The album Pearl Jam called their personal all time low: “Just put my head down”
The key to any great rock and roll band is good communication skills. Although it would be easy to get the greatest artists together in a room and expect them to walk out with a classic, nothing’s going to work if they don’t have the right rapport or get off on the wrong foot before they even pick up their instruments. Getting in that musical space involves everyone being on the same page, and Pearl Jam had to work through a lot of growing pains before they could confront that kind of problem.
At the start of the band’s career, you would have sworn they were like musical brothers half the time. Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard had known each other forever after working in Mother Love Bone, and even when they split apart following Andy Wood’s death, Mike McCready practically forced Gossard to start talking with his old friend so they both could keep pushing forward.
But getting Eddie Vedder in the band was the biggest miracle they could have asked for. Every musician is looking for that signature sound, and in a world that was full of metalheads screaming at the top of their lungs onstage, bringing in Vedder’s baritone pipes was a welcome change of pace from everything else on the radio.
Everything seemed like it would be perfect, but the last thing Vedder wanted to do was become a rich rock star. He had that same punk rock attitude that he did when he was a surfer in California, so when they started getting too big too fast off the back of Ten, Vs. was them lashing out in anger about everything. This was intended to be the record that cut the fairweather fans loose, but when they still couldn’t get enough, Vitalogy was intentionally designed to make you uncomfortable.
Going through the entire album, it’s midway between being one of Pearl Jam’s best albums and an eclectic art rock project. ‘Nothing Man’ and ‘Last Exit’ are fantastic gems in the group’s catalogue, and yet it’s tampered down by songs that would have had fellow rock weirdos like Frank Zappa and Tom Waits telling them to tone it down, like ‘Bugs’ and ‘Stupid Mop’.
That was the kind of reaction Vedder wanted, but not everyone was on board, with Ament admitting, “But now communication was at an all-time low. I responded like I’ve always responded: just put my head down and played. On the first record, he revealed those personal things to us more than he did on the next two or three records. There were songs on Vs. and Vitalogy where I had no idea where they came from.”
But can you really blame Vedder? He was becoming known as the wild man of rock and roll against his will half the time, and by the time Kurt Cobain took his own life, he seemed to passively move away from his time in the spotlight, to the point where No Code felt like it was written by someone that actively hated everyone who ever propped him up as a rock and roll god.
Vitalogy is certainly a fractured album as a result, and it does have a few songs that will leave people with their mouths on the floor, but it’s also a record that needed to be made. All the groundwork that they laid on Ten could have swallowed them up pretty quickly, so it’s records like this that cleared the way forward so they could move on to something else.
