The grunge album Eddie Vedder called one of the greatest: “One of my favourite records”
The entire mystique around grunge music didn’t really matter much to Eddie Vedder.
As much as he liked making the best songs that he could whenever he approached a Pearl Jam record, he was never all that comfortable with people treating him like he was the second coming of Jim Morrison when Pearl Jam first started getting big. He certainly thought that he had the potential to become a great musician, but even when looking at his record collection, he was as influenced by what his friends made as he was by the giants of rock and roll that had come before him.
Then again, no one was arguing that Vedder was one of the biggest Who fans of all time when he first started making music. He felt that Pete Townshend was one of the few who actually understood him, and looking through a lot of Pearl Jam’s best work, Vedder wanted to take that same approach when writing his own lyrics. But there was no right or wrong way to approach what music was all about when looking at what everyone from Mudhoney to Soundgarden was doing.
There were no rules in Seattle music, and while Mark Arm was one of the biggest punks in the city at the time, Chris Cornell wasn’t afraid to unleash his trademark pipes whenever he wanted to. Soundgarden was out there to be an artsier version of what Led Zeppelin had always been, and when listening to Badmotorfinger, you can hear what they are trying to do a lot more clearly than anything.
Superunknown was what won them their fans back in the day, but the sounds of ‘Jesus Christ Pose’ and ‘Rusty Cage’ were a lot closer to what classic Soundgarden was supposed to be. Cornell’s vocals are some of the best of his career on this record, and while Vedder was nowhere near the kind of singer that he was, he could at least admire where the rest of the band fit in underneath a lot of those tunes.
Compared to everyone else in Seattle, Vedder felt that Badmotorfinger was one of the few records that could stand with some of the greatest albums of all time when he reminisced about adventuring with Cornell, saying, “We went swimming in the coldest ice pools and we climbed these green mountains and then onto this rock mountain. The rocks [started] crumbling. All of a sudden, we were both just like two Spiderman impersonators hanging onto the side of this thing. Just stuck and 50 feet above the fucking valley floor. We just started laughing. They had just finished Badmotorfinger, one of my favorite records of all time by any group, and then our record. We just started laughing almost to tears.”
If you look at their situation, though, the fact that they were clinging to rocks couldn’t have been a better metaphor for where they would be going. Cornell and Vedder were both about to get on the massive roller coaster of fame, and while anyone else would have revelled in being one of the most celebrated artists of their generation, Vedder was more than happy to limit his star power whenever they made a new record.
He didn’t want those records that he loved to be corrupted by big business, so those quiet moments that he spent with Cornell were a lot more precious than anyone realised at the time. They were both kindred spirits in a way, but whereas Cornell embraced his status as a rock and roll god, Vedder knew he needed to step away from his own celebrity if he was going to survive the ride in any capacity.
So, really, Badmotorfinger probably resonates more with Vedder because of all the memories that are packed into it. There’s a lot of great riffs that would go on to influence countless bands, but chances are when he hears it, he just remembers the days where bands didn’t have to deal with going through every single part of the music industry.
