The day when Paul McCartney punched Eddie Vedder in the face: “It hurt!”
They say never meet your heroes, and Eddie Vedder can relate to that somewhat.
It’s always interesting to see just how many people were inspired by Paul McCartney and the rest of The Beatles. If you were to listen to a song like ‘She Loves You’ and compare it to ‘Alive’ by Pearl Jam, you wouldn’t think there was any connection, simply because the sounds are so far removed from one another, but Vedder was very much a fan of the Fabs and definitely of Macca.
McCartney’s exciting use of lyricism and melody was great to listen to and has kept music fans clinging to his style for decades now, and the thing that makes his songwriting so beautiful and so universal is how broad the themes in everything he created were.
You have some albums like Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which are incredibly complex, filled to the brim with emotion and psychedelia, as well as a narrative embedded throughout the whole thing. However, he could also make much more stripped-back albums, like his debut self-titled record, which was perfectly imperfect.
Neil Young has spoken about the latter album in the past, saying how McCartney highlighted that simple could also be incredibly beautiful. “I love that record because it was so simple. There was so much to see and to hear,” he said, “It was just Paul, and there was no adornment at all. There was no echo. There was no attempt made to compete with the things that he had done. It blew my mind and made me think, ‘Maybe I could do this too’.”
With these two factors in mind, it shouldn’t surprise people that grunge artists like Eddie Vedder became such big fans of McCartney. What is grunge if not the combination of complex and simple? The music is layered, and there is a heavy atmosphere surrounding a lot of the sound, but the emotions that run through the majority of the tracks are those which we can understand incredibly simply, such as love, loss and all things in between.
Another factor of McCartney’s songwriting that Vedder will have been drawn to is his authenticity. When the former was talking about the best thing a songwriter can do, he said that just being your authentic self is one of the best advantages a writer can have. Equally, the reason Pearl Jam were so quick to get Eddie Vedder on board as the singer was because he wasn’t trying to be like anybody else; he was as authentic as they came.
So, when Vedder finally got to meet Paul McCartney, you can only imagine how excited he must have been; however, said excitement didn’t last long, as while telling a story, the Beatle punched him in the face. It was undoubtedly a shocking moment for Vedder, but he should count himself lucky, as there are a lot of people who think Paul McCartney is great, but very few people who have been punched by him.
“I was fortunate enough to be with Paul McCartney in the corner of a Seattle hotel bar, and he kind of was illustrating how he hit this guy,” recalled Vedder. “When he did that, he shot out his left arm as if he were hitting this guy, and I was standing there, and I got hit. He hit me. He didn’t quite pull back the punch, you see. So the story kept on, and it was a great, incredible personal story. I caught the end of it, but as I was listening, I was thinking ‘Paul McCartney just hit me in the face, and it hurt!’”
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