“Makes me really mad”: The song Eddie Vedder said didn’t represent Pearl Jam
Every artist is going to have somewhat of a tense relationship with their biggest hits. While there’s nothing they would put onto a record that doesn’t represent them, there’s a good chance some tracks can creep in that do not represent the core of their sound as much as they would like. Radiohead are much more than the ‘Creep’ guys, and Patti Smith has many songs leagues better than ‘Because the Night’, and even a band as legendary as Pearl Jam fall into that trap now and again.
But looking through their first handful of records, it’s not like they didn’t have fans who saw them for what they were. Compared to Nirvana and Soundgarden, they could hear Eddie Vedder’s influences on his sleeve half the time, whether that was him trying to channel the primal energy of Roger Daltrey when he screamed or create that punk-rock ethos in his music that he heard in old Fugazi records.
When looking at the greater grunge conversation, though, Vedder would always have an asterisk next to his name. Although he was as authentic to his rock roots as everyone else in the community, he always had people like Kurt Cobain looking over his shoulder, as if to make sure that he was truly alternative underneath all of those wild-man antics and Mike McCready’s blues-rock guitar squeals. And nowhere did this show more than the band’s ballads.
For anyone in the grunge community, a mushy ballad with electric guitars would have been considered taboo at the time; that was reserved for the hair metal bands that had no credibility whatsoever. But if people bothered to listen past the massive production, ‘Black’ was as raw and emotional as any of the softer cuts that Nirvana put out, like ‘Dumb’ and ‘Something in the Way’. However, of all the genres they tackled, no one expected them to break out the acoustics as much as they did on ‘Elderly Woman’.
Especially since Vs is one of the band’s most vicious projects, having this song in the middle of the record is almost jarring. All that we had heard up until this point was tunes like ‘Go’ and ‘Blood’, and while ‘Daughter’ didn’t hold back anything in terms of heavy subject matter, this breezy song that could have come off as a Tom Petty record was a lot more downtempo than people expected. The soft rock stations ate it up, but Vedder wasn’t sure if that was necessarily a good thing.
He wanted respect as a rock star, but this tune shackled him to soft rock for a while, regarding which he said, “I’ll be listening to radio and then they’ll play another cool Nirvana song or Soundgarden, and then they’ll play our song and it’ll be, like, the small town song. You know, the slow one. Just makes me really mad because it’s really not representative of the record.”
That’s probably why Vedder ended up taking so many precautions later on. Despite having a musical slam dunk on their hands with ‘Better Man’, Vedder’s choice to bury it on Vitalogy and hardly bring it up during the Vs sessions was because of all the hype they were getting as the classic rock-ified version of what alternative rock was supposed to be.
Whether it represented them or not, it was at least interesting to know that the band had layers to their sound that weren’t the incomprehensible gibberish of ‘Even Flow’. And judging by how everything from Yield to Backspacer to Gigaton sounded, Vedder took a lot of pride in being able to go in different directions and still have his fans waiting to see what he was up to next.
