“I wanted to play”: How ‘The Last Waltz’ pushed Eddie Vedder to become a musician
Every musician has that one musical memory that set them off on a path towards greatness—an artist, album, or song that inspired their young selves to pursue the artistic aims of music. For Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder, you might assume that his grunge journey started seeing the likes of Black Flag play local punk shows in Washington. However, his true motivation for picking up a guitar for the first time came from much more mellow origins.
Pearl Jam has always been an outlier within the American grunge scene. When the style emerged from the American Northwest, the vast majority of groups who populated the scene were playing fast, loud, and punk-adjacent music. Grunge was always tied to the sound of small, sweaty rooms in local music venues, and even when groups like Nirvana introduced the style to the mainstream, it always retained that abrasive, grassroots sound. Pearl Jam, in contrast, was much broader in their musical taste, and the style that achieved mainstream recognition was much closer to stadium rock than grassroots punk.
This diversion from the norms of grunge came largely from the influence of frontman and songwriter Eddie Vedder. From a young age, Vedder has fostered an incredibly broad musical taste, incorporating everything from The Ramones to Joni Mitchell. In fact, it was the influences of singers like Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and The Band who first inspired Vedder to greatness after he was taken to see the 1978 concert film The Last Waltz as a child.
Directed by Martin Scorsese, The Last Waltz documented a performance by The Band at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom. The “farewell” show featured The Band alongside a host of other musical stars, including the likes of Dylan and Mitchell. A 13-year-old Eddie Vedder was utterly infatuated with the sights and sounds emanating from the silver screen.
“I remember my uncle took me to see The Last Waltz, and there was so much within that two-hour film,” Vedder later recalled. “People like [Bob] Dylan, Neil Young, Ron Wood, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison and Muddy Waters, so it planted a lot of seeds.” The film is incredibly diverse in its musical offerings, drawing upon a range of differing styles and artists. Vedder has carried that sonic diversity throughout his career with Pearl Jam.
Recalling its power, the frontman shared, “There were all kinds of little detours into blues, and it was packed and emotional. You could feel the emotion because it was their last concert and, you know, Scorsese did it so it looked great. I saw it in a kind of empty theatre in Chicago. I was thirteen or twelve.” At that point, Vedder had never played an instrument, but that screening of The Last Waltz inspired a deep-rooted need for the pre-teen to learn to play the guitar.
“I wanted to play,” he remembered. “My birthday’s right next to Christmas, so I lobbied my folks to put my gifts together in the form of an electric guitar. They thought they should give me an acoustic to see if I liked it. I think that was the winter after I saw that film.” The rest, as they say, is history: Vedder dedicated himself endlessly to the mastery of the guitar, began writing his own work, and continued to immerse himself in an impressively broad musical taste. After starting numerous different projects and playing with various different groups, the guitarist eventually formed Pearl Jam in 1990.
The gentle roots rock of The Band might seem like an unlikely influence on one of grunge’s poster boys. Nevertheless, their essential role in inspiring a young Eddie Vedder speaks volumes both about The Band’s universal appeal and the endlessly diverse music taste of Vedder himself. Throughout his long and illustrious career, the Pearl Jam songwriter never forgot the spiritual experience of seeing The Last Waltz for the very first time.
