The band that changed how Eddie Vedder listened to music
Every artist tends to have that eureka moment that turns them into the creative force they are today. No matter how many times that musician might try to innovate their sound or take music to places it had never been before, it doesn’t get better than the record that started it all for them, holding all the keys to music’s power and fury in a single body of work. Although Eddie Vedder has been indebted to thousands of artists throughout his life, this one band helped make his musical engine run.
For the first few years of his musical development, though, Vedder was always in debt to the band The Who. Coming out of the original British rock scene, Vedder became enamoured with how Pete Townshend constructed his melodies, going so far as to call the band one of the greatest live bands he ever saw.
After the initial dream of the 1960s came and went, though, Vedder was looking for something equally as potent once punk struck. In the wake of lavish acts trying to make their living off of long extended jams, the punk legacy left room for less-than-competent musicians to express themselves however they wanted, from militant punk from The Clash to Sex Pistols’s vitriolic energy.
Although Vedder did claim a love for acts like Ramones, R.E.M. was the moment that truly made him pay attention. Formed out of Athens, Georgia, in the early 1980s, the band would soon become legends of the college rock circuit, sowing the seeds of the alternative movement with strange songs tuneful enough to get on the radio.
While the band’s debut album Murmur wasn’t considered one of the most commercial records of 1983, Vedder was entranced by what he heard. When talking about seeing them for the first time, the Pearl Jam frontman told The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, “I was lucky enough to see R.E.M., and it changed how I listened to music and what I listened to because, after that, I started listening to them exclusively”.
Although the band only had one album out at the time, Vedder would go on to say that he devoured their material, saying, “If I take three months over that summer of 1984 and do the math, and Murmur runs at about 44 minutes, I believe I listened to 1260 times. And the reason why I listened to it so incessantly was because I had to know what [Michael Stipe] was saying”.
While The Who may have opened Vedder’s ears to what was possible with music, Stipe was responsible for opening up Vedder’s heart through his melodies, saying, “They helped us find things that we knew were inside us. And I think he helped us find things that we didn’t know were inside us. I can say that I hold things that I feel deep inside that Michael Stipe put in there himself”.
Vedder would also envy R.E.M.’s slow burn to the top of the world, initially becoming jaded about how quickly Pearl Jam rocketed to superstardom in the early 1990s. Regardless of how Pearl Jam became one of the foundations of rock, Vedder may have been able to touch listener’s hearts on the same level that Stipe did just a few years prior.
