Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder performs in Austin, Texas, last year. Photo / Getty Images
The rock veteran on advice from Neil Young, Donald Trump and surviving fame after 34 years in music.
At the end of Pearl Jam’s new album, Dark Matter, comes a song that sounds like a summation of everything that has happened to them until now. “Am I the only one hanging on?” the singer Eddie Vedder asks on Setting Sun, a quiet moment on the band’s 12th LP, which elsewhere exhibits touches of the Who’s stadium-filling drama, Neil Young’s ragged resilience, even Pink Floyd’s cosmic melancholy. And you are tempted to reply: it is certainly looking that way. Of Pearl Jam’s grunge contemporaries, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, Chris Cornell of Soundgarden and Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees are no longer with us.
“Survival is the normal response to life,” Vedder says when I ask him why Pearl Jam have endured — as a band, as people — when so many of their peers didn’t. “We shouldn’t be the abnormal ones for getting through it, and all the cases you mentioned were extreme. When you add drugs into the equation, you can see why people didn’t make it.”
Pearl Jam have not only survived, but prospered: 100 million album sales, enough loyal fans to fill stadiums worldwide, three and a half decades after emerging from Seattle’s localised attempt to combine the rebelliousness of punk with the appeal of classic rock. Two days before our interview, which takes place in a room at the Savoy hotel overlooking the River Thames, Vedder played Dark Matter to 600 fans while handing out tequila shots from the stage, exhibiting the combination of laid-back bonhomie and rock-star charisma that helped to propel the band into the stratosphere. As Vedder sings on a song from the album called Got to Give, “I’ll be the last one standing.”
“I’m simply saying I’m not going anywhere,” says Vedder, a softly spoken 59-year-old who comes across, on a sunny spring Saturday at least, as supremely unflappable. “I’m not going to give up. On my way to the launch two days ago, I was thinking, we’ve been going for 34 years and we’re getting on better than ever. Then I realised why. We hadn’t been on tour for a while, and we made the album so quickly that we didn’t have time to get into the usual conflicts. All the s*** that usually collects, like when someone mishears someone or takes something the wrong way, had no chance to happen.”
Dark Matter was recorded in two weeks at Shangri-La, a studio in Malibu, California, once leased by the rootsy Canadians the Band. Their producer, Andrew Watt, 33, is the hyperactive New Yorker whose speciality is giving an energy boost to rockers of a certain age: the Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop and Ozzy Osbourne have been subjected to his supercharged approach. “The one thing I can say about the record, whether you like it or not, is that you’re hearing the band at the peak of their performance,” Vedder says. “You’re generally hearing the first or second take.”
That work ethic, alongside a tendency to get on with it without too much overthinking, explains the longevity of Pearl Jam, although, according to Vedder, none of it was guaranteed. Their roots go back to the bassist Jeff Ament and guitarist Stone Gossard’s tenure in Green River, the original Seattle grunge outfit who proved too pioneering for their own good: a 1985 concert at New York’s punk hangout CBGB attracted a total of six people.
Ament and Gossard duly joined the Seattle glam metal band Mother Love Bone, but in March 1990 its singer, Andrew Wood, died of a heroin overdose aged 24; a bleak foreshadowing of problems to come for the Seattle scene. The pair formed Pearl Jam after Vedder taped vocals over a handful of their instrumentals that a mutual friend had given him.
Ament and Gossard’s idea was to strip hard rock back to its bare bones, Vedder had a lot to get off his chest after discovering the man he thought was his father was actually his stepfather, and whether through luck, talent, chemistry or a combination of all three, it worked — more than anyone could have expected.
“We didn’t know how to behave,” Vedder says of Pearl Jam going from the slow build of 1991′s album Ten to the hysteria of 1993′s Vs; close to a million copies sold in the week of release. “We didn’t know how to deal with what we were going through. It certainly wasn’t anything we were able to celebrate. It was kind of terrifying, actually.”
Vedder says initially, the band tried putting the genie back into the bottle: refusing to make videos, boycotting the concert giants Ticketmaster because of how much money they took from fans. Help came a year later from a surprising source: Neil Young. The awkward genius of rock hired Pearl Jam as his backing band for 1995′s Mirror Ball, subsequently taking them out on tour at a time when the Ticketmaster stalemate had all but stopped live activity.
“To see someone who was on the other side of it all, who was carrying on regardless, made us realise that none of the stuff we were going through really mattered,” Vedder says. “Neil is mercurial, he moves fast, and more than anyone else I’ve encountered he is always in contact with his muse. I wish we could have dealt with our success more gracefully, but at the same time our reaction was authentic and watching Neil in action helped us see the value in that.”
Young also taught Vedder the value of political songwriting, how to put poetry and character into commentary or protest. Young did it on his 2006 album Living with War and Vedder has done it with Wreckage, a pretty acoustic song from the new album about a certain orange-hued former President battling all manner of legal woes.
“There is a guy in the United States who is still saying he didn’t lose an election, and people are reverberating and amplifying that message as if it is true,” Vedder says. “Trump is desperate. I don’t think there has ever been a candidate more desperate to win, just to keep himself out of prison and to avoid bankruptcy. It is all on the line, and he’s out there playing the victim — at least they’re doing this to me, because if not they would be doing it to you — but you haven’t falsified your tax records. You don’t have classified information in your basement. So the song is saying, let’s not be driven apart by one person, especially not a person without any worthy causes.”
Perhaps Trump’s time is passing. “I can’t wait,” Vedder says. “Most thoughtful people are going through a bit of PTSD about it now, so maybe you’re right.”
Meanwhile, Pearl Jam have proved a longer-lasting proposition. Before our time is up, I ask Vedder if this life felt inevitable for him.
“I knew I wanted to express myself in music, whether anyone heard it or not,” he concludes. “You think, if someone were to hear this, maybe they would know me better. Maybe that is the power of any art form, actually: to get to know someone.”
Written by: Will Hodgkinson
© The Times of London
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