is a band that rocks out in full-force with versatility and pure, all-out balls. Just a brief list of awe-inspiring midtempo songs from this band’s career would be “Dissident”; “Immortality”; “In Hiding”; “Not for You”; “Wishlist”; “Thin Air”; “I am Mine”; “Parachutes” and “Amongst the Waves.”

What does demarcate “Red Moquito” from the rest of the pack is that it actually begins with a guitar solo, an incredibly creative maneuver and one which, of course, true to form, involves a prevalent guitar presence in the song’s first few bars, and said guitarist playing something that amounts to improvisation — a series of riffs and runs that weren’t planned out ahead of time, in other words. This type of thing usually constitutes a solo.

Pearl Jam should be contrasted with Soundgarden, then, another band I albeit have much respect for, for their penchant for featuring copious guitar solos. In my opinion, Mike McCready was the best soloist of the 1990s, that is, of any band which reached its peak potential within that decade, although it probably wasn’t an era that was huge on improvisation and virtuosity. All the calamities going on in the world called for more purposeful, calculated songwriting, like, say, LIVE’s “Lightning Crashes,” than a non-semantic sort of noodling on your instrument to show off. But He**, noodling and showing off are always cool, too.

Anyway, if it is true that “Red Mosquito” is Pearl Jam’s most important song (and again, a listen to the live version will do anything but take the wind out of this argument’s sails), then that naturally cements Pearl Jam as, intrinsically, a classic rock band. This, as well, is something to which I have no problem assenting. The most immediate, perhaps grotesque, reason why one could concur on this matter, of course, is that Eddie Vedder is still alive, not deceased at the hands of hard drugs. Another reason, though, would be, within what I earlier diagram as the group’s profuse potential for versatility, a lot of their best songs are ballads — several of those I listed earlier would qualify as well as the venerable “Elderly Woman behind the Counter in a Small Town”; “Nothingman” and “Off He Goes”; each of which, again, sees their own full fruition on the unbelievable Live on Two Legs.

So Pearl Jam made a “grunge” album in Ten, perhaps opportunistically, to cash in on the flannel and crowd-surfing aesthetic of the early ’90s. Well, sh**. That stuff still rocks. And no, Ten doesn’t cohere as an album, as many often asininely claim (Rolling Stone even ranked high all time and failed to mention so much as one song on the LP that wasn’t a single). Does Vs. conjeal as an album? Maybe. Vitalogy does and let’s face it it’s a grunge album, almost like an explicit goodbye to Kurt Cobain. No Code, in my experience, conjeals well enough, commendable further for taking a pointed step away from grunge, at least in many instances, such as “Red Mosquito”; album opener “Sometimes” and the indescribably psychedelic “In My Tree,” a song that kind of exists on a stylistic island of its own. Walt Whitman once said “Do I contradict myself? Very well. I contradict myself. I’m vast and contain multitudes.” Pearl Jam of course has never been accused of disagreeing with themselves semantically, but perhaps still resides within this de facto problematic realm of multiplicity in that, if you were ask them whether their specialty were grunge, ballad or classic rock, the answer would likely be “Yes.” Yield, it’s true, as well as Binaural, also all cohere well as full-LP listens, hence positioning “Faithfull”; “In Hiding” and “Nothing as it Seems” as within the upper echelon of this band’s catalogue, something with which I don’t think any true fan would disagree. Come to think of it, “Nothing as it Seems,” the defiantly down, somber and incredible summertime lead single to Binaural (2000), does furnish a few improvised licks in its very beginning, hence buddying it up to “Red Mosquito” in terms of importance within the band’s entire catalogue. No argument here. Salute!

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