Pearl Jam – Last Kiss

A disaster of this magnitude should have been predicted in the quatrains of Nostradamus. Sonic leviathan, Pearl Jam, the greatest band ever named for neck-borne ejaculate, dipped into early sixties pop for “Last Kiss.” Written by Wayne Cochran about an actual Georgia car crash and popularized by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers in 1964, this tune remained a relatively unknown gem of early sixties studiocraft– admittedly marred by the ham-handed bathos of its lyrics– until the CD release in 1998 of The Last Kiss Sessions, an effort which, if nothing else, brought J. Frank Wilson back into the collective jukebox of rock history. PJ’s pensive, slowed-down take on this classic of dead girlfriend pop amplified the drama while evaporating the campy fun. Eddie Vedder’s whimper-to-a-scream vocal style cranked up the maudlin-ometer until the tune was ready to serve as an anti-drunk driving commercial. (Text 1999)