Long Road: Pearl Jam and the Soundtrack of a Generation by Steven Hyden

Pearl Jam is aging dad butt rock now, but I'm also an aging dad, so here we are.

“Another Pearl Jam thing? Really?” Is this actually what you’re thinking or just the voice in my head? The answer to the potential hypothetical is, “yup.” We’re talking about Pearl Jam again, but the context is kind of interesting, at least to me. I just finished the book by Steven Hyden called “Long Road.” I’ve had it on my radar since it came out in September 2022, and I’m only just now getting to it. That’s instructive because I saw Pearl Jam on 9/11/2022, and yet, even in the afterglow of maybe the best rock concert I’ve seen in my life, I didn’t leap into this book by an author and podcast whose work I know, trust, and like.

There are many reasons for that, most notably because I feel like I know basically everything I ever need to know about Pearl Jam. I can’t quote their Wikipedia page with perfect accuracy, but there’s no Pearl Jam story I haven’t heard at least once, even if I might have forgotten a detail or two. You don't expect to learn anything new when you know the story and the band members so intimately from age 12 to 44. And so I had trouble cracking a book that I expected to be something of a literary version of a greatest hits record. In the end, that’s what Steven Hyden produced in “Long Road,” but it’s very well done and worth your time if you’re a Pearl Jam fan.

Here’s why.

1. Hyden provides an unofficial cheat sheet for the greatest moments in Pearl Jam bootleg history. This book is for you if you want to know the subtext or presumed subtext behind a certain time period or even a certain song from a certain show. I hadn’t really thought about all that Pearl Jam was going through when they decided to start their Red Rocks show in 1995 seated. But here I am, watching a YouTube video with remastered audio of the band in this moment that Hyden pontificates about at length. It’s a show where they played a very stripped-down version of “Jeremy” with no chorus. That’s just one example. There are gems throughout the book.
   

2. Each chapter is loosely about one song, but not really. I loved the structure of the book, which was loosely chronological but headlined by a certain song that drove the narrative of each chapter. A book like this could easily get to navel-gazing, but Hyden continually provides the proper amount of personal context while trying to provide universal context on the band members and their careers together.

3. I loved the exploration of Pearl Jam as a cultural touchstone as they’ve aged from being a vital voice to being some sort of combination of Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, The Grateful Dead, and even The Dave Matthews Band as a touring entity that almost doesn’t need to release studio records. It talks about how Pearl Jam became a band that releases every single show as a record, which has become a new part of their identity.

4. Maybe most of all, I appreciated Steven Hyden’s brutal honesty about some of the lower points in the band’s career where their material wasn’t hitting. For me as a fan, I always kind of felt bad about dropping out for a bit from 2000 to 2009. I have grown to love some tunes from Binaural, Riot Act, and 2006’s eponymous Pearl Jam avocado record, but I thought it was me when I didn’t take to those in the moment. Through Steven Hyden’s book, I feel sort of justified in my awkward Pearl Jam years, like it wasn’t just me.

   

   The most awkward years.

5. 

   My friend Andrew and I loved 2020’s Gigaton, and there’s no doubt it’s one of the best Pearl Jam records since the band’s last truly vital record, 1998’s Yield. But a late-stage band always needs caveats as they create new music this late in their career. Hyden captures it perfectly that as good as Gigaton might be on its own, the timing of being released a few weeks after the world shut down allowed it to exist in an environment where it could mean so much more than it otherwise would have.

Most of all, I loved this book because no matter what was said, you could always tell that Steven Hyden was a fan. He had opinions throughout the book, but the sense of love and appreciation shined through the entire way without sounding like an apologist or sycophant. As an unabashed Pearl Jam fan and a realist, it gave this book credibility that I didn’t know it would have before I started reading it. As a fan of Hyden’s through his music criticism and his podcast, Indiecast, I probably should have known.

So read it. Enjoy it. Be prepared to look up Youtube videos of the shows he references. Have some fun with Pearl Jam again.