Since his earliest days as a popular high school actor and his years as the
best networker" in the San Diego music scene, Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder has
reinvented himself as the voice of an alienated generation. A Rolling Stone
special report:
"Welcome to the REM album release party," Eddie Vedder deadpans from
the stage of Seattle's Showbox theater - "and the Pearl Jam reunion tour."
It's Sept. 14, 1996, and Pearl Jam are preparing to launch the world
tour for their new album "No Code". This warm up club gig should be Vedder's
ideal venue. Having long professed disdain for his arena-rock superstardom,
he faces a crowd of just 800 or so locals in his adoptive hometown - an
audience from which journalists, low-level PR flacks, photographers and
other industry hangers-on have been barred. It's a hand-picked crowd of the
faithful who have waited a long time for this moment. Apart from scattered
dates on their aborted 1995 tour, Pearl Jam have not sustained a tour in
more than two years. The scene is set, then, for a legendary show - the
band's triumphant return.
You'd never guessed it from Vedder's scowl. "Have you heard the new
album?" he askes in his husky baritone. The applause is scattered. "Well,"
Vedder mumbles, "you're about to hear it again." With that Pearl Jam edges
into "Sometimes," the fragile ballad that opens "No Code". "Seek my part,"
Vedder sings, pushing out the lyrics in a pained rasp. "Devote myself/My small
self/Like a book amongst the many on a shelf."
The muted start seems to confuse the audience of mosh-minded
twentysomethings, who are pumped for some of Vedder's girder-climbing
theatrics. The fans are out of luck. Even when the band mambers kick into
"Hail, Hail" - the closest song to a classic Pearl Jam arena anthem on "No
Code" - they seem determined to thwarth the song's urgent, driving momentum.
Bassist Jeff Ament, famous for his flying leaps, stands rooted to his spot
on the stage. Lead guitarist Mike McCready tries a few flailing guitar-hero
moves, but when his band mates fail to respond, he, to, sinkd into sullen
torpor. Stone Gossard, who hasn't bothered to remove his glasses for this
gig, works away at his guitar with all the passion of a man digging a ditch.
and drummer Jack Irons keeps a steady, if downbeat, pace.
Then there's Vedder himself. Planted at the mike, he delivers he songs
witha throwaway offhandedness that borders on contempt. "This is the part of
the show we call the human jukebox," he announces before Pearl Jam dip into
the sure-fir crowd pleasers from "Ten", "Vs", and "Vitalogy". The versions
of "Even Flow," "Alive," and "Whipping" sound like the leaden workings of a
cover band. And Vedder seems to know it. "Well," he says, before quitting
the stage, "this was almost worth leaving the house for."
Lately, it seems, it seems Eddie Vedder is searching harder and harder
for reasons to leave the house. While the four other members of Pearl Jam
are regularly spotted in Seattle's nightclubs and restaurants, Vedder
sightings are few and far between. And not just on the streets of Seattle.
Shunning interviews, refusing to make videos and playing truncated tours
because of his unwinnable war with Ticketmaster, he now keeps a low profile
in the city, living in his large house in West Seattle, in an enclave of
upper-middleclass homes on a tree-lined slope that overlooks Puget Sound.
The house is patrolled by two bodyguards who check out even the Domino's
Pizz boy who delivers Vedder's weekly small pepperoni and sausage pie.
Fearful of reported death threats, hounded by fans who have gleaned his
other address (in the city's Capital Hill district), the singer has
surrounded himself with a handful of fellow rock celebrities who are
unwilling to speak of him to journalists, even off the record. On the rare
occasions when Vedder does talk to reporters, he uses the opportunity merely
to bemoan endlessly, the burdens of his fame and success.
Publicly, Pearl Jam have always decribed themselves as a democracy
where all five members form a consensus on decision making. But sources
close to the band say the Vedder is the group's unquestionable leader and
that while artistically, all five band members contribute, the singer sets
the agenda for the band's extracurricular, anti-rock-industry crusades.
"Other band members look to him to make decisions," confirms a confidential
source at the band's label, Epic. "Everybody gets input, but Eddie leads the
way." Another source states the case more strongly, calling Vedder a
"control freak" around whom Pearl jam personel "walk on eggshells." It's an
interband dynamic that resulted not only in charismatic figures but also
because of the temperament of his fellow band mates.
Unpretentious journeymen musicians gratful for their success after
years of laboring in pre-Pearl Jam obscurity, Vedder's band mates are
affable types who are unlikely to rock the boat with their volatile singer.
Jeff Ament, a barber's son raised in small-twom Montanna, still lives in the
same apartment in Seattle wher he lived before the band's breakthrough.
Stone Gossard, a Seattle native and son of a local lawyer, has cofounded a
small record label, Loosegroove, which his sister Shelly helps run. Mike
McCready, a local boy who began playing in bands in junior high school, has
come closest to falling prey to the occupational hazards of rock stardom: He
did stint at Minneapolis clinic for booze prblems, in 1994, but is by all
accounts now clean and sober. He's also part owner of a popular Seattle pool
hall, the Garage. New drummer Jack Irons is an old ally of Vedder's, the man
responsible for hooking the singer up with Pearl Jam in the first place, and
is thus unlikely to challenge the singer's authority over the band.
Vedder's authority was clear to all in 1994, when drummer Dave
abbruzzese was abruptly fired from the band. "Dave was too much of a rock
star," says a source close to the band. "He was giving cover-story
interviews to drumming magazines. He was happy, he was achieving his dream.
That bugged the fuck out of Eddie. I witnessed eddie drawing mustaches on
ave's face on the cover of Modern Drummer." Some sources say that
Abbruzzese's ouster sent a message to other band members. "I think that once
again, it goes back to eddie and his very voltile personality," says the
source. "I think all the band mambers would feel like they're on their way
out too." Asked how seriously they take such a threat, this source says,
"Put it this way: Stone has his own label; Mike's working on another record;
Jeff has his band Three Fish."
From his earliest days in Pearl Jam, Vedder claimed that his goal was
to be a different kind of rock star. He would resist the temptations of
power, wealth and ego. The emphasis, he said, must be on the music - a
sentiment entirely in keeping with Seattle's punk-inspired, anti-commercial
ethos.
Vedder seemed to be a ready-made poster boy for the disaffected grunge
generation: a disgruntled rebel whose agonized lyrics and raw-throated,
rageful singing sprang from an unhappy childhood and an alienatied and
lonely adolescence. In a wide-ranging series of interviews that he granted
Rolling Stone, in 1993, he shaped his myth as a reluctant star - a
highschool dropout turned surf-slacker whose ascent from humble beginnings
occured almost despite himself. This too, fit perfectly with the grunge
doctrine, which rejected the careerism and grsping ambitions of the
pondering 1980's hair-metal bands
But according to those who knew Vedder before his fame, the singer's
rise was hardly the result of happenstance. "He knows what the whole
business is about," says a friend from Vedder's days before he join Pearl
Jam. "He's not some kind of little lost soul who writes great songs." By
many accounts, Vedders' rise was a concerted effort that was propelled by
his flair for self-invention effort and self dramatization, his relentless
drive to be heard and steely determination to control his public image. "He
is  master manipulator of the people and situations around him," says a
source at Epic. And he's a master amnipulator of his own image."
It's an image - and indentity - that is often obscured by the vagaries
of Vedder's parentage. He was born Edward Louis Severson III, in 1964, in
Evanston, IL, the son of a musican father who divorced his wife before
Vedder was 2 years old. Raised believing that his stepfather was his
natural father and that his mother's three other sons by her new husband
were his full brothers, Vedder was, for the first two decades of his life,
known as Eddie Mueller.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times eight days after Kurt
Cobains suicide was dicovered, Vedder talked about his own depressive
nature, describing how as a teenager, thoughts of suicide visited him "as
often as mealtime...I was all alone - except for music." Declining to even
name his high school or even discuss his fellow students, he said, "They
didn't treat me well."
But classmates from San Dieguito High School, which Vedder attended
after his family's migration to San Diego in the mid-70's, paint a picture
that stands in stark contrst to the singer's recollections.
"He was very popular," recalls Annette Szymanski-Gomez, a friend who
was a grade ahead of Vedder. "He was outgoing. He'd go out of his way to be
nice to everyone." Another classmate concurs: "He was so nice to everyone
and took time to chat. That's why I don't understand this stuff about
himbeing miserable. He didn't seem miserable to me! He was so doggone cute."
"All the girls had a crush on him," says another friend who fondly recalls
engaging in wholesome teenage fun with "Liitle Eddie Muller" as he'd
affectionately dubbed because of his diminutive stature. "We'd play
football, climb around this abandoned building. I remember going to his
house and hearing him play guitar with his best friend."
The Muellers lived is a solid middle-class neiborhood in the San Diego
suburb of Encinitas, CA. "It was a nice house," says one friend. "It had two
floors. They had a piano. It was not at all a deprived childhood. I remember
there was a darling picture of Eddie as a kid. He was about 3 years old. His
mother said he'd been in a TV commercial."
This early brush with show buisiness was only the beginning of Eddie
Mueller's youthful training as an actor. Though he was known to be musical,
Mueller's primary identity was as the school's thespian. He got his start as
a high-school actor in the chorus of "Little Mary Sunshine". He soon
graduated to leading roles and appeared in "Bye Bye Birdie", "Butterflies
Are Free", "Outward Bound" and "The Wirld of Carl Sandburg". In his final
year, Mueller was voted most talented for his acting skills.
"He was just a wonderful actor, really exceptional," says a former
drama classmate. "His idol was Dustin Hoffman." In Mueller's junior year, he
was cast in a school play with Liz Gumble, a student one grade behind him.
The two began dating, in March 1981, and became by accounts inseparable.
When Gumble went away for a brief vaction with her family, Mueller expressed
his grief with typical theatricality. "He wore her scarf wrapped around his
neck every day till she came back," says a classmate.
Mueller also found a close friend in his theater teacher, the late
Clayton Liggett. The drama coach became something of a mentor and surrogate
father to Mueller, who, friends say, did not get along with his stepfather.
"I remember when Eddie was in school, he would come over to our house quite
often and talk to Clayton about personal things," Liggestt's widow told the
San Diego Union Tribune in 1995. "I don't know if Eddie was looking for a
father figure, but I do know he needed someone to talk to, and Clayton was
always there for him."
One former calssmate surmises that Vedder is "embellishing" his past as
part of a "persona" he's developed as spokesman for alienated and
dysfunctional X Generation. "I don't think he's being untruthful," she says
in Vedders defense. "I just think people don't understand that you don't
have to be this miserable charater in real life. I feel it's an art, an
ability to be the charater who sings these torchered songs."
But if Eddie Mueller's high school years were less fraught with misery
than the singer has claimed, there is little doubt that he did suffer an
emotional blow in his senior year when Liz Gumble broke up with him. Friend
recall that Vedder was inconsolable after the breakup. "Things fell apart
for him in senior year," says a friend. "He dropped out of theater
productions and someone else had to take over, so I know it had to have been
serious, because he took the theater really seriously." Mueller left San
Dieguito High shortly before graduation and moved back to the Chicago area
to be with his family. he evntually completed his high school equivalency
degree. It was also around this time that "little Eddie Mueller," perhaps in
a gesture of emancipation from his stepfather, took his mother's maiden name
and became Eddie Vedder.
Though Pearl Jam's music is closely associated with the Seattle scene
and the early 90's grunge explosion that helped carry the band to the top of
the charts, Eddie Vedder's musical roots and careerist amitions actually lie
in the idyllic beach community of La Mesa, CA, a suburb of San Diego to
which he moved in 1984 after two years in the midwest.
By then, Vedder's theatrical aspirations had been supplanted by his
ambitions as a singer songwriter. a childhood fan of the bombastic rock
operas of the Who, Vedder became a constant presence at San Diego rock
shows, where he spirited in a tape recorder, amassing a vast collection of
bootlegs. Working low-end jobs as a hotel security guard and
petrolium-station attendant, he penned a large number of original songs
while working the grave yard shift but did not take his talents public until
late 1986, when he responded to an ad in th San Diego reader. A Duran
Duran-influnced rock band, Bad Radio, was looking for a singer to help take
them to the more-alternative, Love and Rockets direction. Vedder submitted a
homemade audition demo, which included his cover of Bruce springsteen's
brooding "Atlantic City".
At a live audition, Vedder sang a number of cover songs including the
Rolling Stones' "Paint it Black". Three singers auditioned that day. "One
was wasn't too bad," says Valery Saifudinov, who ran the rehearsal studio
and was present for the audition. "But Eddie had something from the inside,
some energy. Everybody agreeded that Eddie was the choice." Only after
Vedder got the gig did his band mates learn that their new singer had a
cache of finished songs. "We were blown away," says bassist dave Silva.
A Bad Radio demo cassette from 1989 reveals the band trying to mix
bland, radio-friendly rock with the funk-inflected grooves of the Red Hot
Chili Peppers. Vedder sings a thinner, higher register than he's known for
today - that is until the lkast song, a version of "Better Man", which would
evenually appear on Pearl Jam's "Vitalogy" and become one of the band's
biggest radio hits. Here, Vedder's vocal manner emerges full-blown: the
testosterone-heavy, David Clayton-Thomas-style baritone that would become
his signature. Onstage Vedder's early dramatic training came in handy.
Constantly fingering his long mane of hair, grimacing, pounding his mike
stand against the floor. Vedder brought all this theatrical know-how to
bear. "Eddie's always been a great performer," says his San Diego friend
Mike Aitken, whose parents were Vedder's landlord for four and a half years.
"I'd be at shows, and people would be going 'Wow, check this guy out!'
They may or may not have like the music, but everybody was just like, 'whoa
this guy's good.'"
If Vedder was the focal point of the band onstage, he was also the
focal point offstage. Though hired simpley as the group's singer, he quickly
seized the reins of the operation, becoming not only Bad Radio's chief
songwriter but their manager, booker, and chief promoter. He xeroxed
elaborate handmade publicity fliers and designed the artwork for the band's
demo cassette, which he shilled to local radio stations. "It was his deal,"
says Marco Collins, one of the San Diego DJs who used to field Vedder's
calls. "He was thye one trying to plug the shows. He was the one
hustling."
Vedder was by all accounts, a tirless hustler. "Eddie was constantly
promoting that band, trying to make it into something," says San Diego club
promoter Tim Hall. Steve Saint, a veteran of the city's rock scene, recalls
Vedder's drive: "90 percent of guys in garage bands are sitting around,
waiting to be discovered, waiting for some racord agent to knock on their
door. Eddie didn'tv take that attitude. He was constantly trying to put his
band in some place where it could be seen." Another San Diego music-scene
source says, simply, "he was the best networker in the biz."
Vedder's main base of operations was the Baccanal a local club where
rising alternative acts played (and which would be later memorialized on "No
Code"'s "Mankind"). Vedder was a constant presence in his signature green
shorts and combat boots. "He would load equipment for free just so he could
meet the Chili Peppers or meet so-and-so," says Saint. The Baccanal's
then-manager, Billy Burhrkuhl, recalls: "He'd roadie, stagehand, stick
stamps on the mailing list. He knew he wanted to be in music and was focused
on where he wanted to go..Hewas asking me questions about contracts, about
what's the best way to get signed, how do you find a booking agent."
"[Vedder's] seen everything," confirms another San Diego scenester.
Hanging backstage, Vedder "saw every single rock star in San Diego when
they were on their way up," says one source. Vedder's ability to ingratiate
himself with big-name bands was legendary. The Clash's Joe Strummer was one
of many rock stars whom Vedder won over. He spent a night drinking beer and
smoking cigarettes with the guitarist. On another occasion, Vedder and
Silvatraveled to Los Angeles to see ex-Police drummer Stewart Copeland's band
play a club show. Afterwards the two tracked Copeland down as he left
through the kitchen and managed to corner the drummer for a long
conversation. Red Hot Chili Peppers Anthony Kiedis, Flea and then-drummer
Jack Irons were particularly susceptible to Vedder's charm. After meeting
him at a gig, the band invited Vedder along on a backpacking expedition to
Yosemite.
Some visiting rock stars however were immune to Vedder's ovations.
Fellow surfer John Von Passenheim remembers the night when Bad Radio opened
for alternative darlings the Lemonheads. "He got introduced to Evan Dando
and said, "Look at the flier I made for the show." Evan looked at it, said
"Oh," dropped it on the floor and walked away." But such snubs were rare.
"[Vedder's] got a personality where you don't feel threatened by him at
all," says Nick Wagner, another longtime San Diego friend. "He'd just pick
up an amp and strike up a conversation."
Even Vedder's romantic life dovetailed nicely with his musicla
ambitions. His girlfriend,(and now wife) Beth Liebling, a producer of
Chicago's exclusive North Shore, was well-connected to the industry. While
attending classes at San Diego State Univerity, she booked shows on campus
and commuted on weekends to Los Angeles, where she had an internship at
Virgin Records. Eventually, Vedder and Liebling would help promote Red Tape,
a weekly gothic-rock gathering at Winter's, a local SDSU hagout. "They
certainly saw th music business from all sides," recalls Jay Thomas, a
former boss of Liebling's. "They booked the bands, they paid the bands and
they had to get out there and market their facilities...They knew exactly
what was going on." "Between her and Eddie," says one San Diego club
veteran,"they knew everybody."
One of Vedder's closest confidants was rehearsal-studio head
Saifudinov, formerly the leader of his own rock band in Russia in the
1960's. "We would talk for long hours after rehearsal," says Saifudinov,
whom Vedder lists on his liner notes for a Bad Radio demo as "mentor." "I'd
tell him about Europe, books, music, culture. Bring him some sort of sense
of humor. He was really interested. He knew that I started the first rock
band in Russia. We had a mutual sympathy for each other. I was 18 or 19
years older than him, but it didn't feel like it." According to Saifudinov,
the roots of Vedder's current anti-rock-star stance may originate in certain
long post-rehersal rap sessions. "I would say to him, 'First you're a
musican. You're a songwriter. That's what counts. any idiot can put a salami
in his pants and pose. Or become an asshole because you have money.'"
Meanwhile, Vedder worked to establish Bad Radio as the band with the
social conscience. He booked the group at an array of benefit concerts,
including a local Amnesrty International benefit and a rain-forest
fund-raiser. And Vedder had a song for every occasion. "His songs took a
slice of life - either it was a homeless guy or some kind of racist
situation," says Saint. "So when the oppertunity came up, [Vedder] would
always jump at the chance to do something - and [he'd] usually have a song
that would amtch the cause." Alive-performance videotape of Bad Radio from
those days shows Vedder announcing from the stage, "Here's one I like. This
one's about the homeless."
Vedder didn't confine his activism to the Bacchanal stage. During a San
Diego City Council meeting on low-income housing, he set up in the courtyard
with his acoustic guitar and sang Tracy Chapman's then-current social
anthem, "Talkin' Bout a revolution." On another occasion, he and Liebling
talked to a homeless man who expressed a wish to return to his native
Midwest. The pair bought the man a meal, brought him back to Liebling's
apartment, gave him use of the shower, clothed him, bought him a bus ticket,
then put him on a Grey hound home. Liebling documented the entire
transformation with a Polaroid camera. Vedder later brought the photographs
to the rehearsal studio and proudly showed them off to Saifudinov. Bad Radio
bassist Silva even recalls that Vedder kept one of the photos in front of
him while recording one of their demos - for inspiration.
According to some, Vedder's activist zeal drove a wedge between him and
the rest of Bad Radio. "Eddie got so pissed off," says Pierce Flynn, a
surfer friend of Vedder's. "He wanted to have them play a bunch of benefits
and social-activist stuff, and the band wanted to go other ways." But Silva
says it wasn't so much that they were opposed to Vedder's activism but that
he kept them in the dark about it: "He wouldn't let us get close enough to
him to say we want to be a part of it. He'd just say, 'we're doing this show
and this benefit.' He'd go out at Thanksgiving and buy all this food, feed
homeless people. He'd tell us afterwards, and we'd be like, 'Oh my God, we
would have helped.' He didn't really let us know what he was thinking." And
there were other problems between the band and its singer. "We were on a
different level," Silva admits. "He had already surpassed us in terms of
dedicating his whole life to music."
In late 1989, three years after answering Bad Radio's ad in the "San
Diego Reader", Vedder invited Saifudinov to Bad Radio's headlining gig at
the Bacchanal. "Afterwards we were having a party," Saifudinov recalls.
"That's when Eddie sat with me and said, 'I'm leaving the band' I said,
'Why? What's going on?' He said, 'I just have to move on. I'm trying to go
and do things.'"
Vedder's next stop was Los Angeles. Liebling had landed a job at Virgin
Records, where Vedder became a fixture. By moving to L.A., Vedder had
managed to put himself at the epicenter of the West Coast music business.
Ironically, his destiny - and the entire future of rock music in the 1990s -
was taking shape several hundred miles north in Seattle.
Five years earlier, around the time that Vedder hooked up with Bad
Radio, the Seattle "scene" existed simpley as a close-knit handful of bands
that played at tiny venues in warehouses and the backs of taverns. Among
these groups was the grunge-rock outfit Green River, featuring the two core
members who would founf Pearl Jam: guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff
Ament. Green River was an unlikely blend of musicians, since Ament and
Gossard made no secret of their commercial aspirations; lead singer Mark
Arm, later of Mudhoney, made no secret of his contempt for the mainstream.
"We were five guys playing five different things," Arm recalls. "It worked
for a while, and then it didn't."
When it stopped working, Gossard and Ament split off and formed Mother
Love Bone, a screechy glam outfit whose sound owed much to the slick,
radio-friendly vamps of L.A.-based cock rock. According to some, the
crediblity gap that plagued Pearl Jam's early years can be traced back to
this period. "Mark Arm went off to found the "cool" band, [Mudhoney]," says
a longtime member of the Seattle music industry. "Stone and Jeff formed the
"uncool" band." Mother Love Bone was duly signed by PolyGram Records,
becoming one of the first Seattle bands of its generation to land a
major-label deal. But in March 1990, a few months before the bands debut
album was released, singer Andrew Wood died of an accidental heroin overdose
on the eve of a scheduled tour.
Gossard and Ament moved quickly to form a new outfit, recruiting
guitarist Mike McCready, who had been playing since his early teens in the
band Shadow. Like his new band mates, McCready had roots in commercial rock.
In the late 1980s he'd moved to L.A. with Shadow in a bid for stardom. After
a yearlong stint in the city, where he had worked as a record-store clerk,
the band returned, unsigned, to Seattle, and soon broke up. McCready
disillusioned, had given up guitar, cut his hair and applied himself to the
teachings of the ultraright-wing former Republican senator from Arizona,
Barry Goldwater. But after returning to playing guitar in a new band,
McCraedy was spotted by Gossard who was impressed by the guitarist's
explosive lead work and asked him to join his as-yey unnamed band.
With Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron filling in on drums, the
proto-Pearl Jam band recorded a handful of instrumentals that were built
around Gossard's brawny guitar riffs but lacked vocals. To fill that gap,
the band turned to former Red Hot Chili Peppers' drummer Jack Irons, who
suggested a singer that the Chili Peppers had met in san Diego; an affable
dude who worked as a gofer at the Baccanal while fronting his own band, Bad
Radio. Irons agreed to pass along the Gossard demos to his San Diego friend.
Vedder had said the writing the lyrics and melody lines to Gossard's
demos marked a turning point in both his creative and personal lives. "I
started dealing with a few things that I hadn't dealt with," Vedder told
ROLLING STONE in 1991. "It was geat music - it was bringing things out of me
that hadn't been brought out."
The things he hadn't "dealt with" were events that dated back to the
earlt 80s, the day his mother revealed to him that the man whom he'd known
as a distant family friend was actually his biological father - a man whom
Vedder dimly recalled as a hospitalized multiple sclerosis victem who'd died
when Vedder was 13. Vedder had said that while listening to to Gossard's
tracks for a song entitles "Dollar Short", he felt longburied emotions
boiling up inside him: "Son sge said/Have I got a little story for you/What
you thought was your daddy/Was nothing but a.../While you were sitting home
alone at age 13/Your real daddy was dyin'...Sorry you didn't see him/But I'm
glad we talked." Vedder raced back to Liebling's apartment, where he dubbed
his vocals over the music, titles the song "Alive" and them sent the tape
with two other songs, off to Seattle.
While the individual members of Pearl Jam were seasoned veterans of
their respective local music scenes, the band itself upon forming in late
1990, was the defination of an overnight sensation - at least in Seattle.
Before flying from San Diego for his first face-to-face meeting with
the future members of Pearl Jam, Vedder asked only that they waste no time.
They didn't. From tha airport, the band members went strait to the rehearsal
studio. In five days, they wrote 11 songs. On the sixth, the group played
its first live show at a Seattle club billing itself as Mookie Blaylock,
after the then-New Jeresy Nets' point guard.
"I just remember hearing about this amazing, intense singer," says Kim
Warnick, lead singer and bassist for the Fastbacks and reining queen of
Seattle's punk-rock underground. "[The band was] getting lineups around the
block." But Warnick remembers that Mookie Blaylock (who changed their name
to Pearl Jam when the basketball player complained) were not popular with
Seattle's hip grunge elite. "From the beginning," she says, "they were
defined by their audience, which wasn't punk. They were the 'bogus' suburban
rock kids." Nor did it help that the band, complete with a major-label deal,
was being fronted by a singer who was airlifted in from outside the scene
where so many had toiled for so long in obscurity.
But Vedder, in a pattern that he had established in San Diego, moved to
inagratiate himself with the Seattle music clique. After a fastbacks show at
RKCNDY, he approached Warnick and showered her with praise. The next day,
Warnick received a fan letter, signed in glitter, by Vedder and Liebling.
Vedder has since tapped the Fastbacks to open several live shows for Pearl
Jam (including the current world tour), and warnick has become one of
Vedder's chief defenders. "It's actually real," she says of Vedder's broding
persona. "When he talks to you, it's like you're the only person in the
room. He leans close, and he's frowning and real intense."
Vedder was equally intense, if less voluble, in his early meetings
withe Epic record executives. "When I first met him, there was something
different about him," says a source who met Vedder at the label. "He was
tremendously enigmatic and charismatic." In their first meeting, Vedder
spoke little and kept his eyes fixed on his lap. He gave the impression of a
person "naive about the industry," according to one longtime Epic confidant
of Vedder's who was stunned to learn of the singer's past as a hustler in
the San Diego music scene. "If we wre being fooled," the source says,"I was
fooled as anyone."
Pearl Jam's debut album "Ten", which was released in August 1991,
barely registered pulse on the sales charts. A month later, Nirvana released
"Nevermind" and by January 1992, that album had landed at No. 1, ushering in
the age alternative. Pearl Jam were soon swept up in the mania for all
things Seattle. While Nirvana were reinventing punk for the 1990s, PearlJam
were infusing hard-riffing 70s radio rock with a personal feel, touching
themes of divorce, alienation and anger - all of it delivered by a singer
who seemed to embody the brooding fears and explosive rage felt by millions
of young people. Soon, both MTV and radio were playing "Alive" in heavy
rotation.
From the start, Pearl Jam were dogged by skeptics who saw the band as
little more than a cuddlier, more MTV-friendly version of the genuinely
anarchic and dangerous Nirvana. Among Pearl Jam's most vocal doubters was
Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, who decribed Pearl Jam as a "corporate, alternative
and cock-rock fusion," and bridled at comparisons between the two groups. "I
would love to be erased from y association with that band," Cobain told
ROLLING STONE in 1992, as Nirvana and Pearl Jam became mutual poster boys
for Seattle's grunge explosion.
Vedder, perhaps in reaction to such scathing criticism, seemed
determined to prove his alternative bona fides. As early as 1992, he
instituted an array of "alternative" promotions geared toward maintaining a
grass-roots connection with Pearl Jam's fans: a series of unadvertised
fan-club-only shows, live concert broadcasts distributed free to radio
stations, vinal albums releases a week before CDs and cassettes shiped to
stores, and moderate ticket prices. In the current documentry "Hype",which
details the commercial rise of the Seattle music scene, Vedder assumes the
role of grunge spokesman, the impassioned voice of the city's punk inspired
ethos: "If all this influence that is part of the country and this musical
scene has..if it doesn't do something with it...if [we] finally get to the
forefront and nothing comes of it, that would be a tragedy."
For Vedder, changing the industry meant setting himself, and his band,
in opposition to do it. Thwarting the conventional means of mass marketing,
he put an unprecedented ban on video and drastically restricted press
access. He has always claimed that these commercially risky moves were made
to prevent overexposure. But other suggest that Vedder's crusades actually
stem from his need to maintain rigid control over all aspects of Pearl Jam's
image - just as he had dome with Bad Radio. Vedder was incensed, for
instance, when a teen-music magizine ran outdated pinup shots of him that
he'd posed for a year earlier - one of the many indignities that would lead
to his press ban. He seethed when MTV put "Jeremy" into endless rotation,
robbing the song of its emotional power - a contributing factor to his ban
on videos. By this year, Vedder seemed leery of promotional efforts of even
the most innocuous kind. Prior to Pearl Jam's recent performance on Late
Shoe With David Letterman, Vedder personally dialed the show's host,
requesting that the appearance not be heavily promoted by the network.
To a generation reportedly suspicious of advertising and hype, Vedder's
prohibitions acted as the ultimate anti-commercial promotional tactic. In
1993, Pearl Jam's second album, "Vs", broke single-week record selling
950,000 copies its first week out and going on to sell 5.4 million according
to SoundScan. In 1994, Pearl Jam released "Vitalogy", which sold an
impressive 877,000 copies in it's debut week before achieving platinum
status five time over and establishing "Corduroy" and "Better Man" as
rock-radio staples.
Then came Ticketmaster.
Perhaps bolstered by Pearl Jam's success at rewriting the indusry's
rules for stardom, Vedder might have believed that changing the entrenched
ticketing indusrty was within his power. Today the Ticketmaster fight stands
as the band's most public defeat - and an example of Vedder's overreaching
himself. The seeds for the Ticketmaster feud were sown as early as 1992,
when Pearl Jam played a benefit concert in seattle and demanded that the
ticketing giant donate to charity $1 from the service fee that teh agency
adds to each ticket. The agency agreed, then slapped an extra $1 charge on
tickets. According to one source Vedder was furious at this personal
betrayal and began to talk about Ticketmaster "incessantly."
For Pearl Jam's 1994 tour in support of "Vitalogy", the band tried to
proceed without Ticketmaster but could not finf venues that did not have
exclusive agreements with the ticketing agency. The tour was scrapped - and
Pearl Jam's battles with Ticketmaster ratcheted into high gear. "They truly
felt ticketing in this country was monopolized and [that] live entertainment
was being held hostage by [Ticketmaster}," says Peter Schniedermeier,
co-founder of EMT Entertainment Network, the ticketing company that Pearl
Jam selected to handle their 1995 tour. "They felt they owed it to their
fans to fight."
And fight they did. In May 1994, the band precipitated a Justice
Department investigation into the alleged Ticketmaster monopoly. While it
was Pearl Jam's Ament and Gossard who testified before congress about the
alleged monopoly, those close to the band have never doubted that the fight
was Vedder's. Indeed, when the band lated shopped for an alternative
ticketing agent, Vedder was the lone band member present at the meeting with
ETM. "He was definitely out front," says Schniedermeier.
With tiny and unproven ETM at the helm, Pearl Jam went ahead with a
1995 summer tour, thus opening a Paradora's box of bureaucrstic, logistical,
security and climatic snafus. The tour began to unravel from Day 1. The
opening June 16 date in Boise, Idaho had to be scrapped - the state-run
facility required government approval to use an alternative ticketing system
- and moved to Casper, Wyo. At the second stop, Salt Lake City - where the
band was obliged to play an out-of-the-way outdoor venue - a bone-chilling
rain storm desended before the band even took stage. The concert was
canceled, and 12,000 fans were sent home.
Disaster also struck in Vedder's hometown of San Diego, where Pearl Jam
was slated to play at the Del Mar fairgrounds - at the same time as the
annual county fetsival. Overzealous cops, fearing that rowdy rock fans would
overrun fair goers, moved to have the two shows canceled. During a week of
back-and forth squabbling over then venue, Pearl Jam manager Kelly curtis
announced that the band would, if necessary, tour with Ticketmaster. "It's
time for the band to get back to doing what they do best," Curtis reasoned,
"making music and playing for their fans." But a few days later, an
impassioned Vedder called a San Diego radio station and overrode his
manager. "If it turns out that we can't feasibly tour without Ticketmaster,"
he said, "then we'll just go home and make albums."
The fight was clearly taking a toll on Vedder. On june 24, the singer
went to a local hospital, suffering from digestive problems. that
afternoon, he faced a crowd of 50,00 at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. He
made it through seven songs, then stopped to announce: "I just went through
the worst 24 hours of my life." With that, he walked offstage and did not
return. Later Vedder would privately balme his illness on food poisoning
from a room-service tuna-fish sandwich - an excuse that did little to
explain the cancellation of all the band's remaining tour dates. Most of the
shows were made up by the year's end, but the damage had already been done.
Reaction in the press to pearl Jam's scrapped tour was swift and
scathing - especially in cities left in the lurch by the cancellations. "For
a group that bellows so incessantly in favor of its fans," read a column in
the Austin American-Statesman, "Pearl Jam sure left a whole bunch of them
out in the cold, including the 25,000 people who went through a lot of
trouble to get tickets [to the local show]. Pearl Jam's reputation has been
damaged, the band's mystique punctured."
"Obviously, eddie is attuned to the evils of the buisness," adds the
manager of another multiplatinum rock act. "But how many of your fans really
give a fuck? The majority of them don't. They don't care if it's in venue
X,Y or Z, or what the ticket company is. They want to hear you play good
music." Even Pearl Jam's former allies in the Ticketmaster fight abandoned
Vedder's crusade. R.E.M., who had expressed support for Pearl Jam's
Ticketmaster fight in 1994, signed on with the ticketing agencyfor R.E.M's
1995 "Monster" world tour. "Idon't like Ticketmaster, but I am not going to
not tour," R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck told the Chicago Tribune. "I'm not
going to cripple my band because society is not run the way I like it."
The final blow to Pearl Jam came on July 5, 1995, when the federal
antitrust investigation of Ticketmaster was quietly dropped. Vedder has
never commented publicly on his defeat. But symptoms of new disillusionment
within the singer seemed appearent. Last Febuary Pearl Jam made their first
television appearance in two years at the Grammy Awards. Vedder, having
abandoned his grunge costume of tattered T-shirt, shorts and flannal shirt,
appeared at the ceremony in a knee-length black-leather coat and sunglasses.
After winning the night's first statuette, for Best Hard Rock Performance,
the singer took the opportunity not to thank fans for remaining loyal to the
band but to mumble that the honor "doesn't mean anything." The quip might
have been a clumsy attempt to play down the competitive nature of awards
shows. But to some viewers it came across as the steriotypical musings of arock star.
mong those who felt that way were his high school friends. "I get
angry with him when I see him on these awards shows," says one former drama
classmate, "and I see that horrible image he puts out." "I don't know what's
happened to him," says another former school mate. "He justseemed like some
Van Halener dude." Baccanal manager Billy Buhrkuhl was also watching that
night and did not recognize the singer he'd known back in San Diego. "If
you'd known him 10 years ago, you just wouldn't believe he'd ever say
anything like that. Back in the old days, Eddie was grateful for everything
and anything."
Evidently, Vedder's old friends wern't the only ones put off by his
performance that night - or Pearl Jam's endless crusades against their own
popularity. Fans' impatience with the band's near-invisible profile has
begun to affect sales. Released last september, "No Code" debuted at No. 1
but within two months had dropped out of the Top 20 - an ignominious fate
for a band whose previous three records were among the best sellers of this
decade. It's also a grimly ironic fate for a record that is the band's
finest, most mature work to date - a dazzlingly varied and assured
collection that ranges from Buddhist-inspired chants to glam-punk raves to
moody ballads.Still Pearl Jam have shown no symptoms of trying to goose up the CD's
sales: The group staunchly refuses to make a video and has rejected
virtually all requests for interviews. Indeed, when the Pearl Jam tour
arrived in late September at Randall's Island, in New York, Vedder
reiterated his resolve to boycott the press. Having caught wind of ROLLING
STONE's investigative efforts to throw light on his shadowy pre-Pearl Jam
past, the singer interrupted himself in the middle of the song "Who You Are"
to make a pointed announcement. "I know who I really am," he declared from
the stage. "It's a long story, and it won't fit...in a ROLLING STONE."
Vedder's stated aim in fighting the rock industry has been to keep the
emphasis on the music. On "No Code's" "Off He Goes" he sings "Nothings
changed but the surrounding bullshit."
But on the eve of Pearl Jam's current tour, which Vedder insisted
include only 12 statewide appearances, the "surrounding bullshit" seemed
finally to have eclipsed the music. "It's all caught up to them," says an
Epic staffer. "No band is bigger than the system, and consumers are
punishing them. Pearl Jam hurt themselves when they don't do things America
wants. If you only do 12 shows, you need to do videos to remind the country
what you look like."
Disenchantment with Pearl Jam's modus operandi is not confined to the
press and public. Two weeks before the launch of the band's current tour,
bassist Jeff Ament confided to a friend that he was dreading the coming road
trip: "I had so much more fun on the road with [his band] three fish."
Guitarist Gossard put it still more strongly. After promising to look up a
mutual friend when the tour reaches Europe in midfall Gosard added,
ruefully, "If we're still together by then."
That Vedder might leave the band is, sources say, an ever-present
threat that hangs over Pearl Jam and their management. Asked in a 1994
interview whether Vedder is tempted to run away, manager Curtis said, "I
believe he thinks about that every day." "I was really pushing Eddie to do
something he didn't want to do," says a source who worked with the band. "I
was told: 'Just don't push him too far, or he'll just go away.'" And that's
an eventuality that no one associated with Pearl Jam wants to contemplate.
"Pearl Jam without Eddie Vedder," says the source, "is Mother Love Bone with
a dead singer."
There's evidence to suggest that Vedder is reaching for grounding by
revisiting his pre-Pearl Jam past and reaffirming old loyalties. In 1995, he
arrived unexpectedly at the funeral of his old drama coach, Clayton Liggett.
After the service, he joined several old drama classmates at the house of
their former teacher, where they talked until 10 p.m. And lately he has been
dropping in unannounced on old san Diego basketball buddies who still find
Vedder the "down to earth" friend they knew in the old days. "He wanted to
go down to the park and play ball and drink some beers," said one. "It was
so wierd, because it was like he had never left."
Appearently, Vedder feels differently. "[When] I hang out with people
that I have missed," he told a reporter in a long rambling interview, "and
that I've been friend with before, that I'm looking forward to sharing
moments with like we used to have...it feels like I'm a child being eaten by
dingoes...I'm in conflict."
Trapped by his fame, alienated from his past, the one place that Vedder
does not seem to be in conflict is onstage before thousands of worshiping
fans. It's Sept. 16, 1996, two nights after Pearl Jam's listless
tour-opening gig at Seattle's Showbox theater, and the group is playing the
first of its large scale shows, at Seattle's Key Arena, a Ticketmastr venue
where the band has agreed to perform on the condition that the proceeds be
donated to charity. Thanks to Pearl Jam's Byzantine "alternative" ticketing
service system, the crowd has spent an hour outside while all 16,000 tickets
are passed through a bar code scanner.
Inside things aren't going much better. Working studiously at their
instruments, heads down, the band churns joylessly through the set list
while Vedder, spotlit beneath a crown-of-thorns-like circular structure
strung with colored lights, repeatedly extends his arms in a Christ-like
crucifixion pose.
It's clear from the pit of moshers down front that this crowd wants
nothing more than to rock out to its favorite Pearl Jam oldies. but Vedder
seems determined to thwart his fans, draining the show's energy with earnest
speeches between songs. "We didn't use a promoter," he announces. "I hate to
even mention it, but we do it all ourselves." Soon the music begins to seem
little more than a backdrop to Vedders speechifying, the fans little more
than a receptacle for Vedder's polemics.
That is, until late in the show, when Pearl Jam kick into "Alive". As
Gossard's and McCready's guitar lines churn and the singer leans into the
life-affirming chorus, a flannal-shirted mosher arrives at the edge of
stage. Vedder hauls the kid from the grip of security guards and onto the
stage, where the fan sinks to a sitting position, then tips over onto his
back. Vedder crouches and directs the song to the spread-eagle fan. "You're
still alive!" Vedder sings, adjusting his most famous lyric in a gesture of
inclusion that seems to strike at the heart of what Vedder has always said
Pearl Jam's music is all about. The band, looking on, throttles into high
gear as the fan rises and backs up to the drum riser. Vedder howls as the
kid charges the lip of the stage and launched himself in an arcing dive into
the pit. The crowd roars - and for the first time in more than a year, the
band and Vedder are playing in perfect sync, thrashing hard, exchanging
dumbstruck smiles.
Alive.