Inside Pearl Jam’s drunken MTV disaster
Becoming one of the biggest bands in the world feels like getting on a rollercoaster. After paying one’s dues playing in half-empty halls, it’s jarring to see thousands of people suddenly appear out of nowhere. Pearl Jam was always looking to be a semi-underground band, so when they were asked to do a segment for MTV, they weren’t going to roll over and play nice.
Prior to the grunge explosion, director Cameron Crowe had been working on the movie Singles, which quickly became one of the biggest soundtracks in the world thanks to its inclusion of Alice in Chains, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam. During the promotional rollout for the film, Pearl Jam was on a marathon tour and was asked to stop by the party and play a handful of songs.
Despite being exhausted, they all agreed to take on the next gig, only opting to play a few tunes. Since the party was going to be mostly made up of MTV executives and very few genuine fans, Eddie Vedder became uncomfortable leading up to the show and tried to drink some wine to calm his nerves. Since no one else was drinking with him, he had made his way through an entire bottle by the time the band hit the stage.
Even though most of the executives were ready for something non-corporate to come out of the show, Pearl Jam was hammered to the performance, with Vedder diving into the crowd more than once to get a rise out of the audience. By the time they finished their first song, Vedder had started complaining of voice and monitor problems and could be seen motioning to the backstage area to turn his monitors up.
Losing patience halfway through, Vedder took the problem into his own hands, running over to the wall of machinery and tearing the whole thing apart. In Pearl Jam Twenty, Vedder revealed that he made a grave mistake when he did that, remembering, “That wasn’t the sound system. That was the lighting rig. I just kept wondering, ‘Why is it getting brighter in here?'”.
For as much havoc as they caused onstage, this show displayed Pearl Jam’s insecurity after becoming famous. Vedder was always looking to be in a successful rock band, but the barrage of attention that he got right out of the gate shook him to his core, leaving him to let out his frustrated energy onstage or drastically change up the band’s style on future albums like No Code.
While Vedder drowned his sorrows for one night, Mike McCready started hitting a wall with his drinking, occasionally blacking out onstage and not even remembering when the band played ‘Daughter’ on Saturday Night Live. Anyone can get over a bad show, but McCready’s constant excesses led to him seeking treatment a few albums later on Vitalogy.
After bravely making it through the MTV showcase, Stone Gossard looked back on the show as a learning experience, saying, “When we were starting, we would say yes to everything. Then we started to realise there was always going to be another thing they’re gonna want you to do. It’s OK to say ‘no’ every once in a while. That was the birth of no.”
