Pearl Jam & Eddie Vedder by Martin Clarke

Author:Martin Clarke
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780859658720
Publisher: Plexus Publishing Ltd.

‘We really weren’t collaborating with each other at the time . . . So the only way we could make something happen was by going into the studio and deciding on it then and there.’

Stone Gossard

McCready remained unconvinced, even after the album had been mastered, but he needn’t have worried. Vitalogy was far from incoherent. It was complex, yes, and hard listening too. There were also tracks which were decidedly inferior. However, when the album made sense, it was a deep, emotional, musically rich tapestry, despite its occasional abstruse flavour. Thematically the album touched on the media, the family, betrayal, responsibility, and emotional anger. Nothing new for the band perhaps, but the way Eddie dealt with these songs was far superior to what they had done before.

In order to get inside Eddie’s mind at work, it is interesting to look at this album in depth, to see how much thought goes into his work, where he gets his inspiration, how much he changes things, and what he feels during that process. The opening ‘Last Exit’ touches on the subject of death, the first word on the lyric sheet being ‘die’. Elsewhere, in ‘Immortality’, the spectre of Kurt’s death seems to loom large, although Eddie was not about to play on this: ‘No, that was written when we were on tour in Atlanta,’ he told the Los Angeles Times. ‘It’s not about Kurt. Nothing on the album was written directly about Kurt, and I don’t feel like talking about him, because it might be seen as exploitation. But I think there might be some things in the lyrics that you could read into and maybe will answer some questions or help you understand the pressures on someone who is on a parallel train.’ Even the reference in the song to a cigar box, like the one which was found next to Cobain’s corpse, was passed off as being to one where Eddie often kept his tapes. All the same, Eddie must have known people would assume this track referred to Kurt.

The new, harder Pearl Jam were again present on the next track, the punk-like ‘Spin The Black Circle’, which is almost thrash, a twisted love song about Eddie’s love for vinyl records. However, Eddie seemed to be veering off to the bizarre, with the liner notes talking of CDs as bad acid. The following song, ‘Not For You’, was more obvious – a clear-cut attack on the media and executives in it. Eddie said in the Los Angeles Times: ‘There is something sacred about youth, and the song is about how youth is being sold and exploited. I think I felt like I had become part of that too. Maybe that’s why sometimes I have a hard time with the TV end of music and much of the media and the magazines. When I pick up a magazine, I just count how many pages of ads before the first article starts. You go one, two . . . up to fifteen to twenty or more.

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