‘Vitalogy’: the one Pearl Jam album Mike McCready hated
In the early 1990s, the grunge movement arrived at the exact right time. The entire rock scene had become far too overblown with artificial bands made by labels and acts like Nirvana and Soundgarden kicked the door down with songs that were both reverent to rock’s past while also expanding on it. Not every album from this album can be a winner, though, and Mike McCready of Pearl Jam didn’t have the best experience walking away from their third album, Vitalogy.
After the first two Pearl Jam albums dominated the rock charts, Eddie Vedder wasn’t all that happy with his newfound celebrity. Along with the massive amounts of attention that they were getting, Vedder was also in a feud with Ticketmaster, for what he claimed were massive sales prices for their tickets. To counteract the trouble in their personal lives, Vedder set out to make an album that was designed to lose some of the fans.
Although the album may have had some great songs across the record like ‘Spin the Black Circle’ and ‘Better Man’, there are more than a few times on the album where things go into wildly different directions, like the song ‘Pry To’ consisting of a couple of seconds of McCready noodling and Vedder muttering the line ‘P-R-I-V-A-C-Y is priceless to me’. While the interludes may have been strange, there were just as many strange songs in the mix as well, with ‘Bugs’ being the result of Vedder finding a used accordion and writing a song about how there are bugs in his room and wanting to become one with them.
The group morale wasn’t great as well, including drummer Dave Abbruzzese leaving the band partway through the sessions, leaving newcomer Jack Irons to play on the eight-minute experiment ‘Stupid Mop’. Though anything released by Pearl Jam would have sold fairly well, McCready admitted not being the biggest fan of the final mix, telling Rolling Stone, “At first I didn’t think it had any continuity. It was weird. When I heard the final album, I didn’t really like it, which may have been because I was so fucked up when we were recording it”.
Alongside making the album, McCready was quickly becoming an alcoholic and checked himself into a program shortly after the album was completed. McCready wasn’t the only one feeling a bit uncomfortable though, with producer Brendan O’Brien going on to say, “I was stressed out almost all the time. I was trying my best to keep it positive, but it was a stressful time…They were imploding a little bit internally”.
Though not everyone may have been on board with what the final album became, most of the songs became staples of the band’s live set, with ‘Better Man’ always circling throughout the set and songs like ‘Corduroy’ being one of the biggest deep cuts. When the band were set to tour, they released no music videos, preferring to let the songs stand by themselves without having to worry about normal promotion. Although Pearl Jam might have had to vent their feelings throughout this record, fans always responded to the sounds of them being human.
