The singer Eddie Vedder said was always pissed off at him: “He was frustrated”
Eddie Vedder wasn’t into the glitz and glamour of rock and roll when he first started working with Pearl Jam.
If anything, the grunge movement was a great way to push against every single hair metal act that was strutting their stuff on MTV, and by the time ‘Alive’ came out, Vedder seemed ready to take on the world and then some in their first music videos. But even if he got to the top of the rock and roll mountain, Vedder didn’t exactly like what he saw up there and needed to get off the train as soon as possible.
Then again, anyone else would have been leaping up and down with joy the minute they became the biggest band in the world, but Vedder had something else in mind. He envisioned Pearl Jam as the kind of group that had a slow burn up the charts, so when everyone started copying his singing style and getting their own record contracts, he was almost ashamed to say that he inspired the likes of Scott Stapp from Creed when he made his first records.
And if he was already uncomfortable with fame, there was no way he was willing to play the game that Hollywood had in mind. Even if you look at what Vedder was doing during the late 1990s, he was almost doing everything in his power to minimise his celebrity, whether that was wearing outfits people were meant to avoid or refusing to make any more music videos after the controversy surrounding ‘Jeremy’ happened.
He wasn’t looking to make the same kind of moves that people like Axl Rose were doing, but his refusal to have a voice also didn’t sit well with the music community. Pete Townshend told Vedder that he didn’t really have a choice once he became one of the biggest frontmen in the world, but when Vedder started to peel back from the limelight, he remembered catching a lot of grief from Bono at the time.
The U2 frontman was always going to use his platform for good at every opportunity, and he felt that Vedder was wasting his shot at the big time every time he played, with the grunge icon recalling, “I’ve had conversations with Bono back in the day. He was suggesting that we needed to work harder and that you didn’t want rock ’n’ roll to become a niche. He said that when U2 makes a record, it’s like they’ve got a racehorse and they don’t just want the horse in the race, they want to win the race. I said we race the horse and then we let the horse run free”.
“I wasn’t trying to be clever. That was the truth. He was frustrated with me.”
Granted, it’s not like U2 and Pearl Jam were cut from the same cloth by any means. Both of them did have moments where they got political and touched on real issues, but Vedder wasn’t trying to become the massive messiah-like frontman Bono was. He may have looked more Jesus-like with his long hair and beard in the 2000s, but he was more interested in relating to his audience in a more natural way, even in his prime, to the point where he wanted to quit the business altogether and make demos of songs to sell outside his house.
The rest of the band may have felt like he had taken the wind out of their sails, but looking back on it, Vedder’s decision to pull back is what gave them their longevity. Most fans didn’t understand what the whole thing was about behind the scenes, but whenever they got onstage and started playing, everyone in the crowd realised that they had been a part of something important, even if they didn’t know every single song.
So while Bono does have his massive fanbase that will stand by his more over-the-top moves onstage, Pearl Jam have crafted the kind of fanbase that feels more akin to what The Grateful Dead had in their prime. Everyone in the band was looking to make the best music they could, but the sixth member of the band was always going to be their fanbase whenever they came to town.
