Watch legendary punk band The Frogs with Eddie Vedder
By the mid-1990s, Eddie Vedder could have gone onstage with anyone he fancied. From the moment Pearl Jam’s Ten hit the charts, Vedder joined Kurt Cobain alongside the leaders of his generation, speaking to fans that wanted something more authentic than what they had gotten out of hair metal acts. Although Vedder may have been looking to keep playing music, he wasn’t ready to hang with the rock legends.
Around the same time that Pearl Jam was working on Vitalogy, Vedder joined The Frogs onstage for an impromptu performance. Hailing from Wisconsin, The Frogs were never for their lo-fi style, instead preferring to keep all of the audio blemishes into their recordings half the time. Despite their amateur production style, their focus on humour always made them a spectacle to watch onstage.
Granted, this is far from the same calibre of an act that Pearl Jam usually worked with. For perspective, the biggest tour that Vedder had seen at that point was supporting U2 on their famous ZooTV tour. Vedder could have played with anyone else, but the entire point behind joining The Frogs was a friendly affair.
For years, Vedder had been looking to shed his superstar skin and joining them onstage was a way to separate himself from the media circus that wanted to hear what the next Pearl Jam record would sound like. Since The Frogs also had the grunge sense of irony, Vedder also took to the warped takes on their tunes, including The Frogs’ rendition of ‘Rearviewmirror’ on the b-side to their single ‘Immortality’.
Though the critics dismissed The Frogs for what they saw as poor taste, Pearl Jam was one of a handful of grunge acts that got their approval. After meeting Kurt Cobain, The Frogs eventually wrote songs about Nirvana and created a pseudo-documentary about the group that became a favourite amongst Cobain on the tour bus. Despite getting some support from acts like Billy Corgan, the closest they came to stardom was playing one of the secondary stages at Lollapalooza.
After occasionally performing with the group, Vedder’s thank-you to the group came one album later. For their next album, No Code, the ballad ‘Smile’ had lyrics written by Frogs frontman Dennis Flemion, leaving them in Vedder’s notebook while he was performing. The phrases Vedder would eventually use in the song are from different Frogs songs, including ‘This Is How I Feel’ and ‘Now I Wanna Be Dead’.
Whereas most Pearl Jam members seemed untouchable at the time, this is one of those rare instances where Vedder seems to be having fun playing music. Seeing how much of a frenzy was generated by grunge, coming together to play music for the hell of it was sorely needed around this time.
Although the album No Code became one of the band’s worst albums critically, Vedder mentioned that he intended to be as impersonal as possible in an attempt to lose some of their fairweather fans. The Frogs may have pissed some people off with their music, but Vedder probably wouldn’t want it any other way.
