By Cameron Crowe

Rolling stone 10/28/93

Pearl Jam emerged from the strange daze of superstardom with a new album full of
rage and warrior soul.
There are two Eddie Vedders. One is quiet, shy, barely audible when he speaks.
Loving and loved in return. The other is tortured, a bitter realist, a man capable of
pointing out injustice and waging that war on the home front, inside himself. On a
warm and windy late-spring day in San Rafael, California, it's easy to see which
Eddie Vedder is shooting baskets outside the Site, the recording studio where Pearl
Jam are finishing their second album. It is tortured Eddie, the one with the deep
crease between his eyebrows.
"Your shot," calls Jeff Ament, the group's bassist. He bounces the ball to Vedder,
who takes a long outside jumper. It rattles into the basket and rolls away. By the
time Ament retrieves the ball, Vedder has already disappeared into the studio. His
mind is on a new song, "Rearviewmirror." This is the last day of recording at the Site,
and the track's fate hangs in the balance. It's a song about suicide... but it's too
"catchy."
The choice of studio seemed perfect back in February, when the band decided to
record the new album here. This idyllic studio compound in the hills outside the San
Francisco offered privacy and focus. Keith Richards had recorded here; his thank-you
note to the studio is framed on the living-room wall. This is gorgeous country, where
locals look out at the expansive green horizon and say things like "George Lucas
owns everything to the left." This is where Pearl Jam would face the challenge of
following up Ten, one of the most successful debut albums in rock. There was only
one problem.
"I fucking hate it here," says Vedder, standing in the cool blue room where he is
about to sing. "I've had a hard time." He places the lyric sheet on a stand between
two turquoise-green guitars. "How do you make a rock record here? Maybe the old
rockers, maybe they love this. Maybe they need the comfort and the relaxation.
Maybe they need it to make dinner music."
Frustrated, Vedder shakes his head He pulls at his black T-shirt, uncomfortable in
his own skin. A long moment passes. Finally, producer Brendan O'Brien speaks over
the intercom. "Ready to give it a shot?" "Sure," Vedder says quietly, turning his back
for the vocal. He slips on headphones, and for a long time the only sound in the room
is his tapping foot.
"Took a drive today," he sings. "Time to emancipate/I guess it was the
beatings/Made me wise . . ." He holds a shaking hand to his head. "But I'm not about
to give thanks . . . or apologize." Now listening carefully, his weight shifts from foot to
foot. He growls and begins spitting on the floor. "Divided by fear . . ." Louder now.
"Forced to endure/What I could not forgive . . ." He's bellowing now, eyes shut. "Saw
things . . ." The room is filled with his anger. "Clearer . . . once you were in my . . ."
Eight feet away, a snare drum leaning against the wall starts to shake. "Rearview . . .
mirrorrr!"
In another part of the building, Ament, the band's resident artist, prepares for a group
meeting about the new album cover. For months, the unwritten rule had been Don't
talk about it. Just make the record. Forget about the pressures on the other side of
that hill. But now decisions must be made, and the band slowly gathers in the
kitchen to look at Ament's ideas.
"I've been thinking about windows," Ament says, fighting nerves, passing his artwork
ideas to the other members. Ament's distinctive hand-scripted style adorns all the
group's T-shirts and record releases. On the table before them is a complex
collection of his photos and sketches.
"Cool," says Vedder softly, just returned from the studio and still hunched from the
emotional vocal. Stone Gossard and Mike McCready, the band's guitarists, study the
ideas with growing enthusiasm. Buoyed, Ament continues. He likes the idea of
contradiction. Conflicting images. The five members kick the concept around until it
sticks. Contradiction. There is the lull that follows a winning idea.
"So are we talking about 'Daughter' as the first single?" drummer Dave Abbruzzese
asks casually.
Suddenly, all air leave the room. The other four members dog pile on Abbruzzese.
What single? One meeting at a time! What do you mean, single? Abbruzzese
shrugs. Perhaps it's still a little too soon to mention the unmentionable. Soon, the
subject returns to the album-cover art. Abbruzzese suggests adding a battered and
bolted New York City apartment window to the artwork. The idea is instantly
accepted and the meeting ends on an exuberant note. The band disappears to play
softball while Brendan O'Brien finishes the mix of "Rearviewmirror."
Abbruzzese stays behind, nursing a sore wrist. (He occasionally suffers from
carpal-tunnel syndrome, which causes numbness in three of his fingers.) "To me,
when I was younger and I heard about a band selling a million records, I thought the
band would get together and jump up and down for at least a minute," he says with a
wide-open East Texas laugh, "and just go, 'Wow, I can't believe it.' But it doesn't
happen that way [in this band]. Me, I flip out. I jump up and down by myself." For
Abbruzzese, who co-wrote the album's opening track, "Go," it's sometimes hard to
watch his band mates deal with success. "There's a lot of intensity over decisions,"
he says cheerfully. "And I think it's great. But every once in a while, I wish everyone
would just let it go. Make a bad decision!" He looks out at the same green forest
Vedder had raged at earlier. "Look at this place! It's paradise."
Sitting in a downtown-Seattle coffee shop a few weeks later, Stone Gossard
analyzes the combustible nature of his band 'I think we're doing fine," he says in the
clipped rhythm of an athlete. 'I think we made a great record. Nobody's out buying
limos and thinking they're the most amazing thing on earth. There's a natural balance
in the band where we need each other. Everybody sees things from their own angle,
and all those angles are the archetypes of the things you need to really cover your
ass. It's what makes a band to me."
And he has heard the criticism of Pearl Jam's success. "If somebody wants to say,
'You guys used to be my favorite band, but you got too big' - to me, the problem with
getting too big is not, innately, you get too big and all of a sudden you stop playing
good music," Gossard says. "The problem is, when you get too big, you stop doing
the things you used to do. Just being big doesn't mean you can't go in your
basement and write a good song. I think people are capable of being a lot bigger on
that rad big scale." He laughs. "A lot more people are capable of being big out there
that just don't give themselves a chance."
At first, the songs on the new album, Pearl Jam, came in a burst. The initial week of
recording at the Site had produced "Rats," "Blood" "Go" and a slow, potent version of
their previously unrecorded stage favorite, "Leash." Then the band hit a wall. Vedder
disappeared into San Francisco, often sleeping in his truck to preserve his fighting
spirit. Hiking, he'd even picked up poison ivy. "He needed to get in the space of his
songs," says Ament. "Soon we were back on track."
Pearl Jam is the band's turf statement, a personal declaration of the importance of
music over idolatry. But the burden of Pearl Jam's popularity has fallen most solidly
on Vedder, who spent much of his off-season wondering about the effects of being in
such a high-profile band.
Vedder had - uncharacteristically - even gotten into a barroom fight defending the
band. (In a Waits-like voice, he offers a snippet of an unrecorded song that he has
written about it: "Gave myself a black eye/To show off just how I was feeling.") And
one night, while sitting out on a deserted coastal sand bluff, contemplating life after
the death of a friend, guitarist Stefanie Sargent of 7 Year Bitch, he heard strange
voices coming from the hill behind him. They were singing "Black," the fragile song
that to Vedder had come to symbolize the overcommercialization of the band. He'd
fought to keep it from getting overplayed, didn't want a video made of the song.
Vedder hiked out of the bushes to ask the surprised hikers not to sing the song.
Months later, he still remembers their odd and concerned looks as they faced the
angst-filled author of the song.
"I had a hard time getting away," Vedder says now with a laugh. But as Ament says,
the struggle is everything. "The push and pull," he says, "is what makes our band."
"Let's do 'Black,'" says Gossard.
It's rehearsal time back in Seattle, June 1993. Later in the summer, Pearl Jam will do
a brief "fun" tour of Europe, opening shows for Neil Young and U2, and the band has
rented out the downtown Moore Theater for practice.
Half-seriously, Gossard asks that the stage lights of the empty theater be darkened.
(They are.) He begins strumming the simple chords that open this anguished song to
a former lover. Then, hands in pockets, Vedder eases into the words. He gives
himself, wrenchingly, to a thousand empty seats. When it's over, there is a buzz in
the air. The band is clearly energized.
Soon Pearl Jam are racing with a new riff by Gossard. Abbruzese tries a few different
feels, locks in on one with Ament. Then McCready adds a spitfire lead. Like
McCready himself, his playing is quietly expressive marked by sudden explosions.
Now Vedder joins in, trying random lyrics ("When it comes to modern times/You're
standing in line"). His omnipresent yellow-tweed suitcase, the one filled with journals
and lyrics and masks and tapes, is open and spread out onstage. He selects
phrases and thoughts as the band blazes behind him.
Before long, they've honed loose versions of two new songs. At the heart of Pearl
Jam is the relationship between Gossard and Vedder. "I consider us to be very
different people," says Gossard, whose razor-edged wit is far different from Vedder's
deadpan irony. "Almost polarized in a lot of ways. I mean, name any given issue, and
we'll take opposite sides of it. We give each other the total different end of the
spectrum so we can always somehow find the middle. My goal, what I really want to
achieve, is not to need him. Because he is needed by so many people who don't
really understand him."
Later, Vedder grabs a pitcher of beer at a bar next, door, the Nightlite, and unwinds
from the rehearsal. He reflects on singing "Black" for the first time in months. "There
are certain songs that come from emotion," he says. "It's got nothing to do with
melody or timing or even words; it has to do with the emotion behind the song. You
can't put out 50 percent. You have to sing them from a feeling. Like 'Alive' and
'Jeremy' to this day - and 'Black.' Those songs, they tear me up."
Ament is sitting next to him. The two have not been out together socially since the
1992 Lollapalooza tour. They share the easy camaraderie of music lovers. "My
relationship with the band," Vedder says, "began as a love affair on the phone with
Jeff." Soon the two musicians are recalling the early history of Pearl Jam, the
scuffling days of only two and a half years ago.
It had all begun with an unassuming tape marked STONE GOSSARD DEMOS 91.
The guitar-god magazines have only recently discovered it, but most Pearl Jam
songs began life as a Gossard riff. One of his early favorites was a song called
"Dollar Short," an unfinished track that he'd started working on back when he and
bassist Ament were in Mother Love Bone. Love Bone was the promising Seattle
hard-rock band they'd formed after the breakup of their previous group, grunge
pioneers Green River. When Love Bone singer/songwriter Andrew Wood died in 1990
of a tragic heroin overdose, Ament - the Montana-born son of a barber - downshifted,
playing around town with a group called the War Babies and returning to his other
love, graphic arts. Gossard - a Seattle native whose father is a lawyer - barely put
down his guitar, playing constantly, moving away from the trippy atmospherics of
Love Bone and toward a hard-edged groove. Part of the new blueprint was "Dollar
Short."
Eventually Gossard called in McCready, an explosive lead guitarist who had been so
bummed out by the breakup of his own Seattle band, Shadow, that he'd started
turning into a Republican - literally. He'd cut his hair, was working in a video store and
was reading a book by archconservative Barry Goldwater.
"I was becoming a staunch conservative," McCready says, "because I was so
depressed." Gossard saw him more as his new secret weapon for the band he
wanted to form.
'Whatever you're playing," says Gossard, " 'Cready comes in and lights the fuse." As
the Seattle sound started to gather momentum around them - Nirvana were about to
enter the major- label arena, Sub Pop Records was flourishing - Gossard and
McCready jammed in the attic room of Gossard's parents' house. That room had
already been the musical hothouse for Green River and Mother Love Bone. When
Ament joined the Gossard-McCready jams, inspiration struck again. "I knew we had
a band," McCready says, "when we started playing that song 'Dollar Short.' "
Dave Krusen joined the band later, playing on Ten, but soon left to deal with some
domestic problems. He was replaced by Abbruzzese, who had been playing in a funk
band and co-hosting a radio show, Music We Like, in Houston. At first, Abbruzzese
was tentative about playing rock full time; after two shows, he'd tattooed Ament's
stick-figure Pearl Jam logo on his shoulder.
Today, listening to Gossard's original '91 demos is not unlike hearing Ten without the
vocals - powerful but incomplete. The missing piece, it turned out, was in San Diego.
Originally from Evanston, Ill., Vedder - better known on the San Diego music scene
as "the guy who never slept" - had brought a Midwestern work ethic to the sunny
beach community. Working at hyperspeed, laboring days at a petroleum company to
finance his budding career as a singer and song-writer, Vedder had befriended Jack
Irons, formerly of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Irons passed along Gossard's tape.
The demo tape from Seattle contained five instrumentals, Vedder remembers, but
there was something about that one song, the one with that great bridge, that was
triggering things that Vedder had kept long contained. It all came to a head one
morning in the fog as he was surfing, the morning "Dollar Short" became a song
called "Alive."
Vedder raced back to the Mission Beach apartment of his longtime girlfriend, Beth
Liebling. Working from yellow Post-it pads lifted from his job, Vedder taped himself
singing over three of the instrumentals. Together the three songs told a story, as
Vedder recalls today, "based on things that had happened, and some I imagined."
The "mini opera" tape was carefully designed by Vedder, the graphics Xeroxed at
work and the package entitled Mamasan.
Sitting in his apartment in Seattle, Ament listened to the tape three times and picked
up a phone. "Stone," he said, "you better get over here." By the time Vedder arrived
in Seattle, he'd already written "Black." All he'd requested in his earlier, lengthy
phone conversations with Ament was not to waste time. He wanted to come straight
from the airport - right to their rehearsal room - and make music. And that is what
happened. The first song they played together was "Alive." Within a week, they were
a fully functioning band. And Vedder's creative floodgates were wide open. Most of
his songs, from 'Why Go" to "Oceans," were real stories about people he knew.
Some of them contained riddles, private messages to himself or friends.
Even the lyrics printed on Ten are only partial, but it's hard to dispute the pain in his
delivery of such aching lines as "Daddy didn't give attention/To the fact that Mommy
didn't care." "I don't know where all those songs came from," says Ament. "I know a
little about his childhood. I know he loved [the Who's] Quadrophenia ... I guess I don't
know many details."
"Alive" set the tone for everything that would follow. The first song on Ten was also
the first song to bring - attention to the band. It was clearly Vedder's creative
breakthrough, and the band's initial video celebrated a cathartic live performance of
the song. In an early Los Angeles Times review, writer Chris William had even
compared the song to the Who's "My Generation."
Today, "Alive" is a Gen X rallying cry, but tonight, sitting in the Nightlite, Vedder
reveals the true meaning of the song. "Everybody writes about it like it's a
life-affirmation, thing - I'm really glad about that,' he says with a rueful laugh "It's a
great interpretation.
But 'Alive' is ... it's torture. Which is why it's fucked up for me. Why I should probably
learn how to sing another way. It would be easier. It's... it's too much."
Vedder continues: "The story of the song is that a mother is with a father and the
father dies. It's an intense thing because the son looks just like the father. The son
grows up to be the father, the person that she lost. His father's dead, and now this
confusion, his mother, his love, how does he love her, how does she love him? In
fact, the mother, even though she marries somebody else, there's no one she's ever
loved more than the father. You know how it is, first loves and stuff. And the guy dies.
How could you ever get him back? But the son. He looks exactly like him. It's
uncanny. So she wants him. The son is oblivious to it all. He doesn't know what the
fuck is going on. He's still dealing, he's still growing up. He's still dealing with love,
he's still dealing with the death of his father. All he knows is 'I'm still alive' - those
three words, that's totally out of burden."
Elvis' "Suspicious Minds" blasts on the jukebox as Vedder continues. "Now the
second verse is 'Oh she walks slowly into a young man's room... I can remember to
this very day . . . the look . . . the look.' And I don't say anything else. And because
I'm saying, 'The look, the look' everyone thinks it goes with 'on her face.' It's not on
her face. The look is between her legs. Where do you go with that? That's where you
came from."
"But I'm still alive. I'm the lover that's still alive. And the whole conversation about
'You're still alive, she said' And his doubts: 'Do I deserve to be? Is that the question?'
Because he's fucked up forever! So now he doesn't know how to deal with it, so what
does he do, he goes out killing people - that was [the song] 'Once.' He becomes a
serial killer. And 'Footsteps,' the final song of the trilogy [it was released as a U.K. B
side to 'Jeremy'], that's when he gets executed That's what happens. The Green River
killer... and in San Diego, there was another prostitute killer down there. Somehow I
related to that. I think that happens more than we know.
It's a modern way of dealing with a bad life."
Then he smiles as he says, "I'm just glad I became a songwriter."
Sitting next to Vedder, Ament listens like a fascinated brother. Perhaps he is
remembering the first impressions Vedder made upon arriving in Seattle. Friends from
his early days up north recall a different Vedder from today, a desperately shy surfer,
a guy with a lot of heart and little irony. One friend even called him Holy Eddie. "He
was genuinely quiet and loving Eddie when we first met him," says Ament. In the
band's earliest shows, Vedder had been so self-effacing, he barely looked up. "And at
a certain point, he changed."
An early turning point came onstage at a club called Harpo's, in Victoria, British
Columbia. It was Pearl Jam's maiden tour, their first appearance away from a
nurturing audience of Seattle friends. But this Canadian crowd was far more
interested in getting drunk. In midset, Vedder decided to challenge the jaded
audience, to wake them up. Unscrewing the 12-pound steel base of the microphone
stand, Vedder sent it flying over their heads, like a lethal Frisbee. The steel disk
crashed into the wall of the back bar.
They woke up.
Vedder would never fully be the same. Gossard credits the influence of
Soundgarden's Chris Cornell, who had asked Vedder to sing on his tribute to Andrew
Wood, Temple of the Dog. "Cornell had already transformed himself in an intense
way," Gossard says. "Eddie looked to him as a guide to help us through that time."
Vedder soon developed a new stage habit. He began climbing the stage scaffolding
or the wings of the theaters the band was playing, falling into the hands of an often
worshipful crowd. 'I think the first time I got really worried, we were in Texas," recalls
McCready. "Eddie climbed up on this girder, about 50 feet in the air. Nobody knew
where he was. And all of a sudden you look up - some guy had a flashlight on him -
and it was like 'Fuck!' He's up there clinging to a girder. I'm thinking, 'This guy is
insane, but I'm so totally pumped.' "
"That whole thing almost turned into a circus event," adds Ament. "People weren't
looking at his eyes when he was doing that. I think they were looking at the fucking
freak, you know. The guy who was dumb enough to put his life on the line. Evel
Knievel. But if you looked at his eyes, man, there was an intensity in what he was
doing. That was his belief in himself. He was saying, 'This isn't just "rock" to me.' "
The band returned from a European tour and taped a stirring edition of Unplugged.
There was a particularly galvanizing, unforgettable moment at the end of"Black." 'We
belong . . . together . . . together," Vedder sang. It was simple, a guy sitting on a
stool, ripping his heart out, drowning emotionally, right there in front of you. After
Unplugged, letters to the band's Ten Club almost doubled, many were about "Black,"
and they began in an eerily similar fashion: "I was recently considering suicide, and
then I heard your music...."
Vedder answered many of the letters himself, sometimes leaving the band's office in
a wreck. But there was more work to be done. Almost immediately, the band
returned to Europe to play some of the big summer festivals in front of 30,000 to
50,000 people. It was trial by fire.
"The whole thing culminated in Denmark," says Ament. "The Danish, I think, were
playing Italy in the World Cup, so the city was crazed. Nirvana was playing there,
and they were dealing with their fame, too. We played the show in front of 70,000
people. Eddie went into the crowd, like he usually does, and he came back, and the
security didn't know who he was. They started beating him up. Half the band went
down. This was during 'Deep.' I remember we stopped, and I was ready to jump
down, seeing this total riot happen . . . and Eddie and Eric [Johnson, tour manager],
they're totally swinging. And Mike's down there, and Dave's down there."
The previous night in Stockholm, Sweden, Vedder explains, the band had played a
longer show than usual. A group of Americans had reportedly broken into the
dressing room and, among other things, stolen Vedder's lyrics and journals. He had
intended to give them away at the end of the tour, just as he'd done on an earlier
European visit (with a backpack personalized by handwritten accounts of each
show). But the theft weighed on him; it felt like a breach of trust, a bad omen. For
Vedder, it was a metaphor for the growing success of Pearl Jam. The band about
which Ament had once written, "Add water, watch Pearl Jam grow," was growing
wildly, far beyond the small-scale plans for a small-scale debut. 'It made us feel like
playing those huge shows maybe wasn't as important as we thought it was," says
Ament.
"We packed our bags, and we left the next morning."
Sitting in the Nightlite, Ament and Vedder recall the bruising end to that 1991 tour.
The band had seen their unassuming debut album, Ten, sell into the millions. Only
Billy Ray Cyrus had kept them from the No. 1 slot, thankfully saving at least one
achievement for later. Pearl Jam had been designed for a slow build. Instead, they
were strapped to the rocket. The band held numeros meetings: "Where do we draw
the line?" The line was drawn at "Black." Eddie Vedder refused to turn the song into
a video, wouldn't listen to the corporate coaching that told him the track was, as
Vedder puts it, "bigger than 'Jeremy', bigger than you or me." Vedder held firm, and
the band backed him up.
"Some songs," he says, "just aren't meant to be played between Hit No. 2 and Hit
No. 3. You start doing those things, you'll crush it. That's not why we wrote songs.
We didn't write to make hits. But those fragile songs get crushed by the business. I
don't want to be a part of it. I don't think the band wants to be part of it."
The subject soon turns to video, and Ament describes a recent encounter with Mark
Eitzel from the group American Music Club. Ament and McCready jammed with the
band in Seattle, but within 30 seconds of conversation, Eitzel took the opportunity to
challenge Ament on the "Jeremy" video. 'I liked your hit," he'd told Ament, co-author
of the song, "but the video sucked. It ruined my vision of the song."
The exchange stuck with Ament. "Ten years from now," he tells Vedder, 'I don't want
people to remember our songs as videos."
Vedder agrees. He promises that the new album will be released before any videos. "I
don't even have MTV," he says with a shrug. 'I don't know why I'm commenting.
People stop me in the streets and tell me about this band Stone Temple Pilots. I
don't even know who they are. I'm buying a sandwich, and they go, 'What's going on
with the Stone Temple Pilots?' "
"You haven't seen the video?" asks Ament. "You have to have seen it." "I haven't," he
says. "I don't have MTV."
Ament tells Vedder about the "Plush" video, with the singer's uncanny appropriation
of Vedder's mannerisms. Vedder's heard it before. In fact, he hears it daily. From
fans, from friends, even from a French musician who complimented him on the song
and his new short orange hair. (Vedder's hair is still longish and brown.)
"Apparently, it's something that the guy is dealing with, too," Vedder suggests. 'It's
like, am I supposed to feel sympathy? Get your own trip, man. I don't think I was
copping anybody's trip. I wasn't copping Andy Wood's trip. I wasn't copping Kurt
Cobain's trip, even though Kurt Cobain's one of the best trips I could ever cop. But
Beth and I were part of the San Diego scene. We knew everything that was going on,
and it was small enough to know. Those guys came from there? I never heard of
'em." End of subject.
For several more hours, Vedder and Ament reminisce over the strange daze of the
last few years. Vedder admits to Ament that it's no longer as easy, the stage
appearances are tougher now. It's harder, he says, to gear up to sing the songs the
way that they must be sung. And although Vedder is only an occasional drinker, he
has taken to slugging at a bottle of red wine onstage. When the conversation turns to
the late Andrew Wood, though, Vedder becomes reflective.
'I wonder about Andy," he says. 'I relate sometimes. Not the drug part - I don't need
drugs to make my life tragic - but the fact that things were going so well for him. He
didn't know." Vedder pauses. "There's one song of his that I'd be proud to sing. I
won't tell you which one. But there was one song of his that always got to me.
Someday I'm going to sing it."
Vedder excuses himself to visit the restroom. Ament shakes his head "First time I
heard that," he says with a private smile.
It's 2 a.m. now, a chilly night in June. Ament and Vedder stand shivering on the
corner outside the Moore Theater. Neither seems anxious for the night to end.
Fingering their car keys, they continue talking under the darkened marquee. Tonight
is Grad Night in Seattle. Last call barflies and late night prom couples brush past
them on the street, no one recognizing the two musicians, save for one woozy grad
in a crimson tuxedo. For a few minutes, he stands watching them from nearby, softly
repeating a drunken mantra to himself. "Eddie, Eddie, Eddie, Eddie, Eddie," he says
and then moves on.
"I don't know if it was the beer or the company or what," Ament remarks, "but I got to
a place tonight I hadn't been in a long time."
"Me, too," says Vedder. "So much has changed around here."
"There's going to be a point where it'll revert back to the way that it was," says
Ament. "We'll get through this whole period right now. We'll get back out there
playing. We'll get back to actually being five guys who want to work it out together."
Vedder thrusts his hands deep into his pockets. "I'd really like that," he says. The
two band mates stand in the dark for another 10 minutes, talking about Oliver Stone,
about Reservoir Dogs, about attitudes in the band and sexism on the road, about
their pride in the new songs and about Vedder's ultimate meltdown plan. He can
always sell solo cassettes out of his house for $1.50. Finally the cold overtakes
them.
"See you tomorrow," says Ament, heading for the parking lot across the street.
"Wait," says Vedder, "I'll go with you."
"Fuck you," yells a chorus of fans near the front. There is little poetry in the Italian
crowd. Forty thousand fill this Roman soccer stadium today, but there isn't much
they're interested in seeing outside of the group on the ticket - U2.
"Fuck me?" repeats Vedder, out on the lip of the stage. "Tell you what - you fuck me,
and Bono will fuck you!"
The band launches into "Even Flow" and attempts to build a consensus, good or bad,
anything. The struggle for acceptance ends in a draw. This is one of the few countries
in the world not to have fallen under the Pearl Jam spell and the band feels the chill in
its first of two shows opening for U2's Zooropa '93 road extravaganza. It would be
easy to write this audience off as lackadaisical, but within seconds of leaving the
stage, the Zooropa DJ spins Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust," and the entire
stadium thunders along in beat, instantly.
Back in the dressing room, the band mills about, somberly picking at food.
Abbruzzese already has a game plan for tomorrow: "I'm gonna lower the drum riser
so I can see the audience. I'm gonna connect with those people."
Within a few minutes, Vedder emerges upbeat and finds some American fans.
'I wish we'd played a club here," he tells them, signing some shirts. He and Beth
Liebling head out to the mixing platform to watch U2 with the rest of the band. Before
long, a cluster of super- and semi-supermodels position themselves just behind him,
clucking and whooping, taking pictures, trying to get his attention. Vedder remains
fixed on the spectacle ahead. Finally one of the models manages an introduction to
him. She speaks earnestly to him, shaking his hand. Vedder nods politely, turning
back to the show. Total time investment - three seconds.
Later the band rides the tour bus back to the hotel. Stuck in traffic, a crowd of Italian
fans discovers the bus and strains to look inside. Their expression is unmistakable.
"Oh," they seem to say, "it's the other band." But still they stare, as if looking inside
a fish-bowl. "Wish we'd played a club date here," says Vedder to no one in particular.
The conversation turns to Neil Young and the upcoming show with him in Dublin,
Ireland. The band is soon talking about its next chance to jam with Young on
"Rockin' in the Free World" But even this venerable topic is soon exhausted And still
the Roman faces stare inside the windows of the stalled bus. It's unsettling. It is as if
Zoo TV has gone off the air, and the test pattern is Pearl Jam.
Until about a month before its release, the album was going to be titled Five Against
One. The name comes up during a meeting in a hotel room in Rome as the band
approves the final mixes of the record. There are already rumblings from the record
company. Can you raise Eddie's vocals? And there is the issue of video. Can we get
a decision on a director? And the press interviews. You gotta do some. The answers
to the questions are Not really, No and Later. Decisions swirl around them hourly, but
Pearl Jam are intent on doing it their own way. The album title feels appropriate. The
phrase comes from a new song, "Animal."
"For me, that title represented a lot of struggles that you go through trying to make a
record," says Gossard, who picked out the phrase. "Your own independence - your
own soul - versus everybody else's. In this band, and I think in rock in general the art
of compromise is almost as important as the art of individual expression. You might
have five great artists in the band, but if they can't compromise and work together,
you don't have a great band. It might mean something completely different to Eddie.
But when I heard that lyric, it made a lot of sense to me."
It's now Day 2 in Rome. Vedder sits at the top of the stadium bleachers on this
blazingly hot afternoon in July. He wears a tourist shirt that says I x GRUNGE. He is
rather anonymous in this country, and it agrees with him. "The whole success thing, I
feel like everybody else in the band is a lot happier with it than me," he says.
"Happy-go-lucky. They kind of roll with it. They enjoy it, even. I can't seem to do that.
It's not that I think I'm better than it. I don't know. I'm just not that happy a person."
He shrugs. "I'm just not. What I enjoy is seeing music, getting to watch. Watching
Neil Young. Or I get to watch Sonic Youth from the side of the stage. That's what's
been nice for me. "Music is an incredibly powerful medium to deliver a story by. But
the best thing is, you have to have volume. You're supposed to play it loud. I would
do anything to be around music. You don't even have to pay me."
Vedder confesses having some recent difficulties in writing for Pearl Jam. As
Gossard had pointed out earlier, the other band members now call him their
spokesperson, and with that comes a certain Eddie ethic. Vedder works hard with
manager Kelly Curtis to keep ticket prices low and to police the powerful promotion
machine of Sony Music. But therein lies the grand contradiction. The artists he most
admires are the very ones who have turned their backs on the machinery of big-time
rock - like Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye of Fugazi.
And Vedder, the guy who never slept, still doesn't sleep. "Never have," he says.
"Never have, and now I really don't. I have that spasm thing. I wake up and go,
'Aaarrrgh.' I'll get up and start pacing. I'll walk through a room, and the TV's on and
my face is on, and I start to freak out. I want to call a friend and say- 'Did I lose my
mind? I need perspective.' I talked with Henry Rollins one day. I said, 'Dude, I need
some perspective real quick.' And I really felt bad doing it. Because I was calling him
up for the same reason kids call me up."
You wonder, of course, if this is all part of Vedder's elaborate defense mechanism.
How can you attack the man who attacks himself? How can you doubt the credibility
of a man who won an MTV Video Award for "Jeremy" and then told 50 million viewers,
"If it wasn't for music, I would have shot myself in front of that classroom." For all his
open-wound honesty, there are many mysteries that Vedder still clings to. Even a
close band mate like McCready says: "No, I don't know if we've ever had that big,
bonding talk yet. Our relationship is still growing. We'll probably have it sometime
soon."
Asked about his childhood, Vedder plays it close to his chest. He tells an anecdote
about waiting tables back in Chicago. He tells of moving to San Diego and buying
beanbag chairs and his first bad stereo. He tells of bootlegging shows, something he
still does with a pocket-size microrecorder. All perfect sound bites for populist myth
making, but when confronted with questions about his childhood, Vedder becomes
vague. Of his earliest memories, he says only "I'm confused. I'm mixed up about
everything. I don't know what's happening now."
He still answers fan mail, though less frequently, and tour manager Eric Johnson
sometimes visits the Seattle office late at night to find Vedder calling back troubled
fans. But as Vedder had carefully told one fan in San Francisco after a show: "I'm
really not in your head, I'm not thinking all your private thoughts." The fan had looked
so disappointed. Vedder, in turn, has learned the public effect of writing well about
damaged personalities.
'I was surprised and a little upset that so many people did relate," says Vedder.
"Everyone's fucked up. Actually, now I understand those religious channels more.
Everybody needs something." He pauses for a long time. "There should be no
messiahs in music The music itself, the music, I don't mind worshiping that. I've done
that. And with that comes a little bit of admiration for the people who make it - or awe
or whatever - but I never asked for nose hair from Pete Townshend."
Back in Rome, on the second day, Pearl Jam offer a combative performance. "I'll
meet you back here at a club next time," Vedder says, to sprinkled applause. Later,
he begins to goad them, telling them their stadium was built for soccer, not music.
And below a neon Zoo TV sign, he playfully taunts further "Are we animals?" Let it
never be said that Vedder doesn't enjoy the fine taste of the hand feeding him. His
green T-shirt contains today's gaffer-taped message: PAUL IS DEAD. (Look up
Bono's real name.) The set closes with Vedder donning a huge fly mask, dancing as
if caught in a web. It is Pearl Jam's own lo-fi answer to Zoo TV. Not many fans here
get it, but one who does is Bono, who watches curiously from the pit.
Bono responds later that night, onstage. "So you can't play music in a soccer
stadium," he muses. 'Well, if you do, it better be good music . . ." But before the set
is over, he hails Pearl Jam as "a great rock & roll band" And Vedder, Liebling and
Ament will stay up all night with Bono and the Edge, talking passionately in a diner,
debating the issue of the day, the emotional exchange rate on success. And at 6
a.m., there are Vedder and Ament exchanging hugs with Bono on an empty Roman
street, arriving at the bus just in time for the trip to Dublin.
"I got all my questions answered," Ament confides. In the course of the dates with
U2, he had discussed the hugeness vs. purity issue with all four members of that
band. "And they basically told us this: We used to be like you. We used to be
anti-anti... We used to be angry. But we love technology, like you love what you love.
Next tour we might only play 3,000- seat halls. But this is where we are today. Ten
years from now, you tell us where you are.' "
Today In Dublin, the day before Pearl Jam play before an estimated 50,000 at nearby
Slane Castle, Abbruzzese stands and watches as 30 or so young Dubliners sing
resolutely to street-busking versions of "Black" and "State of Love and Trust."
Abbruzzese is grinning, handing out flowers on Grafton Street, playing with street
kids. "Gone is the bleachy sunshine of Italy. In its place is rain . . . pale faces . . .
romantic beery arguments in the street . . it feels like home.
Elsewhere, there are rumors that McCready has fallen off the wagon, running naked
through the streets of Dublin late the night before. McCready, shopping for bootleg
tapes today, does not confirm or deny this behind his reflector shades. 'I love this
place," he says.
Backstage the next day at the show, there are few of the trappings of big-time rock.
No open bar, no stereo rack pumping psych-up music, no bodyguards, no
supermodels. Just Vedder talking about why he couldn't care less.
"I'm embarrassed for some of the 'veterans' of music," he says. "They had their
original [macho] image, and they're still hanging on to it. The sex thing, they're still
working it. This-dude-looks-like-your- grandpa kind of thing - it's so silly, it kinda
makes you sick. These guys are still using the ancient version of what's sexy, the
bikinis and tongues. It's over. I relate to the people that are coming up now, and that's
not there, that's long gone."
Vedder's relationship with Liebling, a writer, is the strongest one in his life. They've
been together nine years. Perhaps soon, he says, they'll be married. And when it's
time to start a family, he predicts he'll be a devoted parent. He cites Michael Jordan's
father, then still alive, as a perfect example. "The ultimate parent is if they've made a
decision to have kids, that means they're going to give someone else a chance, and
they're going to do whatever they can to boost that kid up so he can really shine," he
says. "I feel like, in the last 20 years, that's been drained out of parenthood. I'm into
real life. I'm into getting the most out of real life."
Sitting now in the shadow of the 200-year-old Slane Castle, the hazy sun shining on
his face, Vedder is asked about his own youth. What about his father?
"I never knew my real dad," he says. "I had another father that I didn't get along with,
a guy I thought was my father. There were fights and bad, bad scenes. I was kind of
on my own at a pretty- young age. I never finished high school."
He was Eddie Mueller then. After moving briefly to San Diego, both his parents had
returned to Chicago. Vedder, who subsequently took his mother's maiden name, had
stayed behind to pursue his career in music. There was a rough goodbye to his
stepfather. They haven't spoken since. Later, Vedder was living in San Diego when
his mother visited from Chicago with some important news for him.
"She came out with the specific purpose," he says, "to tell me that this guy wasn't
my father. I remember at the time I was like 'I know he's not my father, he's a fucking
asshole.' And she said, 'Oh, Eddie, he's really not your father.'"
"At first I was pretty happy about it, then she told me who my real dad was. I had
met the guy three or four times, he was a friend of the family, kind of a distant friend.
He died of multiple sclerosis. So when I met him, he was in the hospital. He had
crutches, or maybe he was in a wheelchair."
Vedder plays with his ripped-out shoe. Somehow, a half-world away, the words flow
easily as he recalls, as he puts it, "the day I found out."
"There was a piano in the room," he goes on, "and I remember really wishing I knew
how to play a happy song. I was happy for about a minute, and then I came down. I
had to deal with the fact that he was dead. My real father was not on this earth. I had
to deal with the anger of not being told sooner, not being told while he was alive. I
was a big secret. Secrets are bad news. Secrets about adoption, any of that stuff. It's
got to come out, don't keep it. It just gets bigger and darker and deeper and uglier
and messy.
"Musically, I tried to think if I had a goal, what it was, and I think more than anything
it was to leave something for my kid, if I had one to listen to. I'm actually a junior. My
real name is something-something the third." Fans can find it in the song credits to
"Alive," on Ten.
Vedder's biological father, it turned out, was a musician himself, an organist- vocalist
who sang in restaurants. Once Vedder knew the truth about his heritage, other
relatives stepped forward.
"There were all these things they wanted to say" he recalls, "like 'That's where you
got musical talent,' and I was like 'Fuck you.' At the time, I was 14 or 15, I didn't even
know what the fuck was going on. I learned how to play guitar, saved all my money
for equipment, and you're telling me that's where it came from? Some fucking
broken-down old lounge act? Fuck you."
Vedder says this quietly, but time has barely mellowed his emotions. It's no surprise
that Quadrophenia, the Who's 1973 classic tale of disaffected English youth, was
Vedder's Catcher in the Rye. (He once told an interviewer, "I should be sending Pete
Townshend cards for Father's Day.") Music saved his life, he says, but the turbulence
of Vedder's youth still fuels the music. It's a painful circle. "My folks are very proud of
me now, he says. "And again, I'm thankful that they've given me a lifetime's worth of
material to write about."
(Recently, a meeting with his real father's cousin left Vedder with a sense of closure.
"The strange thing," he says, "is that there are so many similarities between my
father and I. He had no impact on my life, but here I am. I look just like him. People
in my family - they can't help it - they look at me like I'm a replacement. That's where
'Alive' comes in." He pauses. "But I'm proud of the guy now. I appreciate my heritage.
I have a very deep feeling for him in my heart.")
Have fun with it. You hear the phrase often around Vedder. He rarely has a response.
Have fun with it. Certainly, his rock dreams are coming true: to sing "Masters of War"
at the Bob Dylan tribute concert last year, to sing with the Doors at the Rock & Roll
Hall of Fame and to finally meet his hero Pete Townshend. But to have fun with it, it
seems, would put him one step closer to those rock stars in the magazines, the
ones flipping their hair, the ones who caused him to write Pearl Jam's defining
statement in "Blood" - "It's my bloooood."
It's way too late to be Fugazi, and Vedder knows it. Still, Pearl Jam offer fans a
challenge: Bootleg us if you can, take our album, pass the music around, don't glorify
us. Vedder long ago traded away the brown thrift-store jacket given him by Gossard,
the one remade and marketed by the fashion industry as a $1000 piece of grunge
wear. The band no longer condones stage diving for safety reasons, and even
Vedder's scaffold climbing appears to be history. He offers an interesting perspective:
"That climbing happened out of me saying 'Look this is how extreme I feel about this
situation. This is how fucking intense I'm taking this moment.' You can't do that for
long, because what they really want to see is, they want you to chop your fucking
arm off, hold up your arm, wave it around spewing blood, and believe me, if you did
that, the crowd would go fucking ballistic. You only get four good shows like that,
though. Four good shows, and then you're just a torso and a head, trying to get one
of your band mates to give you one last hurrah and chop your head off. Which they
probably wouldn't do, which would really be hell.
"But," Vedder says with a laugh, "they'd say, 'Sing from your diaphragm, at least you
still have that going for you.' "
THE DUBLIN AUDIENCE IS FIERCE awake, fueled by anger and ale. Van Morrison
performs to the hometown crowd, and he is greeted like a beloved uncle. He is
offstage only a few minutes before the audience, in anticipation of Pearl Jam, surges
to the front. "I love some kind of pressure in the air," says McCready, peering out at
the boiling mass of Irish fans. "Some kind of weirdness in the crowd, good or bad.
That's what we thrive on."
Pearl Jam take the stage, and the crowd packs closer, straining the barriers. It's
brutal down in front, and security is already pulling the semiconscious out one by
one, before a note is even played. Vedder walks on in a gorilla mask, pulls it off and
hurls himself into "Why Go."
It is a crowd happily perched on the edge of danger and today they get the best out
of Pearl Jam. Onstage, the band is narrowly missing each other as they all, in
different ways, leap for joy, pogoing and twirling, just missing each other's skulls with
the instruments. The volatile crowd does not scare Vedder; he's seriously singing to
those serious faces listening to him the way he listened to the Who - with their whole
lives attached. He stands on the edge of the stage, just watching them, and turns to
share it with Liebling, who catches it all on Super 8.
It's the show they've been waiting for, a glimpse of the future. "If it all ends tomorrow"
Abbruzzese says, "I will be the happiest fucking gas-station attendant you ever saw."
Best of all, Pearl Jam are no longer a band with only one very, very big album to their
credit. "There's no school to go to for some of the weird shit that happens," says
Vedder. "The fucking weirdness of it all. But some of these guys, they can help out
a bit. Bob Dylan's advice was 'Go to Dublin.' I wrote him a postcard today."
"It said, 'Made it.' "