Elvis’ “Suspicious Minds” blasts on the jukebox as Vedder continues. “Now the second verse is ‘Oh, she walks slowly into a young man’s room . . . I can remember to this very day . . . the look . . . the look.’ And I don’t say anything else. And because I’m saying, ‘The look, the look,’ everyone thinks it goes with ‘on her face.’ It’s not on her face. The look is between her legs. Where do you go with that? That’s where you came from.”
“But ‘I’m still alive.’ I’m the lover that’s still alive. And the whole conversation about ‘You’re still alive she said.’ And his doubts: ‘Do I deserve to be? Is that the question?’ Because he’s f—ed up forever! So now he doesn’t know how to deal with it, so what does he do, he goes out killing people – that was [the song] ‘Once.’ He becomes a serial killer. And ‘Footsteps,’ the final song of the trilogy [it was released as a U.K. B side to 'Jeremy'], that’s when he gets executed. That’s what happens. The Green River killer . . . and in San Diego, there was another prostitute killer down there. Somehow I related to that. I think that happens more than we know. It’s a modern way of dealing with a bad life.”
Then he smiles as he says, “I’m just glad I became a songwriter.”
Sitting next to Vedder, Ament listens like a fascinated brother. Perhaps he is remembering the first impressions Vedder made upon arriving in Seattle. Friends from his early days up north recall a different from today, a desperately shy surfer, a guy with a lot of heart and little irony. One friend even called him “Holy Eddie.” “He was genuinely quiet and loving Eddie when we first met him,” says Ament. In the band’s earliest shows, Vedder had been so self-effacing, he barely looked up. “And at a certain point, he changed.”
An early turning point came at a club called Harpo’s, in Victoria, British Columbia. It was Pearl Jam’s maiden tour, their first appearance away from a nurturing audience of Seattle friends. But this Canadian crowd was far more interested in getting drunk. In midset, Vedder decided to challenge the jaded audience, to wake them up. Unscrewing the 12-pound steel base of the microphone stand, Vedder sent it flying over their heads, like a lethal Frisbee. The steel disk crashed into the wall of the back of the bar.
They woke up.
Vedder would never fully be the same. Gossard credits the influence of Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, who had asked Vedder to sing on his tribute to Andrew Wood, “Temple of the Dog.” Cornell had already transformed himself in an intense way,” Gossard says. “Eddie looked to him as a guide to help us through that time.
Vedder soon developed a new stage habit. He began climbing the stage scaffolding or the wings of the theaters the band was playing, falling into the hands of an often worshipful crowd. “I think the first time I got really worried, we were in Texas,” recalls McCready. “Eddie climbed up on the girder, about 50 feet in the air. Nobody knew where he was. And all of a sudden you look up – some guy had a flashlight on him – and it was like ‘F—!’ He’s up there clinging to a girder. I’m thinking, ‘This guy is insane, but I’m so totally pumped.’ ”
“That whole thing almost turned into a circus event,” adds Ament. “People weren’t looking in his eyes when he was doing that. I think they were looking at the f—ing freak, you know. The guy who was dumb enough to put his life on the line. Evel Knievel. But if you looked at his eyes, man, there was an intensity to what he was doing. That was his belief in himself. He was saying, ‘This isn’t just “rock” to me.’ ”
The band returned from a European tour and taped a stirring edition of “Unplugged.” There was a particularly galvanizing, unforgettable moment at the end of “Black.” “We belong . . . together . . . together,” Vedder sang. It was simple, a guy sitting on a stool, ripping his heart out, drowning emotionally, right there in front of you. After, “Unplugged,” letters to the band’s Ten Club almost doubled, many were about “Black,: and they began in an eerily similar fashion: “I was recently considering suicide, and then I heard your music . . ..”
Vedder answered many of the letters himself, sometimes leaving the band’s office in a wreck. But there was more work to be done. Almost immediately, the band returned to Europe to play some of the big summer festivals in front of 30,000 to 50,000 people. It was trial by fire.
“The whole thing culminated in Denmark,” says Ament. “The Danish, I think, were playing Italy in the World Cup, so the city was crazed. Nirvana was playing there, and they were dealing with their fame, too We played the show in front if 70,000 people. Eddie went into the crowd, like he usually does, and he came back, and the security didn’t know who he was. They started beating him up. Half the band went down. That was during ‘Deep.’ I remember we stopped, and I was ready to jump down, seeing this total riot happen . . . and Eddie and Eric [Johnson, tour manager] they’re totally swinging. And Mike’s down there, and Dave’s down there.”
The previous night in Stockholm, Sweden, Vedder explains, the band had played a longer show than usual. A group of Americans had reportedly broken into the dressing room and, among other things, stolen Vedder’s lyrics and journals. He had intended to give them away at the end of the tour, just as he’s done on an earlier European visit (with a backpack personalized by handwritten accounts of each show). But the theft weighed on him; it felt like a breach of trust, a bad omen. For Vedder , it was a metaphor for the growing success of Pearl Jam. The band about which Ament had once written, “Add water, watch Pearl jam grow,” was growing wildly, far beyond the small-scale plans for a small-scale debut. “It made us feel like playing those huge shows maybe wasn’t as important as we thought it was,” says Ament. “We packed out bags and left the next morning.”
Sitting in the Nitelite, Ament and Vedder recall the bruising end to that 1991 tour. The band had seen their unassuming debut “Ten,” sell into the millions. Only Billy Ray Cyrus had kept them from the No. 1 slot, thankfully saving at least one achievement for later. Pearl Jam had been designed for a slow build. Instead, they were strapped to the rocket. The band held numerous meetings: “Where do we draw the line?”
The line was drawn at “Black.” Eddie Vedder refused to turn the song into a video, wouldn’t listen to the corporate coaching that told him the track was, as Vedder puts it, “bigger than ‘Jeremy,’ bigger than you or me.” Vedder held firm, and the band backed him up.
“Some songs,” he says, “just aren’t meant to be played between Hit No. 2 and Hit No. 3. You start doing those things, you’ll crush it. That’s not why we wrote songs. We didn’t write to make hits. But those fragile songs get crushed by the business. I don’t want to be a part of it. I don’t think the band wants to be a apart of it.”
The subject soon turns to video, and Ament describes a recent encounter with Mark Eitzel from the group American Music Club. Ament and McCready jammed with the band in Seattle, but within 30 seconds of conversation, Eitzel took the opportunity to challenge Ament on the “Jeremy” video. “I liked your hit,” he’d told Ament, co-author of the song, “but the video sucked. It ruined my vision of the song.”
The exchange stuck with Ament. “Ten years from now,” he tells Vedder, “I don’t want people to remember our songs as videos.”
Vedder agrees. He promises that the new album will be released before any videos. “I don’t even have MTV,” he says with a shrug. “I don’t know why I’m commenting. People stop me in the streets and tell me about this new band, Stone Temple Pilots. I don’t even know who they are. I’m buying a sandwich, and they go, ‘What’s going on with the Stone Temple Pilots?’ ”
“You haven’t seen the video?” asks Ament. “You have to have seen it.”
“I haven’t,” he says. “I don’t have MTV.”
Ament tells Vedder about the “Plush” video, with the singer’s uncanny appropriation of Vedder’s mannerisms. Vedder’s heard it before. In fact, he hears it daily. From fans, from friends, even from a French musician who complimented him on the new song and his new short orange hair. (Vedder’s hair is still longish and brown.)
“Apparently, it’s something the guy is dealing with, too,” Vedder suggests. “It’s like, am I supposed to feel sympathy? Get your won trip, man. I don’t think I was copping anybody’s trip. I wasn’t copping Andy Wood’s trip. I wasn’t copping Kurt Cobain’s trip, even though Kurt Cobain’s one of the best trips I could ever cop. But Beth and I were part of the San Diego scene. We knew everything that was going on, and it was small enough to know. Those guys came from there? I never heard of ‘em.” End of subject.
For several more hours, Vedder and Ament reminisce over the strange daze of the last few years. Vedder admits to Ament that it’s no longer as easy, the stage appearances are tougher now. It’s harder, he says, to gear up to sing the songs the way they must be sung. And although Vedder is only an occasional drinker, he has taken to slugging a bottle of red wine onstage. When the conversation turns to the late Andrew Wood, though, Vedder becomes reflective.
“I wonder about Andy,” he says. “I relate sometimes. Not the drug part – I don’t need drugs to make my life tragic – but the fact that things were going so well for him. He didn’t know.” Vedder pauses. “There’s one song of his that I’d be proud to sing. I won’t tell you which one. But there was one song of his that always got to me. Someday I’m going to sing it.”
Vedder excuses himself to visit the restroom. Ament shakes his head. “First time I heard that,” he says with a smile.
It’s 2 a.m. now, a chilly night in June. Ament and Vedder stand shivering on the corner outside the Moore Theater. Neither seems anxious for the night to end. Fingering their car keys, they continue to talking under the darkened marquee. Tonight is Grad Night in Seattle. Last-call barflies and late-night prom couples brush past them on the street, no one recognizing the two musicians, save for one woozy grad in a couple in a crimson tuxedo. For a few minutes, he stands watching them from nearby, softly repeating a drunken mantra to himself. “Eddie, Eddie, Eddie, Eddie, Eddie,” he says and then moves on.
“I don’t know if it was the beer or the company or what,” Ament remarks, “but I got to a place tonight I hadn’t been in a long time.”
“Me, too,” says Vedder. “So much has changed around here.”
“There’s going to be a point where it’ll revert back to the way it was,” says Ament. “We’ll get through this whole period right now. We’ll get back out there, playing. We’ll get back to actually being five guys who want to work it out together.”
Vedder thrusts his hands deep in his pockets. “I’d really like that,” he says.
The two band mates stand in the dark for another 10 minutes, talking about Oliver Stone, “Reservoir Dogs,” about attitudes in the band and sexism on the road, about their pride in the new songs and about Vedder’s ultimate meltdown plan. He can always sell solo cassettes out of his house for $1.50. Finally the cold overtakes them.
“See you tomorrow,” says Ament, heading for the parking lot across the street.
“Wait,” says Vedder, “I’ll go with you.”
“F— You,” yells a chorus of fans near the front.
There is little poetry in the Italian crowd. Forty thousand fill this Roman soccer stadium today, but there isn’t much they’re interested in seeing outside of the group on the ticket – U2.
“F— me?” repeats Vedder, out on the lip of the stage. “Tell you what – you f— me , and Bono will f— you!”
The band launches into “Even Flow” and attempts to build a consensus, good or bad, anything. The struggle for acceptance ends in a draw. This is one of the few countries in the world not to have fallen under the Pearl jam spell, and the band feels the chill in its first of two shows opening for U2’s Zooropa ‘93 road extravaganza. It would be easy to write this audience off as lackadaisical, but within seconds of leaving the stage, the Zooropa DJ spins Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust,” and the entire stadium thunders along in beat, instantly.
Back in the dressing room, the band mills about, somberly picking at food. Abbruzzese already has a game plan for tomorrow: “I’m gonna lower the drum riser so I can see the audience. I’m gonna connect with those people.”
Within a few minutes, Vedder emerges upbeat and finds some American fans. “I wish we’d played a club here,” he tells them, signing some shirts. He and Beth Liebling head out to the mixing platform to watch U2 with the rest of the band. Before long, a cluster of super- and semi-supermodels position themselves just behind him, clucking and whooping, taking pictures, trying to get his attention. Vedder remains fixed on the spectacle ahead. Finally one of the models manages an introduction to him. She speaks earnestly to him, shaking his hand. Vedder nods politely, turning back to the show. Total time investment – three seconds.
Later the band rides the tour bus back to the hotel. Stuck in traffic, a crowd of Italian fans discovers the bus and strains to look inside. Their expression is unmistakable. “Oh,” they seem to say, “it’s the other band.” But still they stare, as if looking inside a fishbowl. “Wish we’d played a club date here,: says Vedder to no one in particular.
The conversation turns to Neil Young and the upcoming show with him in Dublin, Ireland. The band is soon talking about its next chance to jam with Young on “Rockin’ in the Free World.” But even this venerable topic is soon exhausted. And still the Roman faces stare inside the windows of the stalled bus. It’s unsettling. It as if Zoo TV has gone off the air, and the test pattern is Pearl Jam.
Until about a month before release, the album was going to be titled “Five Against One.” The name comes up during a meeting in a hotel room in Rome as the band approves the final mixes of the record. There are already rumblings from the record company. Can you raise Eddie’s vocals? And then there is the issue of video. Can we get a decision on a director? And the press interviews. You gotta do some. The answers to the questions are: Not Really, No and Later. Decisions swirl around them hourly, but Pearl Jam are intent on doing it their way. The album title feels appropriate. The phrase comes from a new song, “Animal.”
“For me, that title represented a lot of struggles that you go through trying to make a record,” says Gossard, who picked out the phrase. “Your own independence – your own soul – versus everybody else’s. In this band, and I think rock in general, the art of compromise is almost as important as the art of individual expression. You might have five great artists in the band, but if you can’t compromise and work together, you don’t have a great band. It might mean something completely different to Eddie. Bit when I heard that lyric, it made a lot of sense to me.”
It’s now Day 2 in Rome. Vedder sits at the top of the stadium bleachers on this blazingly hot afternoon in July. He wears a tourist shirt that says “I [heart] grunge.” He is rather anonymous in this country, and it agrees with him. “The whole success thing, I feel like everybody else in the band is a lot happier with it than me,” he says. “Happy-go-lucky. They kind of roll with it. They enjoy it, even. I can’t seem to do that. It’s not that I think I’m better than it. I don’t know. I’m just not that happy a person.” He shrugs. “I’m just not. What I enjoy is seeing music, getting to watch. Watching to Neil Young. Or I get to watch Sonic Youth from the side of the stage. That’s what’s been nice for me.”
“Music is an incredibly powerful medium to deliver a story boy. Bu the best thing is, you have to have volume. You’re supposed to play it loud. I would do anything to be around music. You don’t even have to pay me.”
Vedder confesses having some recent more difficulties in writing for Pearl Jam. As Gossard had pointed out earlier, the other band members now call him their spokesperson, and with that comes a certain Eddie ethic. Vedder works hard with manager Kelly Curtis to keep ticket prices low and to police the powerful promotion machine of Sony Music. But therein lies the great contradiction. The artists he most admires are the very ones who have turned their backs on the machinery of big-time rock – like Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye of Fugazi.