The band Eddie Vedder said Pearl Jam are trying to match: “A powerful, powerful record”
When grunge first started to make waves, Eddie Vedder was in both the best and worst position he could have possibly been in.
Sure, he had reached the big time the minute that songs like ‘Evenflow’ and ‘Alive’ started storming up the charts, but since he considered Pearl Jam to be an underground entity, it was a lot more uncomfortable for them to be treated like the new flavour of the month than an earnest rock and roll band. They may have wanted to be respected by their peers, but there were a lot more bands in Seattle that they felt were far greater than what they were doing.
But the reason that Pearl Jam became famous had a lot more to do with the way that they presented themselves. No matter how much Vedder liked to sing his heart out at every opportunity, there was always going to be that mystique around him that made people think he was the second coming of Jim Morrison. And it’s not like they were exactly wrong with thinking that whenever they started playing.
After all, half of Pearl Jam’s discography felt like a love letter to the classic rock bands that came before. Mike McCready had clearly studied everyone from Stevie Ray Vaughan to Jimi Hendrix, and considering how much Vedder loved The Who, it was much better for him to channel his heroes than try to stay true to the same punk rock attitude that a band like Mudhoney had been doing.
They didn’t get to make the decision of how famous they could get, but when riding that wave, it was hard to see a band like Soundgarden take so long to get to the top of the charts. Their friends had one of the greatest frontmen of all time in their ranks, and yet one of their greatest albums that broke them into the mainstream ended up coming out the month that Kurt Cobain passed away.
The wind had been taken out of their sails, but that shouldn’t have stopped everyone from loving what the band were all about. For all of the accusations of them being an alt-rock version of Led Zeppelin, Chris Cornell was actually focused on making music that was a lot more progressive than grunge usually throwing in some strange time signatures to throw everything off or toying with what could be done with guitar tunings that no one in their right mind would have thought of.
Their music may have been a bit more challenging than the rest of Seattle’s finest, but Vedder said that it served as a great model for what they would do later, saying, “We ended up getting lumped in with a lot of great bands. But we were all really different. Soundgarden. There were some similarities but crazily different to our band. They took it to a level that we’re still working on. Every Soundgarden record was a powerful, powerful record with no holes in them.”
While the Soundgarden influence became a bit more apparent when they got Matt Cameron in the band, they were already taking a few cues from what they were doing. ‘Daughter’ is in one of the strangest guitar tunings that the band ever came up with, and while Vedder was never going for the same high notes that Cornell was going for, listening to him test his voice on tunes like ‘You Are’ off of Riot Act was an example of him stretching himself in the same way his buddies would have done on Down on the Upside.
There are moments where they could have stolen from their friends as much as they could, but it wasn’t about them trying to beat them at their own game. Because even in the years when Soundgarden was broken up, Vedder never stopped being a fan whenever he went back to albums like Badmotorfinger.
