“We were convinced he was a serial killer”: The touring member Pearl Jam accused of heinous crimes
In 2009, the FBI made a startling connection between more than 500 female crime victims and long-haul trucking routes across America.
Sadly, it is believed that the footloose nature, isolation and opportunity of the itinerant profession of cross-country driving lend themselves to serial killers. While they were on tour in 1991, Pearl Jam began to fear that their very own long-haul driver was one of these shady characters, accusing the man behind the wheel of their tour bus of heinous crimes.
Life on the road can be difficult and fraught, but fearing your own crew was a serious criminal because of their demented behaviour isn’t one of the normal issues that bands face. Pearl Jam knew that they were in a peculiar position, and they had nobody to turn to for advice.
So, perhaps to serve as evidence in case something did happen, the band decided to write a song about their crooked wheelman. “We had a bus driver at the time, this guy Frank, who we called ‘Dirty Frank‘ because we were scared of him,“ Mike McCready recalled in an interview with Cameron Crowe.
“We thought he may have been a serial killer and he was going to eat me,” he added. “They were just picking on me. And at that time, I was the skinniest guy in the band, so there wasn’t a lot of meat on me.“ This in-joke turned into the truly unhinged B-side, ‘Dirty Frank‘. But it was far from just a glib, throwaway track by punky kids. It was borne from genuine trepidation.
They crafted this macabre tale around what they feared their driver was doing while they played on stage and he was left with a few hours, quite literally, to kill. And as for the rest: “We stole the middle part from the [Red Hot Chili] Peppers when we were opening up for them,” they explained.
While this might sound like a comical backstory to a brutal track, they did have genuine concerns for their safety. “We were convinced he was a serial killer,” they explained once more in an interview with Guitar World. “We would find piles of empty beer cans under his driver’s seat after a whole night’s drive. It was like, ‘Oh man, I’m glad we’re still alive!”
Thankfully, the mystical Frank hasn’t actually been formally linked to any crimes as far as cursory research shows, but that didn’t stop Pearl Jam from singing the gaudy and accusatory line: “Dirty Frank Dahmer he’s a gourmet cook, yeah / I got a recipe for anglo-saxin soup, yeah.“
While this effort may have been grounded in a genuine backstory, it typifies the band’s obsession with the macabre. They were frequently dealing with the darkest side of America. As it happens, when you combine ‘Alive’, ‘Once’ and ‘Footsteps’, the three songs form a murderous mini-opera about a killer.
Firstly, ‘Alive’ details the tale of a son whose father passed away, but the bereaved child grows up to look exactly like his old man. Vedder’s sickening twist to the tale is that this makes his mother lust after him in an incestuous way.
Following on from that sordid story of psychological dismay as the result of an unfortunate childhood comes the song ‘Once’. In this brooding second act, things get even darker and demented. Following the confusion of ‘Alive’, things worsen for the protagonist. In fact, they get just about as bad as they can get… he becomes a serial killer.
As the lyrics explain, “Backstreet lover on the side of the road, I got a bomb in the temple that is gonna explode.” Whether this is a place of worship or Vedder uses ‘temple’ as symbolism for the mind on the brink of implosion, the grim picture implies similar results either way.
The final chapter never made it onto Ten, which is perhaps why the Mamasan trilogy is missed by many fans, with the last song, ‘Footsteps’, tying the murderous trio together. The whole thing takes one final dark twist, so dark, in fact, that it cuts abruptly black in the final act of a grisly grunge tale. Vedder explains that he took inspiration from the story of the Green River Killer with the bruising song that sees the protagonist face the death penalty.
So, whether ‘Dirty Frank’ can just be seen as an addendum to all of that – a grisly B-side extension of the serial killer saga they had woven – or a real-world concern about a genuinely dangerous driver, it certainly is indicative of the grunge mindset of the era. The 1980s “felt so vacuous” to Vedder that he became determined to offer a more meaningful exposure of the woes of the world when Pearl Jam got their share of the spotlight.
He did so in the most deathly serious of fashions, even when they were joking around.
