The band Eddie Vedder couldn’t stand copying him: “Get your own trip”
By the end of the 1990s, Eddie Vedder had good reason to want to file a lawsuit over everyone using his voice.
Even though it’s hard to trademark one’s larynx in the music world, the fact that so many of the biggest bands in the world had taken the kind of alt-rock soul that Vedder was working with and applying it to their own songs made it look like they found the formula on what the typical brooding singer was supposed to sound like. But even in an era that was dominated by the likes of Creed and Days of the New, Vedder only saved his vitriol for bands that he thought were truly trying to take the piss out of him.
If you look at what Vedder was doing at the time, though, it wasn’t always about him trying to sing the lowest guttural notes by any stretch. He liked the idea of stretching his voice every time he sang, and aside from the massive screams that you hear in a song like ‘Jeremy’, people tend to forget how hard the tune is to sing. There are insane vocal leaps where Vedder jumps an entire octave between two notes, and the lion’s share of what he does on ‘Oceans’ is a lot more beautiful than anyone would have thought.
But around the same time that Pearl Jam were getting ridiculed for cashing in on Seattle by Kurt Cobain, there was already another band from San Diego doing the exact same thing. The Nirvana frontman had already chastised Vedder for being the corporate version of what alternative rock was supposed to be, but if he was paying a little more attention, that honour would have probably gone to Stone Temple Pilots when they hit MTV.
It’s one thing for someone to take a few cues from Vedder, but Scott Weiland practically turned that singing style into his entire schtick when singing ‘Plush’. The whole thing was a carbon copy of what Vedder had done, and while the Pearl Jam frontman tried his best to ignore every single aspect about fame, he couldn’t resist throwing in a few jabs at the band’s expense whenever he heard their name.
The band name was already following him around, but Vedder felt more than a little bit uncomfortable hearing them for the first time, saying, “I don’t know why I’m commenting. People stop me in the streets and tell me about this band Stone Temple Pilots. I don’t even know who they are. Apparently, it’s something that the guy [Weiland] is dealing with, too. It’s like, am I supposed to feel sympathy? Get your own trip, man.”
If I’m being completely honest, it’s not like Stone Temple Pilots were outright bad by any means. Weiland was clearly a star in the making when he started making those tunes, and even though Core sounds a little too much like what was going on up North, Weiland did the one thing that so many copycat bands struggle to learn when they got called out on their bullshit: actually changing their sound.
Every other band would have kept on trying to ride the coattails of Pearl Jam, but whereas a band like Bush ended up getting too close for comfort on their records, STP managed to make tunes that Pearl Jam would have never thought of. ‘Interstate Love Song’ was one of the breeziest songs to come out of alternative rock, and they were going to do everything they could to keep innovating when they traded in their brooding looks for glam-style garage riffs on ‘Big BAng Baby’.
So while Vedder could at least call people out if he felt that they were mocking him, STP weren’t going to be defined as the band that kept making alt-rock knockoffs. They wanted to be known for being great musicians, and the rest of their career with Weiland proved that they could still change their sound when the time called for it.
