“The birth of no”: The Pearl Jam show that was an absolute mess
Every band tends to have their off days whenever they’re playing live. There might be a few technical foul-ups every time you hit the stage, but there are also many times when some of the best artists to ever touch a microphone sound like they are in absolute shambles when they are in front of a crowd. Most have to go through those growing pains at the start of their career, but Pearl Jam, unfortunately, had one of their worst gigs on display for the entire world to see.
Compared to what the band had been going through on tour, it’s no wonder why they had so much pent-up energy when they took to the stage. Since most of Ten was composed of songs that dealt with intense subjects and Eddie Vedder’s fragile state of mind, suddenly having cameras in front of them asking what every song was about and questioning their moral judgement had to get to them after a while.
The one major Hollywood star who did understand the band was Cameron Crowe. Already known as a Rolling Stone writer since he was a kid, Crowe made the film Singles as a way to document the kind of music he heard in Seattle, only for the entire thing to blow up way bigger than anyone ever expected.
Now that all these eyes were on this innocent little rom-com with one of the greatest soundtracks ever, the press needed some kind of event to celebrate. Enter MTV, who was just hopping on the grunge bandwagon and planned an extravagant release party with Pearl Jam as one of the main performers.
Pearl Jam had never wanted to play the show in the first place, though. They had already been grinding their way through their last tour, and they needed about as much shut-eye as they could get. Annoyed at the problem, Vedder eventually showed up to the shoot way too early, with a bottle of wine already in hand.
By the time the band got onstage, they were already plastered, with Vedder yelling “FUCK MTV” into the camera halfway through one of their songs. Booze and performing don’t always make for the best combination, and Vedder eventually got angry when he couldn’t hear himself in the monitors.
After taking matters into his own hands, Vedder eventually took his anger out on the wrong thing, recalling in Twenty, “I leapt onto the wall and tore down this structure. I don’t know if there’s footage of it. Then I realised that wasn’t the soundboard…that was the lighting rig. I just kept wondering, ‘Why is it getting brighter in here?’”.
Those kinds of rock and roll antics didn’t just stop there, though. When performing on Saturday Night Live a few months later for the release of Vs, Mike McCready admitted to blacking out halfway through the show and having no memory of performing the song ‘Daughter’ when tapes were rolling.
Out of all the band members’ embarrassment, Stone Gossard said they learned a valuable lesson, explaining, “We say yes to everything. And then we learned that there’s always going to be something else they’re going to want you to do. Sometimes it’s okay to say no. That was the birth of no”.
