Wednesday, July 20, 2011

PJ20 Movie: Opening Credits and Soundtrack Update



Besides gifting us this sweet shot of Pearl Jam Twenty's opening credits, Cameron Crowe has also treated us to some more hints as to his selections for the movie's soundtrack in a recent interview with The Uncool.


I heard that Blood Circus’s “Six Foot Under” will be featured in the Pearl Jam Twenty doc. Will other musicians’ songs play a part as well or will most of the music be courtesy of PJ?


Yes. “Six Foot Under” is in the documentary. It’s one of the first songs I heard back in Seattle when Bruce Pavitt (Sub-pop founder) was DJing at a museum show and played “Six Foot Under” into “Ring My Bell” by Anita Ward. I was thinking, “Holy Shit.” That’s a different sensibility than I grew up with. That is not a San Diego segue. That feels like the future.


Sure enough, later that night, we ended up at a Mother Love Bone show at the Central. It all felt like that KCMU (now KEXP, of course) sensibility that I love so much. Pearl Jam Twenty begins with that mood setting and the idea is to put you back into that frame of mind. 1988-89 Seattle, where the music belongs to you. You have the music playing in clubs that nobody else has. You have KMCU at the far left end of the dial. They will play Thelonious Monk, Anita Ward and Blood Circus. PJ20 begins by putting you in that place.


The soundtrack will have quite a few rarities and some demos from a few different eras in the band’s history. Kevin Shuss (and Josh Taft) deserve a lot of credit for that – Kevin in particular was filming the band as it was all starting to break wide open. He’s still filming them. Chris Perkel, Kevin Klauber and Adi Cabigting, our editors on PJ20, have been deep in the cave curating this visually and sonically, along with Andy Fischer (Vinyl Films) of course, for what has been literally years. It’s been our passion project for a long time. The crew all deserve a big thanks. You’ll be able to hopefully, between the movie and the soundtrack, really feel the band from the inside out. It’s one of the gifts of having met them so early in their careers. They gave me a lot of cassettes and work tapes, and I kept everything. It’s been a little bit like homework for them, I know, to go back over all the artifacts… but like Neil Young, they’re able to be objective and look at their own stuff the way a fan would. Which is one of the themes of the movie – a band made up of fans, kept alive by fans, and now their concerts are a celebration of that fact. Everybody made it, together…