“The devil’s advocate”: Eddie Vedder named his archenemy in Pearl Jam
At the heart of every band lies friction. Whether it’s a group just starting out or one that’s dominated the summit for years, this tension is crucial to any collective dynamic striving to evolve. The sparks generated when an immovable object meets an unstoppable force drive progress by merging diverse contexts, influences, and perspectives. From The Beatles to The Rolling Stones to Pearl Jam, this creative push-and-pull is often key to success—yet paradoxically, it’s also frequently the very thing that leads to a band’s undoing.
After all, the list of famous bands who have split up or had members leave due to creative differences is extensive. While John Lennon and Paul McCartney led The Beatles creatively for years, naturally, George Harrison and Ringo Starr forced their way in, and this more collective spirit played a key part in the second and most significant half of their career.
There might have been personal problems that arose during this era, but the band’s constantly evolving individual tastes also played a part in their calling it a day in 1970 and each member embarking upon a solo career. Clearly, the constant tussling for creativity hegemony is mostly positive, but in most cases, it can only last so long before the transmitters give in.
Elsewhere, the band who toppled the Fab Four from their perch, Led Zeppelin, have also been open about the internal friction that was there from the get-go. While the members were all friends, there was a cultural faultline, with frontman Robert Plant and drummer John Bonham affable best friends from the working-class West Midlands, and guitarist/band leader Jimmy Page and bassist/multi-instrumentalist John Paul Jones from the middle-class London suburbs, who had years of experience in the refinement of London’s session musician scene before they formed in 1968.
There was constant creative friction between both sides, but within minutes of their first rehearsal that August, all four were in no doubt that their collective might was significant. In just a year, they’d become the biggest band on earth.
This is a constant pattern throughout the music timeline, with artists innately proud and having set sonic values also feeding into this. It’s also fitting that grunge survivors Pearl Jam, an outfit that always had more in common with classic rock groups such as the above, rather than metal and punk, should also tick the boxes that their heroes from the 1960s and 1970s did. Frontman of elemental proportions in Eddie Vedder, check; in-house guitar hero Mike McCready, check; metronomic rhythm guitarist Stone Gossard, check, and of course, a hard-grooving rhythm section featuring bassist Jeff Ament and a series of top drummers. Check.
Like all of their heroes, Pearl Jam are also no strangers to creative friction. While this has continued to propel them when so many from their generation have faded, and even seen them produce the 1994 masterpiece Vitalogy against all the odds, certain members take up specific roles for others. For Vedder, his “archenemy” in the rehearsal room is Gossard, whom he calls “the devil’s advocate” in picking apart ideas he thought were foolproof before stepping over the threshold into their creative space.
He told Spin in 2001: “I call Stone my archenemy in the band, mainly because he’s the devil’s advocate. You could have the best idea that was absolutely nonquestionable, and then he’d bring something up why we can’t just go do it. But it’s really positive. Someone’s gotta do it, and he does, unabashedly.”
Vedder is right; members like Gossard are absolutely pivotal to a band’s success. Through some strange form of biological selection, every group has one member who is their quality control, the in-house critic, whom nothing gets past, and helps them keep their feet on the ground and ideas fixed to what their sound really is.
