The band Eddie Vedder considered his bible: “That was my main focus”
It’s never in the cards for musicians to become idolised. The goal is always to make songs that people can sing along to and maybe even relate to their own personal lives, but it’s sometimes crossing a line when you start to see your favourite artists as gods preaching words of wisdom whenever they step in front of a microphone. That hasn’t stopped some artists from going above and beyond traditional rock and roll, and Eddie Vedder may as well have been reading Scripture when listening to The Who for the first time as a young kid.
When rock and roll was first discovering itself, The Who were a different breed of group to their contemporaries. While the early days made it hard for anyone to pick them out of a lineup of the hundreds of other Mods crowding out the scene, Pete Townshend had something else in mind when making songs like ‘My Generation’, almost trying to dismantle everything that rock stood for.
As opposed to the punk scene that came later and adopted the same mentality, Townshend still had something to say. Whereas acts like The Clash would come later and turn rock and roll into a political movement, Townshend wanted to tell stories and let out his pain through every one of his songs, whether individual moments like ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ or entire journeys on Tommy.
Although Vedder was still just getting into music when he heard The Who, that influence has carried him through some of the darkest times of his life, saying, “I lived my life by the bible of The Who. That was kind of my main focus. I just listened to those records over and over, every one of them. I think I finally saw them in 1980, and that pretty much changed my life.”
The record is one thing, but seeing footage of The Who in their prime is nothing short of spellbinding. They may have taken their craft incredibly seriously, but the minute that they hit the stage, it felt like wild abandon getting released from every member, with the lone exception of John Entwistle, who ended up looking like the most virtuosic statue that anyone had ever seen as he assaulted his bass.
Vedder was more interested in what Townshend had to say rather than just practising his best take on his trademark windmill motion. Much of The Who’s greatest moments revolved around finding a sense of relief from the outside world, and when Vedder started listening closely to albums like Quadrophenia, he probably found pieces of himself in the grooves.
That broad approach to songwriting may have been half the reason he got into Pearl Jam as well. On the first cassette that Vedder gave to Stone Gossard, a lot of it came from him telling a story of a lost kid who ends up going on a killing spree after figuring out his entire family life was a lie.
Much of Vedder’s classic songs were rarely meant to be optimistic, but the most important lesson he learned from Townshend was that it didn’t matter whether a song sounded happy or not. It was about finding something that could take you out of your everyday life and give you some sort of outlet for those dark emotions.
