Pearl Jam and ‘Bugs’: How one annoying moment can almost ruin a record
Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy could have been a 10/10 album, if not for this confusing track.
The year was 1994, and Pearl Jam was riding the high of two flawless, chart-topping albums. Their 1991 debut album, Ten, which they followed with their first number one record, Vs, established the band as a leading act in the 1990s. Vitalogy could have been a third no-skips album, if not for his damning song.
The record came at a conflicting moment in the band’s career. They were waging a war against Ticketmaster, fighting for fair prices, reflected in the album song ‘Not For You’. Vitalogy also earned them their first Grammy for the song ‘Spin The Black Circle’, and their single, ‘Better Man’, topped the US Mainstream Billboard charts. Knowing all this, it’s difficult to imagine that they could come up with a track that would put the listeners off. And yet, as one reaches the ninth song, it happens.
Following the thoughtful, moving Pearl Jam classic, ‘Corduroy’, ‘Bugs’ violently rattles the listener and breaks the streak of hits. It breaks the magic with an out-of-tune accordion, which Eddie Vedder plays carelessly as he repeats “I got bugs in my room, in my bed, in my ears, in my head”.
The broken accordion creates a carnival-like dissonance that goes on for way too long (almost three minutes). It makes you inevitably want to skip the song, something much easier to do with streaming services nowadays. But since Vitalogy was originally released a vinyl, it was a headache for fans who bought it right out the gate.
At the time of the record’s release, the band, and especially Eddie Vedder, were in a tussle with their feelings about fame and media presence, so fans originally interpreted the confusing track as a metaphor. The idea of the media being bugs trying to crawl into Vedder’s house, room, bed, and him trying to become friends with them, to no avail.
The reality turned out to be much simpler than that. The song was, literally, about bugs, because Vedder was itching from poison oak. He found humour in it, though, and thought it would be a good way to test their audience and guide them into the joys of walking into unknown greens.
“I think that it’s almost confidence that enables us to record ‘Bugs’ or confidence in our listeners that they can open up to something like that,” he said in an interview with Spin. “For a long time after recording it, I was playing it for friends, saying it was the best thing we’d ever done.”
While it wasn’t a deal-breaker in that they didn’t lose their audience, Vedder was definitely pushing his luck with that song. Not that he didn’t know it at the time. Even guitarist Mike McCready felt it was a bad idea to include it in the record, but for Vedder, it was the gag of the decade.
“Before I went in the studio, I was walking around some little thrift shop, I found an accordion. And I went in with the accordion and played something, and then spoke some gibberish over the top. I remember laughing and saying, ‘That’s the first single,'” the singer recalled in 1994.
Despite this loyalty test in the middle of it, Vitalogy is, without a doubt, a great Pearl Jam record. It contains so many timeless classics that, if one can push through the ninth track, it’s worth more than a few spins on the turntable.
