And Vedder, the guy who never slept, still doesn’t sleep. “Never have,” he says. “Never have, and now I really don’t. I have that spasm thing. I wake up and go, ‘Aaarrrgh.’ I’ll get up and start pacing. I’ll walk through a room, and the TV’s on, and my face is on, and I start to freak out. I want to call a friend and say: ‘Did I lose my mind? I need perspective.’ I talked with Henry Rollins one day. I said, ‘Dude, I need some perspective real quick.’ And I felt really bad doing it. Because I was calling him up for the same reasons kids call me up.”
You wonder, of course, is this all part of Vedder’s elaborate defense mechanism. How can you attack the man who attacks himself? How can you doubt the credibility of a man who won an MTV Video Award for “Jeremy” and then told 50 million viewers, “If it wasn’t for music, I would have shot myself in front of that classroom.” For all his open-wound honesty, there are many mysteries that Vedder still clings to. Even a close band mate like McCready says: “No, I don’t know if we’ve ever had that big, bonding talk yet. Our relationship is still growing. We’ll probably have it sometime soon.”
Asked about his childhood, Vedder plays it close to his chest. He tells an anecdote about waiting tables back in Chicago. He tells of moving to San Diego and buying beanbag chairs and his first bad stereo. He tells of bootlegging shows, something he still does with a pocket-size microrecorder. All perfect sound bites for populist myth making, but when confronted with questions about his childhood, Vedder becomes vague. Of his earliest memories, he says only: “I’m confused. I’m mixed up about everything. I don’t know what’s happening now.”
He stills answers fan mail, though less frequently, and tour manager Eric Johnson sometimes visits the Seattle office late at night to find Vedder calling back troubled fans. But as Vedder had carefully told one fan in San Francisco after a show: “I’m really not in your head, I’m not thinking all your private thoughts.” The fan had looked so disappointed. Vedder, in turn, has learned the public effect of writing well about damaged personalities.
“I was surprised and a little upset that so many people did relate,” says Vedder. “Everyone’s f—ed up. Actually, now I understand those religious channels more. Everybody needs something.” He pauses for a long time. “There should be no messiahs in music. The music itself, the music, I don’t mind worshipping that. I’ve done that. And with that comes a little but of admiration for the people who make it – or awe or whatever – But I never asked for nose hair from Pete Townshend.”
Back in Rome, on the second day, Pearl Jam offer a combative performance. “”I’ll meet you back here at a club next time,” Vedder says, to sprinkled applause. Later, he begins to goad them, telling them their stadium was built for soccer not music. And below a neon Zoo TV sign, he playfully taunts further: “Are we animals?” Let it never be said that Vedder doesn’t enjoy the fine taste of the hand feeding him. His green T-shirt contains today’s gaffer-taped message: Paul is Dead (Look up Bono’s real name.) The set closes with Vedder donning a huge fly mask, dancing as if caught in a web. It is Pearl Jam’s own low-fi answer to Zoo TV. Not many fans here get it, but one who does is Bono, who watches curiously from the pit.
Bono responds later that night, onstage, “So you can’t play music in a soccer stadium,” he muses. “Well if you do, it better be good music . . . .” But before the set is over, he hails Pearl Jam as “a great rock & roll band.” And Vedder, Liebling and Ament will stay up all night with Bono and the Edge, talking passionately at a diner, debating the issue of the day, the emotional exchange rate on success. And at 6 a.m., there are Vedder and Ament exchanging hugs with Bono on an empty Roman street, arriving at the bus just in time for the trip to Dublin.
“I got all my questions answered,” Ament confides. In the course of he dates with U2, he had discussed the hugeness vs. Purity issue with all four members of that band. “And they were basically told us this: ‘We used to be like you. We used to be anti-anti . . . . We used to be angry. But we love technology, like you love what you love. Next tour we might play only 3,000 seat halls. But this is where we are today. Ten years from now, you tell us where you are.’ ”
Today in Dublin, the day before Pearl Jam play for an estimated 50,000 at nearby Slane castle, Abbruzzese stands and watches as 30 or so young Dubliners sing resolutely to street-busking versions of “Black” and “State of Love and Trust.” Abbruzzese is grinning, handing out flowers on Grafton Street, playing with street kids. Gone is the bleachy sunshine of Italy. In its place is rain . . . pale faces . . . romantic beery arguments in the street . . . it feels like home.
Elsewhere, there are rumors that McCready has fallen off the wagon, running naked through the streets of Dublin late the night before. McCready, shopping for bootleg tapes today, does not confirm or deny this behind his reflector shades. “I love this place,” he says. Backstage the next day at the show, there are few of the trappings of big-time rock. No open bar, no stereo rack pumping psych-up music, no bodyguards, no supermodels. Just Vedder talking about why he couldn’t care less.
“I’m embarrassed for some of the ‘veterans’ of music,” he says. “They had their original [macho] image, and they’re still hanging on to it. The sex thing, they’re still working it. This dude-looks-like-your-grandpa kind of thing – it’s so silly, it kinda makes you sick. These guys are still using that ancient version of what’s sexy, the bikinis and tongues. It’s over. I relate to the people that are coming up now, and that’s not there, that’s long gone.”
Vedder’s relationship with Liebling, a writer, is the strongest one in his life. They’ve been together nine years. Perhaps soon, he says, he’ll be married. And when it’s time to start a family, he predicts he’ll be a devoted parent. He cites Michael Jordan’s father, then still alive, as a perfect example. “The ultimate parent is, if they’ve made a decision to have kids, that means they’re going to give someone else a chance, and they’re going to do whatever they can to boost that kid up so he can really shine,” he says. “I feel like, in the last 20 years, that’s been drained out of parenthood. I’m into real life. I’m into getting the most out of real life.”
Sitting now in the shadow of the 200-year-old Slane Castle, the hazy sun shining on his face, Vedder is asked about his own youth. What about his father?
“I never knew my real dad,” he says. “I had another father I didn’t get along with, a guy I thought was my father. There were fights and bad, bad scenes. I was kind of on my own at a pretty young age. I never finished high school.
He was Eddie Mueller then. After moving briefly to San Diego, both his parents had returned to Chicago. Vedder, who subsequently took his mother’s maiden name, had stayed behind to pursue his career in music. There was a rough goodbye to his stepfather. They haven’t spoken since. Later, Vedder was living in San Diego when his mother visited from Chicago with some important news for him.
“She came out with the specific purpose,” he says, “to tell me that this guy wasn’t my father. I remember at the time I was like, ‘I know he’s not my father, he’s a f—ing asshole.’ And she said, ‘Oh, Eddie, he’s really not your father.’ ”
“At first I was pretty happy about it, then she told me who my real dad was. I had met the guy three or four times, he was a friend of the family, kind of a distant friend. He dies of multiple sclerosis. So when I met him, he was in the hospital. He had crutches, or maybe he was in a wheelchair.”
Vedder plays with his ripped-out shoe. Somehow, a half-world away, the words flow easily as he recalls, as he pus it, “the day I found out.”
“There was a piano in room,” he goes on, “and I remember really wishing I knew how to play a happy song. I was happy for about a minute, and then I came down. I had to deal with the fact that he was dead. My real father was not on this earth. I had to deal with the anger of not being told sooner, not being told while he was still alive. I was a big secret. Secrets are bad news. Secrets about adoption, any of that stuff. It’s got to come out, don’t keep it. It just gets bigger and darker and deeper and uglier and messy.”
“Musically, I tried to think if I had a goal, what it was, and I think more than anything it was to leave something for my kid, if I had one, to listen to. I’m actually a junior. My real name is something-something the third.” Fans can find it in the song credits to “Alive,” on “Ten.”
Vedder’s biological father, it turned out, was a musician himself, and organist-vocalist who sang in restaurants. Once Vedder knew the truth about his heritage, other relatives stepped forward.
“There were all these things they wanted to say,” he recalls, “like ‘That’s where you got your musical talent from,’ and I was like ‘F— you.’ At the time, I was 14 or 15, I didn’t even know what the f— was going on. I learned how to play guitar, saved all my money for equipment, and you’re telling me that’s where it came from? Some f—ing broken-down old lounge act? F— you.”
Vedder says this quietly, but time has barely mellowed his emotions. It’s no surprise that “Quadrophenia,” the Who’s 1973 classic tale of disaffected English youth, was Vedder’s “Catcher in the Rye.” )He once told an interviewer, “I should be sending Pete Townshend cards for Father’s Day.) Music saved his life, he says, but the turbulence of Vedder’s cruel youth still fuels the music. It’s a painful circle. “My folks are very proud of me now,” he says. “And again, I’m thankful that they’ve given me a lifetime’s worth of material to write about.”
(Recently, a meeting with his real father’s cousin left Vedder with a sense of closure. “The strange thing,” he says, “is that there are so many similarities between my father and I. He had no impact on my life, but here I am. I look just like him. People in my family – they can’t help it – they look at me like I’m his replacement. That’s where ‘Alive’ comes in.” He pauses. “But I’m proud of the guy now. I appreciate my heritage. I have a very deep feeling for him in my heart.”)
Have fun with it. You hear the phrase often around Vedder. He rarely has a response. Have fun with it. Certainly his rock dreams are coming true: to sing “Masters of War” at the Bob Dylan tribute concert last year, to sing with the Doors at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and to finally meet his hero Pete Townshend. But to have fun with it, it seems, would place him one step closer to those rock starts in the magazines, the ones flipping their hair, the ones who caused him to write “Pearl Jam” ’s defining statement in “Blood” – “It’s in my blooood.”
It’s way too late to be Fugazi, and Vedder knows it. Still, Pearl Jam offer fans a challenge: Bootleg us if you can, take our album, pass the music around, don’t glorify us. Vedder long ago traded away the brown thrift-store jacket given him by Gossard, the one remade and marketed by the fashion industry as a $1,000 piece of grunge wear. The band no longer condones stage diving for a variety of reasons and even Vedder’s scaffold climbing appears to be history. He offers an entertaining perspective.
“That climbing happened out of me saying: ‘Look this is how extreme I am about this situation. This is how f—ing intense I’m taking the moment.’ You can’t do that for too long, because what they really want to see is, they want you to chop your f—ing arm off, hold up your arm, wave it around spewing blood, and believe me, if you did that, the crowd would go ballistic. You only get four good shows like that, though. Four good shows, and then you’re just a torso and a head, trying to get one of your band mates to give you one last hurrah and chop your head off. Which they probably wouldn’t do, which would really be hell.”
“But,” Vedder says with a laugh, “they’d say, ‘Sing from your diaphragm, at least you still have that going for you.’ ”
The Dublin audience is fierce and awake, fueled by anger and ale. Van Morrison performs to the hometown crowd, and he is greeted like a beloved uncle. He is offstage only a few minutes before the audience, in anticipation of Pearl Jam, surges to the front. “I love some kind of pressure in the air,” says McCready, peering out into the boiling mass of Irish fans. “Some kind of weirdness in the crowd, good o bad. That’s what we thrive on.”
Pearl Jam take the stage, and the crowd packs closer, straining the barrier. It’s brutal down front, and security is already pulling the semiconscious one by one, before a note is even played. Vedder walks on in a gorilla mask, pulls it off and hurls himself into “Why Go.”
It is a crowd happily perched on the edge of danger, and today they get the best out of Pearl Jam. Onstage, the band is narrowly missing each other as they all, in different ways, leap for joy, pogoing and twirling, just missing each other’s skulls with the instruments. The volatile crowd does not scare Vedder; he’s seriously singing to those serious faces listening to him the way he listened to the Who – with their whole lives attached. He stands on the edge of the stage, just watching them, and turns to share it with Liebling, who catches it all on Super 8.
It’s the show they’ve been waiting for, a glimpse of the future. “If it all ends tomorrow,” Abbruzzese says, “I will be the happiest f—ing gas-station attendant you ever saw.”
Best of all, Pearl Jam are no longer a band with only one very, very big album. “There’s no school to go to for some of the weird shit that happens,” says Vedder. “The f—ing weirdness of it all. But some of these guys, they can help out a bit. Bob Dylan’s advice was ‘Go to Dublin.’ I wrote him a postcard today.”
“It said, ‘Made it.’ “