Why Pearl Jam fired drummer Dave Abbruzzese
The early days of Pearl Jam came with a revolving door of drums. Though most of the band gelled with each other almost immediately when working on the album Ten, it would take years before they had a stable drummer behind the kit, with most of their percussionists leaving after only a year. Though they seemed to be on safer ground for a little while with Dave Abbruzzese, it wouldn’t take long for tensions to boil over yet again.
By the time Abbruzzese was being considered, he was still playing in a funk band in Texas when Pearl Jam had to get rid of Matt Chamberlain due to scheduling conflicts. Although Abbruzzese thought joining a new up-and-coming rock band was a dream come true, it didn’t take long for personality conflicts to arise between him and Eddie Vedder.
During the recording of the album Vs., Vedder didn’t take kindly to Abbruzzese’s demeanour, as he tried to play up the extravagant lifestyle of being in a rock band. Abbruzzese’s love for firearms even worked its way into the lyrics of the song ‘Glorified G’, where Vedder makes fun of the drummer’s gun collection by claiming that he needs to own weapons to call himself a man.
Though Abbruzzese did write the opening riff for the album, ‘Go’, he would have his own struggles laying down his final takes. After multiple takes of the album’s dramatic centrepiece ‘Rearviewmirror’, the end of the final version consists of his frustrated state of mind, as he can be heard throwing the drumsticks across the room in the final seconds of the song.
Even in one of their interviews for Rolling Stone, Abbruzzese claimed to be thrown for a loop when he entered the fold, noting that the rest of the band didn’t exactly like to celebrate the success they got. As Pearl Jam’s star continued to rise, Vedder immediately wanted creative control for their next project, making Vitalogy a much more artistic record than the straight ahead of rock of the early stuff.
As the band experimented with newer sounds, tensions got even worse in the studio, including one instance where Abbruzzese accidentally knocked over one of Vedder’s guitars that was given to him by The Who’s Pete Townshend. Adam Kasper also remembered Vedder making steps to push him out a little bit further. He recalled: “Dave was a really busy player, and Eddie liked more of a raw sound. We even started out with drum machines, and that’s sort of a slap in the face to a drummer.”
Once the sessions got more involved, it was clear that Abbruzzese’s style wasn’t meshing with the rest of them anymore, so bringing in new drummer Jack Irons to play the percussion on the experimental ‘Stupid Mop’ and continue with him through the next album No Code. Working with Irons would ultimately fall through, leaving them to call Matt Cameron of Soundgarden to lay drums for them after Soundgarden broke up in the late 1990s. It took nearly a decade of great hard rock music, but Pearl Jam finally had a drummer they could call their own and more than a few bruised drummers with bruised egos in their wake.
