January 1995 Spin Article Part Two
LET'S GET LOST (Part Two)
But when you're actually onstage and the band clicks in, are you able to block out all that interference?
A lot of times, music is like a wave, so once it starts, you get caught up in it. And if the sound on the stage is good, I can get lost in whatever we're doing, and I'm fine. But I know for sure, right before you go on or as you're pulling into a town, it starts getting heightened. I'm getting notes backstage from people who are left out in the cold, that couldn't afford the $150 that the scalpers were charging, and how could we be playing if they can't get in.
It sounds as if you're an enabler: you take far too much responsiblity upon yourself to ensure that everyone connected to you is happy or well taken care of.
This could be the cause of everything. I'm worried about everybody else, and I'm absolutely just a fucking mess myself. I think I was like this from the beginning. And it's just gotten worse and worse and worse. And now I'm the enabler for a million people. I don't feel like I can survive it right now.
Did you feel that caretaking burden when you were younger?
I grew up with three younger brothers, and I felt a responsibility for them. And then I found out that I can't just give them a life, that they have to have some kind of initiative of their own. All of a sudden I was like a parent, saying "I'll give you a thousand bucks a month, but after three months we should really see some progress here, send me your grades." Giving away money is a complicated thing. And I didn't want to be their parent. As far as my mom goes, she's done a lot. After she divorced herself from an evil, evil father--not my real dad, but the guy I thought was my real dad--she went back to school and got her degree and ran a women's home for kids that didn't have fathers. Once the band got going, though, the only problem we had was that her identity became that of being my mom, and she forgot that she was special for everything she had achieved on her own. These evil radio programmers in Chicago, where she lives, they actually got her on the radio last year. They said, "Oh, we'll get a car to pick you up," and she said, "No problem, I'll drive down." You know, it sounds like fun or something. And next thing you know there was a radio contest--when you hear Eddie's mom on the radio saying "Pearl Jam is awesome" or something, you know, something totally sickening, you can call in and win tickets to the show. Obviously, this caused a huge rift between us.
Was she just naive?
Totally. And at the time I felt like there was ego involved on her side. Like, why would you do this? Why is this important to your personal makeup? And I think we've gotten through some of that, we're dealing with that. We're in a cool-down period. She just wants everything to be back to normal. I'd love to be able to simplify things. It just seems like it's just getting more complicated every day.
Do you think this is perhaps similar to what Kurt was feeling?
I have a hard time saying, because I don't know exactly what was going through his head at that moment or those two weeks or that month or that year. But I definitely have my own set of difficulties, of which I think there are many parallels. And I totally understand. When it happened, I was in a hotel room and somebody told me, and I just couldn't believe he did it, I couldn't believe he took the step. But I didn't think it was wrong, I just couldn't believe he did it. And I still can't. After it happened, I wrote him a letter and asked, "What's on the other side? And is there room for me?"
Are you able to recognize the differences between his plight and your own?
Well, he also dealt with...here I am sober trying to deal with these issues. And I always used to think that he and Courtney had things way more together than Beth and I did. Now I'm not so sure. I probably took some of that from stuff I saw in the media. They were able to deal with it a little better, kind of make it interesting, take good pictures. They seemed really strong.
Also, our management seems to be much more understanding of the pressures, even when they still put them on us. I think that Kurt was really treated like shit, and made to feel like a worthless individual, because maybe he didn't want to headline a big festival tour or whatever. If you're involved in that kind of thing, believe me, you see firsthand how it's very political. You've got one big band that's playing, but then you've got another band that's either on the same label or from the same management company, and so you're actually supporting a lot of other people's dreams of wealth. But you don't want to do that. All you want to do is play music, and you've got all the wealth you need. There's just tremendous pressure.
I've heard Courtney say that Kurt felt Nirvana was the most hated band in the world, that everyone thought it sucked.
That's exactly how I feel right now, which is just weird. Sometimes--I don't sit around and think about it all the time by any means--I wish that Kurt and I had been able to, like, sit in the basement a few nights and just play stupid songs together, and relate to some of this. That might've helped us to understand each other, that he wasn't the only one, or that I wasn't the only one. We kind of knew that in the back of our heads, but we certainly never... I mean, we had a conversation on the phone, but we didn't really address that. Courtney told me later that he was so excited about a song he'd written with Pat Smear about beans. And that was exactly where I was coming from at the time. I don't want anything to do with this larger-than-life bullshit.
Are some of the goofier songs on Vitalogy, like "Bugs," where you play the accordion, attempts to debunk that way of thinking?
I don't think you can really say that, because that would mean the guys and I would have sat down and discussed it. Before I went in the studio, I was walking around some little thrift shop, I found an accordion. And I went in with the accordion and played something, and then spoke some gibberish over the top. I remember laughing and saying, "That's the first single."
But if you had found that accordion three years ago, do you think that "Bugs" would have ended up on Ten?
Three years ago, this was so new to us. I think that it's almost confidence that enables us to record "Bugs" or confidence in our listeners that they can open up to something like that. Back then I had my mind on the business at hand, and I probably wouldn't have felt so free to take up two hours of studio time working on Eddie's wank-off accordion piece. For a long time after recording it, I was playing it for friends saying it was the best thing we'd ever done [laughs]. We just decided to do something that was fun to listen to and wasn't bombastic and wasn't everything that the band had become.
Does Vitalogy sound good to you right now?
Yeah, I can definitely listen to every song on the record and get something out of it. "Nothingman" was written in an hour, and so I like listening to that 'cause it just happened and somehow captured a mood there, at least for me in the vocal. Any time I can nail down a song, a thought, in a half hour, that feels really good. We recorded "Tremor Christ" in a very short period, one night in New Orleans, and I remember what that night was like. I can see how the lights were turned down low. I can see the room. And so I like listening to that. I wrote "Better Man" before I could drink--legally--on a four-track in my old apartment.
Most of the tracks you mention are the ones that are less bombastic. Does that indicate a desire to do something on your own to help alleviate some of the pressure that comes down on the band?
I do stuff like that all the time, but no one ever hears it. So the only image people have of me is anthem singer, rock star.
You know, Ian [MacKaye, of Fugazi] came to our show in D.C., and he liked it. Just the fact that he came...that was actually the day that we found out about Kurt, and I was just spinning. I was lost and didn't know if we should play, or if we should just go home, or if we should attend the services. I still have some regrets about that, even though in the end it was probably better that we played the last two weeks of the tour. I decided I would play those next two weeks and then I'd never have to play again.
But Ian came and he said he really enjoyed that it was stripped-down, and that all we did was go up and play these songs.
Why did this surprise you so much?
I seem to have so little faith in what we do for some reason. I think what it is, is that I can relate all too well with these people who look up and trash our band, who say, "U2 sucks, and this sucks, and I used to listen to their early stuff but they suck now 'cause everybody else likes them, and because there's a bunch of geeks running around wearing their T-shirts," and "I used to think they meant something, and now they don't." I understand the mentality. But it's just an awful feeling to be the one that is targeted.
I get pissed off if I see someone's picture everywhere: on the cover of this, on the back of that, in ads, in sound bites on TV. I start to hate that person, whether I've heard their music or not. And so I've really tried to hold back from doing that stuff. I think that's what pissed me off about Time magazine, when I didn't have to agree to be on their cover in order for them to put me on it. I felt like, fuck, I'm gonna be that guy I hate whether I want to or not. And pretty soon, I'm gonna be an icon that can just be joked about. I'm too sensitive to that kind of stuff. I did my best to hold us back from becoming that, at least after witnessing what happened on the first record. I thought for the second record we were pretty mellow. We took ourselves off TV. But I still feel like we're that band that everybody hates.
Maybe some of that's over, though. A lot of the heat you took was due to the whole grunge label, and the impression that you were somehow imposters.
And which I felt guilty of. 'Cause to me, grunge is the guitar sound, and I don't think we were that at all. I just felt bad, I felt like there are grunge bands out there, or what I define as that, doing tremendous things, and that we were ushered in with that as our laminate to get backstage, and we didn't deserve it.
And that's what people got bitter or vindictive about.
And I'm right there with them.
But grunge is going to be like "New Romantic" soon, a musical phrase that's no longer part of the lexicon. In which case your band can begin to get taken on its own merit, and not as part of any movement. The whole thing got so...
Overblown.
And everyone got sick of it.
And how could you not when there are pictures of Liz Smith in Vanity Fair in grungewear. And my $10 corduroy jacket was going for $400 from Chanel or whoever.
Don't you think it's possible that phase has passed?
That would be a positive thing for me to fold up and put in my back pocket, and I'd be an asshole for letting it overcome me. That's my other thing, it's like, "Fuck, what an idiot. He's let all this affect him."
I like to think that I'm just gonna relax and do something like go to a record store and pick up Maximum RockNRoll.
That'll cheer you up.
[Laughs] Yeah, to them I'm the Antichrist. I think when Jello [Biafra] got his leg broken and beat up by those punkers in San Francisco--they were calling him a sellout and kicking him in the head--I think that was almost liberating. I said, "I don't give a fuck anymore. If they're fucking kicking Jello, how can I worry about what anybody thinks? How can I expect to still have someone's respect on that end?" That guy lost his empire, his future, battling that censorship thing [over the H.R. Geiger poster for Frankenchrist]. He ran for mayor. You couldn't write a movie script with a more ethical antihero. And yet here he is getting the shit kicked out of him.
Maybe it comes back down to that easy target thing. Dave Grohl wrote a song that I've got a copy of, and the chorus talks about "I'm alone / I'm an easy target." I don't know what he's thinking about there, but the chorus always plays in my head.
I'm not very good at protecting myself. That's one of the problems here. I'm either gonna learn how, or what'll actually happen is that I won't put myself out there, certainly not in these kinds of forums. I feel pretty safe letting it out in the music, but not in the media. There are people who want to be validated through the press, and through public opinion. I don't feel that way at all.
Why, then, did you decide to go through with this interview?
You know what? I felt it was a real honor that people said we were their favorite band. People should know that it meant a lot to me.
You were also voted most overrated band.
Well, I totally agree with that. [laughs]. If a ballot had my name on it, then you would've seen it exactly that way. I wouldn't have put us as the best band, but I certainly would have put us as the most overrated.
What music are you inspired by these days?
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. The Frogs. Daniel Johnston, who cannot be mistrusted. I basically don't want to hear anyone tell me any lies. I spent my life living with fucking lies, and I don't want to believe in somebody's music and find out it's a fucking lie. Who else? Crunt. Kat [Bjelland, of Crunt and Babes in Toyland]. Believe when she sings. Ian's brother Alec, the words he wrote when he recorded with a band called Faith. Everything Ian and Guy [Picciotto, of Fugazi] have written. Michael Stipe on a song called "The Wrong Child." He's singing from someone else's perspective, but it's real. I've heard Pete Townshend demos of songs he never released, perhaps because of their honesty, perhaps he didn't want to hurt his wife's feelings.
Where do things presently stand with your band's battle with Ticketmaster?
It's in the hands of the Attorney General and the Justice Department. There was this editorial in the Seattle Times [September 8, 1994], and I thought, my God, I wonder where this journalist got his information, because these figures are completely wrong. When I got to the bottom, I saw it was actually written by the vice president of Ticketmaster. He was portraying the organization as if it were a very small-time operation. That would gain my sympathy for sure, some small-time operation being bullied by the multimillion-dollar machine that is Pearl Jam. I wrote back that if you're such a small-time operation than you're gonna have no problem convincing the Justice Department you don't have a monopoly.
Back when we were on tour last spring, we asked everybody to take a cut [in profits]--we were taking a cut, and we said if we're gonna work with you, you have to do the same, because we're not going to take as much money from our fans as everyone would like. Ticketmaster didn't want to take a cut. We felt the service charge they were asking for was disproportionate to the ticket price we were offering. If you have a $55 Rolling Stones ticket and there's a $3 to $6 service charge, okay. But ours was an $18.50 ticket, and now all of a sudden it's a $24.00 ticket. That's not right. I just want people to be able to see our shows. It's extremely important that it's available to everyone, that if they'd like to attend they're able to. Also, when you start having $50 tickets, all of a sudden you're changing your audience. And that's a frightening thought, playing only to people that can afford a $50 ticket.
That's a positive legacy of punk rock--lessening the distance between the performer and the audience.
As much as the sounds on our records may be different--they're certainly not punk rock--I feel like our attitude, and the way we handle our business... I feel nowadays punk rock is having control.
It occurs to me that you have a couple of things in common with riot grrrls. Not just the idea of maintaining control of your product, but the notion that youth is to be protected, that's it's pure.
I totally agree with that. On "Not For You" [from Vitalogy], I sing "All that's sacred / Comes from youth." That's something a little different, meaning that what we learn and experience then maybe doesn't happen again, and that some of our best memories are gonna come from those times, whether they're good or bad. When you just said protecting, I thought about not having our youth exploited by various music channels, or by corporate sponsorship. This was a while back, but just to see that the Spin Doctors had their tour sponsored by Levi's or something... I don't know anything about that band, I've never listened to their music. This was the same time we were doing the Ticketmaster stuff, and I thought, what the hell are they doing? Why would anybody want to do that? Sure, right now it's the odd band out there that does that, but I just don't want there to be a day when every band is sponsored. Hopefully in 50 years, when I check back in on society after I've left to go sleep under a tree, I won't wake up and see that it's changed like that.
What do you see around the corner for yourself?
Right now I'm just kind of interested in playing a few shows around town, maybe going to Oregon, Canada, maybe Alaska, and just play small, unannounced gigs, use different names, see what happens. Get back to playing music, standing up there and just playing. Not living up to anything, you know?
Email: edvedder32@aol.com
