The one album that saved Pearl Jam from collapsing: “Came at a time when we needed it”
By the end of 1994, it wasn’t fun to be in Pearl Jam anymore. The grunge icons may have been one of the biggest groups in the world and were probably poised to take the mantle that Nirvana had left behind after Kurt Cobain’s death, but the shadow of grief hanging over the Seattle scene wasn’t exactly going to help a band that wasn’t comfortable with fame to begin with. Although the group almost seemed like they were on the verge of breaking up after Vitalogy, they got a breath of fresh air when Neil Young entered the fold.
Because by the mid-1990s, there wasn’t one artist more embarrassed to be at the top of the charts than Eddie Vedder. While Cobain didn’t necessarily like all the attention being put on him, either, he did at least play into it a little bit, whether that meant making half-assed comments during interviews or infamously wearing a dress to the Headbanger’s Ball episode they appeared on.
Vedder was a completely different beast, usually shying away from the camera and preferring to let his aggression out onstage. That didn’t stop his star from continuing to rise, and the more pressure that seemed to be put on his shoulders, the more he felt that he needed to control the kind of music the group made.
Just look at the collaborations between band members on each album. While Ten was fairly balanced and had a decent spread of riffs from everyone, Vedder is the author of most of the tracks on Vitalogy, including tracks that should have been left on the cutting room floor like ‘Pry To’ and ‘Bugs’.
The band could have been in danger of becoming a sideband for Vedder’s new art-rock project, but nothing gets the blood pumping more than being a substitute for Crazy Horse. After jamming with them at the MTV Music Awards, Young asked Pearl Jam to sit in on the album Mirror Ball, which acts as a weird hybrid world where the group went the classic rock direction 20 years before they could do it.
According to Stone Gossard, this project had a hand in saving the group, recalling to Spin, “That came at a time when we needed it, that Neil thought we were a band that would be good to make a record with. He probably felt sorry for us. He made it all right for us to be who we were. He’s not taking his career so seriously that he can’t take chances. Suddenly, our band seemed too serious.”
Of course, that didn’t mean that it was going to be easy, either. When working through the songs for the first time, Gossard remembered that half of his job was making sure that he had the right chords for every song that they were working on, which makes for a strange push and pull when listening to the album.
While Pearl Jam’s next album, No Code, was among the weirdest they had ever made, it did help them shake off their reputation as a band that was all serious all the time. Whereas Vedder had to worry about his privacy and constantly had the spotlight on him whenever he played, hearing his band cutting loose may have reminded him to look at the big picture of the music instead of just getting scared by their own creativity.
