The “incredible” guitarist Eddie Vedder called as good as Jimmy Page
All of Pearl Jam never forgot where they came from as fans of rock and roll music.
They may have been lumped in with the grunge crowd when they first began, but listening to every record they made, all of them were practically love letters to the kind of music that made them want to pick up guitars and drumsticks when they were kids. Then again, their record collection was bound to be a little bit more eclectic than almost any other grunge act when looking through their catalogue.
Any band from Seattle would have easily gone the way of bands like Tad and Mudhoney and tried to make the heaviest music that they could, but Eddie Vedder would never claim to be that kind of group. Vedder had the same showstopping voice that made Roger Daltrey so interesting to listen to back in the day, and when listening through some of the band’s greatest material, it would have been a shame if they tried to play down his vocal performances on tracks like ‘Black’.
But as soon as Ten became the biggest album in the world, they were bound to wear their more off-the-wall influences on their sleeve. Vs. was already an angry punk-flavoured response to their debut in many ways, but if you listen to the record they made directly afterwards, Vitalogy was full of surprises that felt like they were made after listening to nothing but avant-garde music for three days straight.
And no one seemed to suffer more during that time than Mike McCready. Aside from dealing with his own personal issues, the band’s guitar shredder was always kept at arm’s length for those records, almost like they were a little bit embarrassed to have someone in the group that could play Jimi Hendrix-style solos.
If you look at any of their later records, though, it’s a crime to keep McCready at bay a lot of the time. There is the occasional punk song where his massive guitar solos would not have worked, but there are also tracks like ‘Nothing As It Seems’ that lives and dies on the strength of those massive bends. But outside of the likes of David Gilmour, there was always a healthy amount of Peter Frampton in how they approached their work.
Even though the band didn’t have time for the swaggering side of rock and roll, Vedder said they always had a special place in their heart for Frampton when he introduced him onstage, saying, “This gentleman was someone we looked up to before the Ramones. Some of our first guitar heroes, [like] Jimmy Page and Pete Townshend, he was right up there. [Frampton Comes Alive] was one of reasons why we loved live records, and later we decided to release bootlegs because of his influence. He’s such an incredible human being on top of it.”
For someone like McCready, though, Frampton’s playing was about more than a bunch of great solos. A lot of Frampton Comes Alive is a case study in how to build a mood across a 17-minute song, and even if everything went on much longer than the casual music fan could tolerate, every member of the band was taken on a musical journey whenever they got to the end of ‘Do You Feel Like We Do’.
Frampton’s masterpiece has become almost synonymous with rock and roll at this point, but the joke about it being omnipresent in every rock fan’s life in Wayne’s World isn’t a mistake, either. Because if anyone wants a good idea of what that era was like, all you have to do is give them a copy and watch their mind get transformed.
