“A goal”: the artist Eddie Vedder considered a saint
Not every rock star is meant to be the best role model. For everyone who seems to be fairly mild-mannered and polite, there are 20 more people who seem like the archetype of how people shouldn’t act, whether that’s Gene Simmons acting like God’s gift to women every time he opens his mouth or the insufferable antics that Mike Love has said when hanging out with The Beach Boys. While Eddie Vedder still claims to be in rock and roll for the right reasons, he admitted that every step he took was about doing one punk legend proud.
Then again, Pearl Jam never really struck anyone as the most punky of grunge acts. They had their heavy moments, but Nirvana seemed firmly etched in stone as the punkiest act to break into the mainstream alongside Mudhoney, so hearing Mike McCready’s classic rock guitar solos put them in a completely different league than the true underground legends.
Looking through their discography, though, there are still many great high-energy moments to choose from. Vs. is the closest thing to a straight-ahead punk release that they have ever made, and even later tracks like ‘Mind Your Manners’ were their attempt to make something that fit more in line with what Dead Kennedys were doing rather than try to be the next version of The Who.
They were at least punks in spirit, even if they weren’t a punk band in sound. From day one, Vedder was never all that comfortable being famous, and when he started to become one of the biggest faces in grunge, he began to withdraw even more, including making albums that felt like they were resentful of you listening to them, like the weirder moments of Vitalogy or the weary sounds of No Code.
But doing right by one’s artistry was something that came from Ian MacKaye. Although he was far from the most high-profile punk in the hardcore scene, everything that he did was by design, whether that was him disbanding Minor Threat to make Fugazi or eventually turning in some of the greatest post-hardcore music of the 1980s while not caring for anything that the mainstream might have wanted.
Vedder wants to be the best artist that he can be, but he still believed that no amount of his posturing could do justice to what MacKaye was doing naturally, saying, “Although I would put Ian MacKaye up for sainthood, I don’t think I’d ever want to wear the robe. The whole doing-right thing is just what you do. It’s not a thing. I guess it’s a goal. It’s tricky.”
Granted, MacKaye probably realises the amount of money that he’s left on the table throughout his career. He could have built on the success of whatever he was working on or be known as one of the most outstanding talent scouts for modern punk, but his decision to stay true to himself and do whatever he wanted was the reason why a golden halo had been put around most of his work.
Outside of being one of the greatest human beings in punk rock, MacKaye was a good barometer for what a musician should aspire to be. It’s a hard call trying to take every right step in music, but if everyone looks at whether MacKaye would do it before they make a decision, we would probably have a lot more genuine people in the business.
