Long Road by Steven Hyden

Author:Steven Hyden [HYDEN, STEVEN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2022-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

Pearl Jam’s haphazard touring in 1994 and ’95 dramatically scaled down their public profile at a time when their fame should have been peaking. But it’s not the only reason why Eddie Vedder became an invisible man.

There was a woman who believed that he was Jesus Christ, and that he had raped her, and that he had subsequently fathered her two children. And this woman was stalking him, to the point of driving her car at fifty miles per hour into a wall protecting his house. “One of the reasons you’re protecting yourself is because you’ve been forthcoming with your emotions,” he later said. “So you have to build a wall. And now people are driving into the wall.”

The intensity of Eddie Vedder’s celebrity in the mid-nineties had reached that terrifying strata where it’s very difficult to tell the difference between love and hate. It’s that manic zone where the public becomes so obsessed with your every move that some fans come to believe that they can cure whatever is wrong in their heads by destroying the person who most dominates their thoughts. For anyone caught in that sort of titanic wave, staying out of the public eye suddenly becomes a matter of life or death.

Vedder’s public appearances outside concerts in 1995 were minimal. In early January, he inducted Neil Young into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame during a ceremony at New York City’s Waldorf-Astoria Grand Ballroom. At one point, he implored the audience—jokingly, though perhaps not that jokingly—to gang up on the people seated at the table designated for Ticketmaster. But otherwise he was forced to lay low. He would later recall spending a lot of time in the laundry room of his house, “with an ashtray that I trusted.” Anybody other than that ashtray was held at arm’s length.

Pearl Jam was not inactive that year. They played thirty-nine shows in seven countries and started work on their fourth studio album, No Code. But 1995 does seem like something of a lost year. It was a time when they came very close to breaking up, and in some sense kind of did break up.

I would describe what happened to Pearl Jam that year as a transfiguration. They ceased being the band that they were on the first three albums and started the process of becoming the band they would be in the twenty-first century. I’ve already talked about the Red Rocks concert on June 20, 1995, being a turning point in that regard, but this was not a spontaneous change. It took a while for Pearl Jam to turn into the new version of themselves. On this journey, there were crucial way stations where they were able to take stock of themselves and accumulate invaluable experiences and insights that ultimately paid off in the future.

In 1995, one of those way stations was Mirror Ball.

Is Mirror Ball—the album where Neil Young is backed by the members of Pearl Jam, mostly without Vedder—underrated? In terms of Neil Young’s discography, it tends to be overshadowed by the preceding LP, Sleeps with Angels.

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