When Pearl Jam’s cover of “Last Kiss” came out around the turn of the century, I wrote a review panning the effort, which I will post below. Twelve years on I must admit that I overreacted. Like the earlier version by J. Frank Wilson, it’s a fun tune. Let’s just leave it at that.
Pearl Jam
“Last Kiss”/”Soldier of Love”
Epic Records/CD SingleA 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, has dipped into early sixties pop on this CD single, the profits for which will aid Kosovan refugees. The first track is the better of the two. “Last Kiss,” written by Georgian Wayne Cochran about an actual Peach State car crash and popularized by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers in 1964, remained an 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 Mr. Wilson back into the collective jukebox of rock history. PJ’s pensive, slowed-down take on this classic of dead girlfriend pop amplifies the drama while evaporating the campy fun. Eddie Vedder’s whimper-to-a-scream vocal style cranks up the tune’s maudlin-ometer until it’s ready to serve as an anti-drunk driving commercial. “Soldier of Love,” the second song on the disc was written by country-soul legend, Arthur Alexander. The tune will be familiar to many as The Beatles included a “Soldier” cover on Live at the BBC and as many as a half-dozen fab four reissues and bootlegs have followed suit. Power Pop icon, Marshall Crenshaw did a fun version of “Soldier” on his first record as well. PJ slows this number down enough to remove it from the carousel of good time music. More troubling is the absence of groove and levity. Pop was fun– the soundtrack to dancing and romancing– when these ditties first hit the charts, but the Jamsters, slow and ponderous to the end, just don’t know how to have a good time.
