The rock legend Eddie Vedder turned down working with
At the height of the grunge movement, you couldn’t find too many people more in demand than Eddie Vedder.
Although Nirvana may have kicked down the door, Vedder burst onto the scene looking like the flannel-clad answer to Jim Morrison when Pearl Jam first debuted. His music may have been just as good as anything that his fellow legends from Seattle were doing, but he was going about becoming a rock star in a much more kooky way than anyone else did once Ten blew up.
Any other band would be jumping up and down when they find out that their debut went platinum, but Vedder wanted to keep himself grounded every step of the way. There’s no way to quantify playing to massive crowds after spending so many years playing small clubs, and even if Vedder was a consummate frontman, it was more than a little bit uncomfortable for him to air his most personal songs live.
That’s half the reason why he retired from playing the song ‘Black’, and judging by the moves they were making in the public eye, you would have been forgiven for thinking that Vedder was trying to run away from fame. He refused to make any more music videos after the video for ‘Jeremy’, and while their live performances became the stuff of legend, Vedder wanted to stay true to the same values that Ian MacKaye taught him back in the day to become the next brooding rock and roll star.
Then again, he did lean into it to a certain degree. No one looking to diminish their star power was ever going to go out on tour with U2, but even at the height of the ZooTV Tour, Vedder at least understood why so many people would have had a problem with the Irish legends. He felt that was selling out half the time he started playing songs like ‘Even Flow’ and ‘Alive’, but that shouldn’t have mattered when he started getting the musical elite praising his tunes.
Sure, Kurt Cobain might not have been their biggest fan, but being able to rub elbows with Neil Young and jamming with the remaining members of The Doors at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame couldn’t have hurt his ego, either. For anyone else, this was proof that he might be a respected songwriter, but for someone that was just starting, Vedder wasn’t ready to go through collaborating with Bob Dylan behind the scenes.
There’s a good chance that any other band would have jumped at the opportunity, but Vedder had enough sense to realise that he wasn’t to float anything towards Dylan, saying, “He calls me Eddie and I call him Bob. He actually likes our music a lot. Did he ask me to write a song with him? I didn’t take that seriously. We’d had a few pints that night. It was about seven in the morning and we’d been up all night in this Irish pub in New York, Tommy Maken’s.”
Whereas anyone else in the world would have been called an idiot for saying no to Bob Dylan, Vedder may have been a little bit more sensible at the time. You have to remember that this was 1993, and since Dylan’s post-Traveling Wilburys records left a lot to be desired, it might have been better for Vedder to work through his own frail state of mind when he started working on records like Vitalogy and No Code, even if not every tune on those albums were exactly a masterpiece.
But considering that Dylan would have towards more introspective songwriting on records like Time Out of Mind, maybe Vedder had more of an influence on him than he realised. The grunge bandwagon made it alright for people to open up a little more, and if Blood on the Tracks was Dylan’s first attempt to open his heart, perhaps his existential songs like ‘Tryin’ To Get to Heaven’ wouldn’t have happened without hearing what people like Vedder could do.
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