While the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has inspired a ton of outrage (and rightfully so!) over the past 45 days, directed primarily at the company responsible for the disaster, BP, a certain grunge band from Seattle has been raging against the Big Oil behemoth for years. As the Phoenix New Times pointed out last week, Pearl Jam were so angered by BP’s pollution of the Great Lakes back in 2007 that they performed an original protest song during their headlining slot at Lollapalooza.

As Eddie Vedder knows, the best protest anthems consist of a simple, repeated rhyme, hence his band’s tune, “Don’t Go: BP/Amoco,” which features a basic chord progression behind a chant of the title words with increasing intensity (other lyrics include “no no no no no no…”). Stream Pearl Jam’s anti-Big Oil song below (starts around the 1-minute mark):

Eddie Vedder and the rest of legendary northwest grunge band Pearl Jam will play songs from their new album, Backspacer, on Saturday Night Live next month; specifically,  March 13th.

We still don’t have an identity for the show’s host (surely it will be better than Emilio Estevez or Sharon Stone), but check out their 1994 performance of “Daughters” below in the meantime. We’ll update this post after the 3/13 show airs.

As we previously reported, many famous rock musicians and a songwriter for Sesame Street were outraged late last year when news broke that their music had been used to torture inmates at Guantanamo Bay. Whereas Drowning Pool’s Steve Benton said it was “an honor to think that perhaps [their] song could be used to quell another 9/11 attack or something like that,” Trent Reznor, Rage Against The Machine, and many more were understandably furious.

Now Reznor and Rage’s Tom Morello have joined the National Campaign to Close Guantanamo, along with R.E.M., Pearl Jam, the Roots, Rosanne Cash, Rise Against, Billy Bragg, and Jackson Browne, Huffington Post reports.

After thirteen years without a number one debut on the charts, Pearl Jam “put a bit of fixin’ on it” and landed the number one spot on the Billboard 200 this week with Backspacer. I’m not normally one to following the charts, but it’s no small feat to steal the crown from Jay-Z these days and Pearl Jam’s last time as the king of the charts goes way back to 1996’s No Code.

Jimmy Fallon is finally starting to tear a page out of Conan’s book by having lots of great musical guests. Check out the reformed Sunny Day Real Estate perform classic Diary track “Seven” here. Also, I’m actually starting to enjoy the awkward onscreen audience of Fallon’s show, especially when they’re trying to find a good head-bopping beat to The Dirty Projectors.

Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz will be producing and making a cameo in the upcoming film Freeloaders, a comedy from the team (Broken Lizard) behind Super Troopers and Beerfest. Get more info over at Spinner.

We’ve got lots of cool posts on the way for later today, but if you missed our late night item on Thom Yorke’s new percussionist, you may want to go thataway for a few more deets on the upcoming LA shows.

It’s no secret that Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder is an outspoken, politically conscious dude, a grunge rocker from Seattle who doesn’t mince his words and won’t sit idly by when the system—in his opinion—is broken. As Vedder would say (via Backspacer’s first single), “I wanna put a bit of fixin’ on it.”

Vedder got a lot more specific, however, on his relationship to politics in a recent interview with Italian newspaper La Repubblica’s Giuseppe Videtti. He contends that it’s a musician’s duty to use art as a form of protest, adding that he learned this tradition from Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Townshend, Neil Young, and the Clancy Brothers. The 2004 presidential election was really where the political inspiration for Backspacer began, though. Here’s what Vedder said (English translation via GrungeReport):

The Democrats called the Boss, Ben Harper, James Taylor and the Dixie Chicks to support Vote for Change. Who played for the Republicans? A pair of country & western singers that Bush held to the leash.

When Bush was re-elected I could only think: ‘Fuck Americans, because you are badly informed and based your vote on values that I cannot accept. You believe that George Bush can still be just man after four years of his diabolic administration?’

Vedder adds that the election of President Obama restored his hopeful spirit and inspired the writing process for Backspacer, which drops on the 20th exclusively at Target.

Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament must have recovered well from last month’s violent mugging in Atlanta because the band is set to perform on the first episode of The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien on June 1. EW reports that Will Ferrell will also be a guest for Conan’s highly anticipated premiere.

It will be interesting to see if Pearl Jam performs new material on the show, as they have been recording a new album (at the Atlanta studio where the mugging occurred) with their other favorite O’Brien, producer Brendan O’Brien.

Jay Leno’s final bow on The Tonight Show is on May 29th with successor Conan O’Brien as his guest and a performance by Prince.

Back in the early nineties, Nirvana and Pearl Jam were possibly the two biggest bands in America, but despite both groups having sprung from the same Seattle grunge scene, Kurt Cobain didn’t initially think they had both stayed true to their roots. Cobain even famously accused Pearl Jam of “pioneering a corporate, alternative and cock-rock fusion.”

Now seventeen years later, Eddie Vedder is reissuing Pearl Jam’s breakthrough album Ten and has spoken out on Cobain’s early opinions of his band. “I don’t think Kurt understood us at the time, but we became friends and I’m glad we had some of the great conversations we had, that I’m always going to keep up here,” Vedder told The Sun, pointing to his head.

“I don’t talk too much about him in respect to Krist (Novoselic) and Dave (Grohl) and I know he said that early stuff about not liking us,” Vedder added. “But there’s a couple of complimentary things that he said in public about me as a human being, which I’m proud exist. But if Kurt were around today, I know he’d say to me, ‘Well, you turned out OK.’”

After years of dedication to their fans, a war with Ticketmaster and very few questionable licensing deals, Vedder has put all the early-nineties criticism over the band “selling out” to rest. “People offered us money to sell out but do I look like a whore?” he said.