‘Blood’: Pearl Jam at their angriest
It’s easy to pigeonhole Pearl Jam as the classic rock band that somehow managed to skip two generations and come of age in the 1990s. The long hair, the lighters in the air ballads, and the guitar hero presence of Mike McCready and Stone Gossard are all signs of a band out of place in their scene. Especially when you account for how seriously they took the rock star thing. These were not wallflowers who shied away from the spotlight, Nirvana-style, yet they weren’t the celebrity fame-seekers that Kurt Cobain had tarred them as either.
From the moment Ten took off to become one of the biggest hit albums of the decade, they didn’t so much embrace fame as they tried to use it for all the good that could possibly come of it. They had a platform and wanted to use it constructively rather than pretend they were still in the same Seattle clubs and bars they came up in with people who didn’t get it paying attention.
The peak of this would come a few years after their breakthrough when they took on Ticketmaster three decades before it was cool, but Eddie Vedder and the band were trying to take on fame on their own terms, and right from the very beginning. This went about as well as you’d expect and is the reason why their second album is one of the most confrontational, abrasive and bitter records of its day.
It begins right from the title down. Not for nothing is the album called Vs, with the cover featuring a goat trying to force its way through a fence, teeth bared, in stark black and white. The album itself must have been a hell of a shock to fans expecting more of ‘Jeremy’ and ‘Black’ because this was a timely reminder that Pearl Jam came of age in a thriving hardcore scene.
This is an album where Pearl Jam’s rage against the music industry comes through in bilious, harsh waves against basically everyone, and nowhere is it more apparent than on one of the album’s high points, ‘Blood’. An excoriating thrash with one of Vedder’s rawest, most throat-shredding vocals ever put to tape. However, while the band sound like they’re trying to keep up with their lead singer, the song was actually written the other way around.
In an interview with Songfacts, bassist Jeff Ament said that the track came from a complex riff that Stone Gossard came up with, which he then arranged into something more palatable. He says, “If you listen to a lot of those songs from that time, the big melodies that are going through those riffs are parts that I had written. He’s playing almost every note in the riff, so you just try to come up with some way to articulate the riff that he’s playing in a way that you hope that Ed can wrap the lyric around.”
The lyrics that ‘Ed’ came up with say everything you need to know about his headspace at the time. Matching the seething fury of the song’s backing, Vedder came up with one of the most direct lyrics of his own career: “Spin me round / Roll me over / Fucking circus / Stab it down / One way needle / Pulled so slowly / Drains and spills / Soaks the pages / Fills their sponges / It’s my blood.” For a singer who gets so much flak about being sonically difficult to understand, he doesn’t half make his point.
