The album that made Eddie Vedder “comfortable with ‘difficult’ listening”
It is forever a marvel that The Beatles are the biggest band of all time with more number ones than anyone, plenty of tracks that Catholic grannies teach their grandkids to hum, and yet they are also druggy avant-garde experimenters who pushed music in weird new directions and rattled off sultry riffs like ‘Come Together’, helped to invent heavy metal with ‘Helter Skelter’ and cooked up the baroque madness of ‘Revolution 9’. This mishmash of sound proved as influential as the songs themselves, helping to illuminate to people like Eddie Vedder that music didn’t have to fit into a pre-packaged channel.
So, with Pearl Jam, he realised that you didn’t have to exist amid what was already there. You could easily follow your muse wherever it may bolt, whether it be the sweet pop of sullen ‘Yesterday’ or the raw vigour of dirty ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’. To a young Vedder, there was one Beatles album in particular that showed him this with kaleidoscopic aplomb.
Despite Vedder’s frequent covers of The Beatles focusing on their early years, it would seem this is probably just due to the simpler arrangements suiting his solo style because his favourite record actually comes from 1968 in the form of the famed White Album. Speaking about the fabled LP with Spin Magazine, Vedder ventured to pick an oddly specific year and say: “This is almost a textbook for someone born in 1964.”
Going on to praise the beauty of the musical pick-a-mix on offer: “I had a tape that was called Revolver White Album. I didn’t find out they were two separate albums until years later. The White Album has songs that appeal to little kids, like ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,’ Then, if you get into it, you’re listening to ‘Revolution 9.’ I mean, that stuff opens you up. It’s where you first get comfortable with ‘difficult’ listening.”
This is a notion shared by so many musicians including Ozzy Osbourne who poetically stated that when he first heard the ‘Fab Four’, “When I heard the Beatles. I knew what I wanted to do,” when speaking to Blabbermouth in 2019. “My son says to me, Dad, I like the Beatles, but why do you go so crazy? The only way I can describe it, is like this, ‘Imagine you go to bed today and the world is black and white and then you wake up, and everything’s in colour. That’s what it was like!’ That’s the profound effect it had on me.”
Vedder was similarly wowed; like so many others, The Beatles had welcomed in with the handshake of seamless pop, before pulling the trap door to the wide world of bohemian culture thanks to initially ‘difficult’ flourishes. This was an influential wallop that he hoped to share in his own way with Pearl Jam. Although on the surface Pearl Jam are wrapped up in the notion of being progenitors of the Seattle sound, Vedder asserts that The Beatles were certainly in the welter of their unique sonic wave.
However, just as the ‘Fab Four’ mixed up their own sound, spawning wildly different bands like Pearl Jam further down the line, Vedder claims that not enough bands do this when it comes to their influences. So, while he is happy to hail The White Album, he is also keen to add that he vitally colours that canvas with shades of Bad Radio, Jackson 5, and now bands like La Luz too.
“Our influences are who we are,“ he told Discogs. “It’s rare that anything is an absolutely pure vision; even Daniel Johnston sounds like the Beatles.” He added: “That’s the problem with the bands I’m always asked about, the ones derivative of the early Seattle sound. They don’t dilute their influences enough.”
