QUESTION: "How many members of Pearl Jam does it take to change a light bulb?" Answer: "Change?! Change? We're not gonna change for anyone! Do you hear me? Not for anyone." This joke, coming as it does from Pearl Jam lead singer Eddie Vedder, illustrates several points about him and his band. In the six years since they first exploded onto the scene, the members of Pearl Jam have earned a reputation for taking themselves too seriously, fighting huge corporations, and refusing--in general--to play by the rock-and-roll handbook. And while they've tried to change their angst-ridden image, that's a daunting task when you carry the burden of being branded the last great spokesmen of your generation.
The genesis of Pearl Jam can be traced back to the Seattle music scene of the mid-eighties, when guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament founded the hard-rocking Green River. The band recorded an EP and an album, Rehab Doll, for the local Sub Pop label, but decided to call it quits by the end of 1988. Gossard and Ament then joined with drummer Jeff Turner and singer Andrew Wood (who had previously fronted Seattle's Malfunkshun) to form Mother Love Bone. The new band differed from Green River in its bluesy style and glam-rock image, and was quickly signed to PolyGram subsidiary Stardog. The deal led first to 1989's Shine EP, which was followed a year later by M.L.B.'s full-length debut, Apple. Unfortunately, Wood was unable to overcome his heroin addiction, and he died from an overdose on the eve of Apple's release in March of 1990.
Wood's death meant the end of Mother Love Bone, and Gossard began playing on his own, eventually assembling a hard-rocking tape of self-produced recordings he titled Stone Gossard Demos 91, which included three instrumentals. Gossard soon hooked up with Mike McCready, a lead guitarist whose band Shadow had recently broken up, and reunited with bassist Ament, who had been playing around Seattle with the band War Babies. The three musicians immediately realized that they were on to something. "I knew we had a band," McCready told Rolling Stone, "when we started playing that song 'Dollar Short.'"
What the still-unnamed band did not yet have was a singer, so Gossard started passing his demo tape to friends, hoping that it might land in the right hands. One of those friends was former Red Hot Chili Pepper Jack Irons. He passed the tape to a San Diego acquaintance named Eddie Vedder, who was working days at a petroleum company, but spending his nights writing songs and singing with a band called Bad Radio. Vedder was known around San Diego for being a shy performer, and he sometimes appeared in a mask so he wouldn't have to look at the crowd. He listened to Gossard's tape and liked what he heard. A few days later while surfing, Vedder came up with words for "Dollar Short," a song that would come to be known as "Alive," the centerpiece to Pearl Jam's first album, Ten. Vedder recorded himself singing over all three of the instrumentals (the other songs were "Once" and "Footsteps"), and sent the tape, now re-titled Mamasan, back to Seattle.
Ament and Gossard listened to Vedder's songs and were impressed. They arranged a jam session, and two weeks later, Vedder arrived in Seattle. He wrote and recorded with the band for five days straight, and on the sixth they played their first live show. Vedder was subsequently invited to lend his talents to a side project called Temple of the Dog being put together by Chris Cornell, the lead singer for the Seattle band Soundgarden. Cornell had written several songs about the late Andrew Wood, his friend and former roommate, and decided to record them as a tribute. Vedder's new bandmates played throughout the album, and he wound up sharing lead vocals with Cornell on "Hunger Strike." Once the Temple of the Dog project was finished, Vedder, McCready, Ament, and Gossard-with new drummer Dave Krusen-decided to name themselves Mookie Blaylock, after their favorite basketball player. In short order, they signed a deal with Epic Records, and soon work on their first album was completed. For copyright reasons, the band was renamed Pearl Jam, after Vedder's grandmother, Pearl, and her recipe for peyote preserves.
Ten (named for Blaylock's uniform number) was released in August of 1991, and though its climb up the charts was slow, once it reached the Top 10, Ten didn't move for several months. Vedder's heartfelt lyrics struck a chord, and many praised his honest depictions of the loneliness and confusion of childhood, especially the story of emotional and physical abuse told in "Jeremy." The video for the song became an MTV staple and Video of the Year award winner. Rolling Stone was intrigued that despite "their often sad subject matter," Ten's songs were "oddly celebratory," and singled out "Black," "Jeremy," and "Alive" for revealing "an almost primal yearning." Vedder, however, refused to say his lyrics spoke for anyone but himself. "I am not a good enough writer to have an agenda or come up with a message and try to put it in a song," he told the Los Angeles Times.
But not everyone loved Ten. Along with the album's incredible sales (nine million in the United States alone) came rumblings that Pearl Jam was just riding the grunge coattails of Nirvana, who were viewed as far more distinctive and revolutionary. A Chicago Tribune critic described "Alive" as a "shapeless mass of verses, an anthemic chorus that comes out of nowhere, and a 'Free Bird' guitar finale." Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain called Pearl Jam a "bunch of careerists," and said the band was simply corporate rock dressed up in grunge clothing. Still, no one could doubt that Pearl Jam was a powerful live act. Spin described a typical performance as "such an intense experience that even non-believers walk away with newfound respect for the raw emotional energy the group conjures." To the uninitiated, Vedder's onstage antics might have suggested he was suicidal, as he occasionally climbed scaffolding and light stands (as U2's Bono did a decade earlier) to incite the crowd. His physical connection to the audience often took the form of a head-first stage dive onto their waiting hands.
Pearl Jam embarked on an eighteen-month tour in support of Ten, and in the latter half of 1992, they seemed to be everywhere. Vedder, Gossard, and Jeff Ament appeared in Singles, Cameron Crowe's cinematic ode to twentysomethings in Seattle, where they portrayed Matt Dillon's band, Citizen Dick. The band also taped a hugely popular MTV Unplugged appearance, during which Vedder scrawled pro-choice slogans on his arm. And before 1992 ended, Cobain called a truce between himself and Vedder with the simple explanation, "I'm not going to do that anymore. It hurts Eddie and he's a good guy."
By the time Vs. came out in October of 1993, the band was fighting to maintain some level of control over the Pearl Jam machine. Vedder answered his own fan mail, and during a nationally broadcast radio program, actually gave out his home phone number in case any fans wanted to reach him. The group's second album sold a whopping 350,000 copies its first day of release, and entered the charts at No. 1. Unlike Ten, the critics were unanimous in their praise for Vs. Rolling Stone called it "the band's turf statement--a personal declaration of the importance of music over idolatry." The album featured new drummer Dave Abbruzzese (Krusen had left shortly after the recording of Ten), and drew upon influences ranging from the Police and R.E.M. to the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. Songs such as "Daughter" and "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town" showed the band maturing in their songwriting. Vedder continued to speak of abuse and rage, as on "Rearviewmirror," which begins, "I took a drive today/ To emancipate/ I guess it was the beatings/ Made me wise." But he also wrote about survival, and "Rearviewmirror" included the line, "Tried to endure what I could not forgive."
In 1994, two events changed Pearl Jam's direction dramatically. The first came in April with the death of Kurt Cobain from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. In his suicide note, Cobain quoted a line from the Neil Young song "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)": "It's better to burn out than to fade away." When Vedder learned of Cobain's suicide, he trashed his hotel room, and a week later, while Pearl Jam was performing on Saturday Night Live, he paid tribute to the Nirvana singer by displaying the letter "K" on his T-shirt and putting his hand to his heart. As the band was wrapping up "Daughter," Vedder also sang the Young song, but quoted its second chorus: "Hey hey, my my/ Rock and roll can never die/ There's more to the picture than meets the eye." The tour Pearl Jam was scheduled to undertake that summer was canceled, in part because of Cobain's death, which "knocked the wind out of the band."
The other reason the tour was put on hold was because of Pearl Jam's ongoing battle with Ticketmaster, the nation's dominant ticketing agency. The band was attempting to keep ticket prices low, and were displeased that Ticketmaster was adding substantial service charges to each ticket sold. In May, the band officially asked the United States Department of Justice to investigate Ticketmaster on antitrust changes, asserting that when the agency bought out Ticketron in 1991, it had gained a monopoly. In the summer of 1994, Pearl Jam was unsuccessful in scheduling a tour without using Ticketmaster facilities, and later alleged that the company had forced venues to boycott the group. Instead of going on the road, Gossard and Ament wound up testifying before a House Subcommittee on Information, Justice, Transportation, and Agriculture. The Justice Department later dropped its investigation of Ticketmaster.
By the time Vitalogy was released in November of 1994, the band had reached a crisis, as bickering and in-fighting threatened to split them apart. The situation improved after drummer Jack Irons, the band's longtime friend, was brought in to replace Abbruzzese near the end of the album's sessions. If Irons brought a new level of communication to the band, it was a bad tuna fish sandwich that finally saw Pearl Jam close ranks. On June 24, 1995, the band--after myriad problems securing concert venues--arrived in San Francisco for a sold-out show at Golden Gate Park, only to have Vedder walk off stage after seven songs, sick from a bad room-service sandwich. Gallantly, Neil Young--who had enlisted Pearl Jam as his backing band for the Mirror Ball album and was already taking the group minus Vedder to Europe for a tour--stepped in to finish the set, but the crowd was having none of it. "That was the day we acted as a band," Gossard recently told the Los Angeles Times. "When we saw what was happening, the band finally said, 'This is insane. We've got to stop.' We couldn't let [Eddie] feel like he's got to tour because we're expecting it from him." Pearl Jam decided to cancel the remaining shows, but within a week, they had regrouped, and plans for rescheduled dates were already underway. In October, Pearl Jam did mount a short tour which included stops in Salt Lake City, San Jose (the make-up date for the Golden Gate Park show), and San Diego. The shows in those cities were broadcast live on the band's own pirate station, Monkeywrench Radio, though the signal extended only a few miles away from the venues.
With the release of No Code in August of 1996, the group found itself at a commercial crossroads. Pearl Jam had long been considered a reluctant rock band, but with No Code, their non-commercial tendencies finally caught up with them. Fans were complaining about the lack of concerts due to the fight with Ticketmaster, and the band still refused to promote their fourth album through such conventional channels as videos and interviews. The music industry was somewhat stunned when No Code sold 367,000 copies in its first week, a huge drop from the 1994 sales level of Vs., which shifted nearly a million units in just seven days. That said, No Code's initial sales were still higher than any other album released in 1996, and the band did undertake a successful European tour and its longest U.S. trek in two years, with tickets sold via a toll-free number.
Yet it was hard to argue with once-patient fans who complained that everything surrounding Pearl Jam had become too hard. Like any bandwagon, there were those who took the dark, introspective musical nature of No Code as their cue to get off and declare the band had lost its relevance. Everything came to a head with a Rolling Stone cover piece in October of 1996 which claimed that Vedder was not the introvert he appeared to be and accused him of fabricating stories of a difficult childhood when in fact he had been a popular student. Many jumped to Vedder's defense, including R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe and Cobain's widow Courtney Love. Pearl Jam brushed aside the criticism. Vedder said that he expected the commercial backlash to happen much earlier than it did, and the band seems unconcerned with the declining record sales. "It's great," Vedder told Spin. "We can be a little more normal now."
Biography Provided By Wall Of Sound