With Mother Love Bone, you had some success,
and there was a tragedy there.
And what made you decide
not to continue with Mother Love Bone
and to form something totally different?
Because it was old at that time,
and we wanted to do something new.
So this is what we're doing now, new and fresh.
And then they saw me in a bra, and that was it.
And they said, "We've got to have him."
That was before his front tooth got knocked out.
And I have a weather report
for you people, and it's not a good one.
KCMU. Seattle's rockin' report.
What is it that drives
thousands of young angelic-faced boys
in our calm, tree-lined suburbs
to spend their allowances on Marshall Amplifiers?
Why is this happening?
Truth be told, there's always been a great scene in Seattle.
If you want some crisp, aggressive,
and emotional rock-and-roll, then get on down to The Off Ramp
on Friday, July 5th.
Wowwee!
You haven't seen anything yet.
My name is Cameron Crowe, and I was a rock journalist
when I first moved to Seattle in the mid-'80s.
I became aware of a whole scene of musicians
that really worked together to create
their own world of influences
and bands and community.
I immediately realized
how much this was different from the places I grew up in
and the music I listened to in Southern California.
This was music that came from guys
that stayed indoors a lot.
They had a lot of time to play and a lot of time to listen.
And they listened to everything,
hard rock, hair metal, glam, R&B, soul, disco, blues,
all of it cuisinarted together into this majestic mix
of great, melodic, hard rock.
We'd go and see the shows that got put on by The U-Men,
and we'd go see these guys,
and these guys would come see us.
Sometimes we would open for these guys.
So it was like us, we play.
Two guys who I met early on
were Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament.
They'd been in a well-known local band, Green River,
and had an obvious bond that drew a lot of people to them.
On any given night in Seattle,
it wasn't hard to run into Stone and Jeff
going out to listen to some live music.
Let's do a little more of an intimate thing.
Sit with me. Sit with me, my child.
Those people over there,
police officers. Wave at them.
How you doing?
This is not MTV, but it very well
could be at any time.
Sarcastic police officers. Excellent.
We're supposed to get in to see The Cult tonight,
but so far, nobody's showed up.
We finally got into the show.
We were outside for a long time and they wouldn't let us in
but we got these things, backstage passes.
How come you didn't come out and give me my pass earlier?
I was outside for so long.
We were outside for a long time,
and here is my witnesses right here.
Because you never believe me.
You never believe me, Stone. You never fucking believe me.
I knew when I met Stone,
I couldn't imagine hanging out with the guy.
Mark Arm introduced me to him,
and within five to 30 seconds, I think he wanted to punch me.
I had recently been introduced
into the exciting world of sarcasm,
and so that, to me, was the greatest joy
anyone could ever have.
Out here...
Rock people of all sorts,
Susan Silver, Chris Cornell, Jeff Ament.
We had a bit of a chip on our shoulder.
We always felt, l think, like, if it came from New York
or Chicago or Minneapolis or Athens,
it was probably better, but there also was
this attitude of somehow we will persevere.
It was very different
from Los Angeles' or New York's band scenes.
There were tens of groups in Seattle,
but they all knew each other, and everybody was talking about
Jeff and Stone's new band, Mother Love Bone,
and their amazing charismatic front man.
His name was Andy Wood.
I want the world to know that Mother Love Bone is coming
to take over the world, a plethora of delights,
a fruit salad compote of delights.
He was a fantastic entertainer. People loved him.
I mean, people loved to see him do his thing.
He was very funny. He would do something
like go to The Central Tavern when there was 25 people there.
He'd play it like it was a coliseum.
"To all you people in the back!"
And there's, like, two... There's the guy at the door.
He was a rock star. He knew it.
And something about that... I'll speak for everyone...
Made us believe that we were, too.
I want to get on an arena tour with some band.
Who cares? Warrant, for that matter.
What the hell? Go on tour with Warrant.
Just so we can play arenas.
That's the kind of crowd I like.
There's an easy crowd.
You can say anything.
You can say, "Your mother smells bad, people!"
And they'll just go, "Yeah! Yeah!"
There are certain people you just know that you love,
and you'll do anything for them.
You just wanted him to be a rock star.
You just saw it and were like, "I'm on your team.
"I want to be anywhere near you."
We're going down to L.A. On Monday to record an album.
Do you think you're the band of the '90s?
Do you think you're gonna be one of the forerunners?
I think so. I hope so.
I mean, I thought I always would be involved
in the band of the '90s.
So if we're not the band of the '90s,
I'm gonna fire my band and get a new one,
and then they'll be the band of the '90s.
'Cause you know what was weird?
Like, I was listening to the bottom end of all the songs,
'cause I was kind of worried about Stardog, you know,
and the bottom end of it...
The first guy that I called
to see if he wanted to be my roommate was Stone Gossard.
He was living at home, I think, and he answered the phone,
and he's like,
"Yeah, no, I'm good. I don't really want to...
"I don't really want to change my living situation right now."
And he was at home, so I thought that was a little weird.
But I thought, "Whatever. That's great."
And he said, "But Andy just got out of rehab,
"and he might need a place."
And I thought, "Well, that would be cool."
You know, I didn't really know him,
but I thought, that would be interesting.
He seems like an interesting guy. It would be cool.
I called Andy up, and he's like, "Sure. I'm coming over."
Chris and Andy had a very deep relationship.
I know that both of them had 4-tracks
set up in their bedrooms,
and they would each try to record a song a day
and play it for the other guy.
He just had a freedom.
He didn't edit anything that he did, anything that he wrote.
He didn't care. He just charged through the creative process
without a care in the world, and I was the opposite,
over analyzing, and...
It was just a really exciting creative time.
Thank you so much.
As long as I've known the guy,
there's always been different times
where he wasn't comfortable with himself,
and his using drugs was a product of that, too.
If you know any addicts, you know that, you know,
just because they quit for three months doesn't mean shit,
and he was someone who definitely had
a certain tragic flaw.
That's where his greatness came from.
We knew that he was trying to be sober,
and we knew that he was really...
That he couldn't just sustain...
You know, you can't just...
You can't...
You can't really be a junkie
and be super-productive and, like...
I mean, maybe somebody can,
but he wasn't going to be able to do it.
That morning, like, March 19th, 1990,
there was, like, five messages from Xana,
Andy's girlfriend at the time,
saying... You know, just hysterical.
We all got in a taxi
and went up to Harbor view,
and he was on life support at that point,
and it was a fucking trip.
I mean, it was, like, the worst, most horrible...
It was confusing, you know.
It was, like, "Andy O.D.'ed and he's not dead,
"but he's not gonna live, but he's not dead,
"and you've got to come now."
Whenever people would start to get into drugs after that,
I'd always... I always thought, like,
I wish I had a picture of Andy when he was in the hospital,
because it was... It was so horrible.
He was... They kept him alive for a couple of days.
I think mostly just so family and friends
could say good-bye or whatever, but...
It was... It was horrible.
It's difficult to articulate it,
but, it's...
You know, up to that point,
I think life was really good for us
As a... Just a group of musicians in a scene,
making music.
It just... You know, the world was sort of our oyster,
and we had support, we supported each other.
And he was kind of like this beam of light
sort of above it all,
and to see him hooked up to machines,
that was the... I think the death of the innocence
of the scene.
It wasn't later when people surmised that...
That Kurt blowing his head off was the end of the innocence.
It didn't... It was that.
It was walking into that room.
So at this point, I think everyone
really wants to take a break, for one,
and just kind of let things happen naturally to a certain extent
to see where we want to go with it, you know.
We're not in any huge rush
to be rock stars at this point.
And Andy's attitudes and personality
were such an integral part of Mother Love Bone
that, you know, there's just...
You wouldn't be able to replace him.
It’s just not, in our minds at least, it just...
Fiddle with it.
What? You just lost all sound?
Check.
Hello. Hello. Hello.
In some ways, I was just thinking
about this in the last couple of days,
that I can relate to the Clippers and the Nets
because... I've kind of...
I feel like my musical career has kind of been that way,
in that every time that it seems like it's starting to take off,
somebody goes down with an injury
or the coach gets fired or something happens.
I remember Jeff saying,
"Maybe I'm not supposed to be doing this.
"You know, that was my shot, and it's gone."
I think if my dad and I hadn't had
such a contentious relationship at that point,
I probably would have left Seattle.
I never felt like giving up.
You know, I think I was writing songs days later probably,
you know, playing my guitar and still just going,
"I love playing my guitar."
I ended up playing
with a really good friend of mine in town named Mike McCready.
We got together, and we started playing
in his parents' attic.
That's when I had the conversation,
"We've got to get Jeff Ament in the band."
Jeff was playing with some other folks
and I think having a good time doing that,
and my first instinct was like, "I don't know."
I remember him just saying, "Fuck Jeff Ament, "
or something like that, and I was kind of shocked.
Like, "Dude, that's your guy.
"You've been with this guy forever."
But Mike was like, "No, you've got to."
And I was like, "Okay."
And then Jeff was there, and I was like, "Yes."
We went in and did a demo
pretty quickly after that with Matt Cameron.
And I was like, "What are you guys gonna do with it?"
And they were like, "We're just trying to get a singer."
I was working a security job in San Diego.
I was just, like, writing music in my living room
for the longest time, you know.
This instrumental tape, it migrated to me,
then it really started bringing out some emotions
that I hadn't touched on in a while.
It just... this natural thing came out,
and all I did was record it.
I surfed in P.B. One morning after work
and went and recorded it, like, literally
with the sand still on my feet and stuff
and just sent it up that day.
This is where Jeff Ament... His apartment was.
This is the place where I came over after he called me
and said, "I got this demo from... Back from Ed,
"back from Eddie,
"and you should come over and check it out.
"It's good."
It was a voice on a tape that blew my mind.
It was kind of, "Who is this? Is this real?"
I really remember thinking that,
like, "Is this a real guy?"
"Who is this guy?"
Here, in fact, is the Momma Son tape.
This is it, huh?
That is the tape.
Crazy.
I remember listening to music.
I remember thinking about his voice.
I heard a person in there, like a real person.
I didn't hear a person trying to sound like another person.
I heard a guy. I hadn't met him,
but he's in there.
And look it. It has...
There's my phone number on it.
I'll call the number later
and see if I can find a younger you.
Tell him to be careful.
Hold on. Hold on, my friend.
Hi. I'm Eddie Vedder.
In Seattle, I feel like I'm kind of the new kid, and...
I'll be a new kid for a while.
We flew Ed up, and we hung out for about a week
and worked on these songs
in the basement of Galleria Potato head.
It’s just nice to walk in that room,
and you smell raw materials, you smell paint.
There's this whole feeling of, like, creativity.
You hear the pound of your footsteps
as you go down this basement,
and you just go in and light it up.
I remember right before he got on the plane to come down,
he said, "When I get there, I want you to pick me up,
"and I want to go straight to the practice studio
"and I don't want to fuck around.
"I just want to plug in the instruments and get at it."
The music that sprouted right off the bat
was pretty heartfelt and deep, and before we knew it,
we all spent five days rehearsing.
The sixth day, we played a fucking show.
We thought it was just insane that we were playing a show
after being together for five or six days, yeah. Totally.
Let's talk about the show at The Moore.
The hidden Eddie Vedder. Where was he?
He was frightened. He was terrified.
It was a bit hard for me at the beginning,
coming up and being part
of a different place and a different scene,
and it wasn't just a neutral zone.
It was their zone.
He was really coming from a different place
that I didn't... I didn't fully understand.
And I felt like he's good,
and then once I met him and saw how personable he was
and, like, excited and not fucked-up
and you know, just like a guy that
we sent him music,
and literally, like, two weeks later, we had music back.
And that it wasn't Mother Love Bone.
That was big.
You know, we had gotten a few tapes,
and they were all, like, Andy kind of tribute things,
and it was all like whoa...
I think it took me years to understand Eddie.
My dad... He passed away
before I knew he was my dad, right?
So I grew up with this dad I thought was my dad,
and then I found out later that he wasn't
and that the guy who was my dad
had already passed, like, a few years earlier, man.
There's only two chords to this song.
It'll probably be really boring on an acoustic.
You know, looking back, I realize, like,
we all got together in that room at that time,
and you know, I was still thinking about stuff
with, like, my dad and loss and all that,
and then what they were thinking about,
having been through the situation with Andy and everything, so...
In ways we were strangers,
but we were coming from a similar place.
And all that kind of came out in the first batch of songs.
Release was kind of a drone jam
that we were messing around with in the basement
the first week that Ed came up,
and it was one of those songs
that he just started singing over the top of it,
and these words came out of him.
I remember the first time that we played that song,
right at the end of it, I remember
he sort of ran away and ran around the corner.
I was thinking about my dad,
and then afterward, it got me all tore up,
and I went in the little hallway,
and then Jeff came out and said, you know, "You okay?"
So this one here,
this is, I don't know if you've ever seen this.
This is my dad.
I met him a few times,
but he was just, like, a friend of the family or something.
Edward Louis Severson lll.
When I was born, that was my name.
So he kind of... He's up there for me.
Like, he's up in the ether somewhere.
I feel him sometimes.
The camaraderie and the healthy competition part
I found later was unusual,
and it was Johnny Ramone that actually
pointed that out to me later,
talking about, I think, you know, the friendship
you saw between Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, for example,
and saying, "I've never seen that before.
"New York wasn't like that. We hate each other.
"We would screw each other up at every turn.
"If you could, you would mess the other band up."
The best thing about it is, I think, that...
You learn from each other, you know, and you...
You're inspired by each other.
For me, Temple of the Dog grew out of that.
After Andy passed, Chris (Cornell) just wrote these songs.
We were going to record it with, you know,
the surviving members of Mother Love Bone.
It was a fun record that no one had any expectations for,
so nobody worried about it, and that made it
feel very fresh from beginning to end.
For him to write songs
and then have the idea of sharing those songs
with Jeff and I was just, like, another generous gesture
that said, "I'm not only gonna help you guys with this record,
"but I'm gonna even ask your new singer,
"who he just is kind of a shy, quiet guy,
"because I haven't really heard his voice yet.
"I kind of saw you guys live,
"and you know, maybe he can sing. I'm not sure."
And then you hear it, and you go,
"Our guy sings really fucking good, too."
Eddie was very shy at the beginning.
He was very kind of self-conscious.
He's wasn't fully comfortable, I think...
Until him and Cornell went out one night.
He really embraced Eddie when he first moved up here,
and sometimes I wonder if that was a void that he felt
from Andy's passing,
having another equally talented singer
that he could sort of bounce ideas off of
or just basically relate to.
I know Eddie felt a real mentorship,
and I think that gave him a lot of confidence.
It was the first time
I ever heard myself on a real record.
So it could be one of my favorite songs that...
That I've ever been on, or the most meaningful.
Where's Stone Gossard when we need him?
Where is Stone? My God.
We went up to Vancouver to open for Alice in Chains.
Played at this place called The Town Pump.
During the song Breath,
security was taking out some kid, some drunk guy.
They were being overly aggressive.
They were really taking this guy out,
and Ed noticed that, was watching it.
And you could just see this change come over him.
This guy that had been shy, that people didn't really know,
he didn't know us, all of a sudden
his voice changes, his attitude changes.
It just got really intense.
You got a problem.
Here we are in the studio.
They're known as Mookie Blaylock, but...
Not anymore. We had some legal problems.
Yeah, the name was taken
by this guy named Mookie Blaylock.
Mookie Blaylock and Michael Jordan.
Look at that. They played yesterday.
The Bulls won, victorious.
So the new name is Pearl Jam.
We're not gonna cultivate anything today.
Okay. So Pearl Jam, the new name.
And you guys have a lot of other stuff going on,
almost as we speak.
Yeah. We're going in the studio tomorrow
to make our first album.
I was selling merchandise at that time,
and you know, you can only take so much stuff into Canada.
Everything we brought, you know, I brought
based on kind of what we'd been selling up to that point.
That night, before the opening band was even done playing,
I had sold out of everything, stickers, T-shirts.
Anything that we brought across was gone.
I had nothing to do for the rest of the night.
So I grabbed my camera and filmed the whole show.
They were breaking. Things were taking off.
That's our CD.
See, I hate holding up a CD.
I want to hold up an album.
You can barely see this.
Our band is doing 10 times as well
as I ever thought we would.
We're getting to play shows almost every day.
You know, we're happy.
So the band's chemistry seems really good right now.
Yeah. Yeah. Very much a family.
What is, you know, being on the road, being touring,
what is the strangest thing that has happened to you?
Right here.
I'd like to thank D'arcy from the Smashing Pumpkins
for letting me borrow her wardrobe.
I think she looks a little better
in it than you do, though.
We showed up in Zurich, Switzerland,
and the venue was almost like a kind of an art house.
The stage is, like, about as big as our drum riser.
We're like, "What are we gonna do?"
We'd been playing enough at that point
that we were kind of ready to change something up.
And we asked the local guys, "Is there a chance
"that you could get us some acoustic instruments?
"Maybe we could just do kind of an acoustic show."
And we'd never done that before.
And then it was the next day, somebody called
and asked about "MTV Unplugged."
So we said, "Yeah, we could do that."
Yeah. We just did it. Yeah.
Yeah.
It’s a true story, something that I really felt
and I still feel every time I sing it.
A lot of your songs are sort of on the dark side.
Is there any reason for that,
or is that just mostly what you see, or...
My emotions.
It seems like I should be even really happy right now.
You know, I get to, like, play shows.
It’s been amazing, but the fact is,
it's like my emotions are like a quarter flipped in the air.
It’s just like black and white, you know, good and bad,
constantly, and you know, maybe by talking
about things that may be a little darker
or more, you know, on the negative side of our existence,
by dealing with them,
maybe that's where I find my happiness.
The folks at MTV said
they thought that was one of the best "Unpluggeds."
Is it nice to get that kind of response,
especially when it's a stripped-down...
I don't trust nobody,
especially when they say something good.
If I even see you having fun,
you will be promptly arrested
and led away.
Fuck security.
Yeah!
That was when Ten was completely blowing up.
They played at 3:00 in the afternoon.
They were, like, the second group.
But the frenzy during their set got more and more extreme
as the tour went on.
And it was all a whirlwind,
because we went from vans to playing little clubs
to a little bit bigger clubs,
and then we get in "Lollapalooza, "
and then you have everything blow up.
I remember not being able to sleep
for entire nights after the show
because you'd be so buzzed.
I finally figured out years later
that if I took a bath, that sometimes put me to sleep.
Is it like you can...
Like you're just walking down the street one day
and all of a sudden you feel like
you're getting a lot more exposure
by a lot more people coming up to you?
Like, I'm just wondering, like, when would you start noticing
that all of a sudden, you know, your millions,
millions of people are, like... Yeah, exactly.
That would be weird. That would be weird.
We try not to think about that as much as we can.
Think about that sentence for a while, America.
Think about it.
Back on the "Headbangers Ball"
with Eddie and Mike of the band Pearl Jam.
The album is called Ten. Why is it called Ten?
Actually, that's back to Mookie Blaylock.
That's his number. It’s total dedication to Mookie.
Now, we're about to play your video for Alive.
Did you like making the video, or...
That was the thing. We didn't make a video.
We said we just wanted to play live.
There's no way, with a song like that,
which talks about living for the moment,
that we're going to, like, lip-synch something
that we had recorded a few months ago.
I wonder what they're going to do for another video
if we ever have to do one,
because all we ever want to do is live.
Really? You can't see yourself
ever making some sort of conceptual video or anything like that?
Roll sound. Background.
I personally have no problem
with the theory of doing a concept video at all.
To me, it's more of a question
of what you have more control over,
and we're going to give some control up this time
and, you know, see how it works.
That song was part of the second wave
of songs that we wrote with Ed.
I still didn't really understand songwriting at that point,
and pretty much that whole song is in A.
There's not really, like, a real major chord change in that song.
It sort of goes against the rules of, like,
how to write a pop song.
Ed had been reading a newspaper
when we were starting to jam on the song
and basically wrote the entire lyrics
off of a newspaper article.
Visually making that video with Mark Pellington,
he did such a great job at making you see
kind of how heavy that lyric was.
You seem kind of embarrassed about it.
This seems to me to be quite a valid
sort of artistic thing to be doing up there.
It was just... it’s a different...
You know, it's a different kind of focus.
You know, and that's the key to it,
is just focusing, you know,
but kind of like, with a camera,
that's just... You know, I'm just not into it really.
Yeah!
We've never played for this many people before.
We never thought we'd ever play for this many people.
So you ready for one more? 1, 2, 3, 4.
Yeah, lots of times,
especially when our singer starts climbing up on the ceiling,
like, 50 feet above the stage, and, like, is on a truss.
You know, it's like, "Don't do that."
Were you worried he'd fall down?
All the time.
I thought, "This guy's gonna fall and kill himself,
"and our career is over."
I was worried every time he did it.
Over the gigs, it got higher and higher.
You'd do one, and then you'd notch it up,
because you survived the last one, so...
We're gonna take this to some level
that people aren't gonna forget,
and if that means risking your life,
we're gonna do it.
You know, we'd get to the hotel after the shows or whatever
and feel pretty good physically,
and then I'd take a shower and realize that I had, like,
a thousand deep scratches on my back.
I didn't want him to hurt himself.
But at the same time, it's like there was no talking to him.
He was going to do what he was going to do.
He could have killed himself a couple of times probably
for sure, which would have been...
More than I could have taken.
Tell me. You look quite mixed up.
Look at these pictures. I'll show you these pictures.
I'll show you why I feel the way I do.
It’s a little bit overwhelming
to see this many people.
I mean, I'm sure you've been looking at this all day.
It’s a lot of people.
We're used to playing small clubs, you know,
and we want to go back to playing small clubs.
He wanted Pearl Jam to be a band
that goes out and tours in the van
and pays its dues and plays clubs
and makes albums and has a slow, natural life.
He was not the guy that wanted to come out
and have overnight success.
I think he was critical about the mixes of Ten.
He felt like maybe they were leaning too commercial.
He was really reluctant.
You are also not going to be
doing videos right away at least.
We just don't know.
You know, our mind is on music right now,
which is probably a really good thing for everybody.
I think I got that theory to make that part work.
I come in one earlier than I normally do.
So I still do four. So it almost felt like it didn't...
It almost kind of always felt like I did
one too many or something,
but it didn't, like, play itself.
Let's just do it one more time.
A lot of my job is taking what they bring
and turning it into something.
Okay, this is a chord change. This is this. This is a melody.
Okay, but what does that mean?
Where am l? If I close my eyes, where am I?
What does this music mean?
Let's just figure out where we want to go on that verse.
I was at this, like, small, little coffee shop,
and someone came up and stopped me,
and the waitress, this older lady,
kind of witnessed it and said, "You're..."
I said, "Yeah, yeah, " you know.
She says, "What? You don't like it?"
I said, "it’s just...
"it’s no big deal, you know. I'm just this guy."
And she says, "If you don't like it, you know,
"you certainly picked the wrong business to be in."
And she had a really good point.
The fact is, when you sit in your room playing guitar,
you don't have to worry about being successful.
It's not gonna happen. It's just not gonna happen.
The point of doing an encore
just doesn't make any sense to me.
When you're playing in front of 30 people...
I had done the movie "Say Anything..."
and was anxious to do the next movie here in Seattle,
and it was going to have that mix of music that I love.
The studio looked at the movie and said,
"We don't know how to sell this movie.
"We don't even want to put it out."
But as Nirvana got bigger and Pearl Jam got bigger,
they came to me and said, "Well, you know, there is one way."
When we looked at the schedule,
it was like there was one day off that week,
and that was the day that he wanted us to play,
and we're just going like, "Shit."
Any memories of the "Singles" party in Los Angeles,
which we have very vivid footage from.
God. Do you have some footage of that?
We do. The unaired, of course, footage.
Yeah. I won't watch that.
Fuck MTV! Fuck all TV!
It was pretty bad.
We're all just warming up, you know.
It’s not like one of these fucking movie things.
You've got to warm up, right?
It was a disaster,
a total disaster.
Everybody loves us.
Everybody loves our town!
There were some long sound checks that day or something.
So I drank, like, one bottle of wine,
and then there was, like, another that I opened
to give to friends, and they weren't drinking.
And so we're downstairs,
and there's a bottle of tequila sitting down there,
which we hardly ever drank before the show,
but by that point, we were already, like, fucking wasted.
I actually have more memories
than you'd think I would have.
The monitors weren't working that well,
or my ears weren't working, one or the other.
I kept looking over and asking them to turn the monitors up.
I can't hear anything. And it just wouldn't turn up.
At some point after a while, I just got really upset,
and I went over. They had this pipe and drape thing,
and I pulled it off and threw it down or something.
I don't know. Is this documented?
I looked over, and that wasn't our sound woman.
It was the lighting person. I kept wondering, like,
"Why is it getting brighter in here?"
I began to see studio executives and their families
starting to stream for the exits.
Some fights were breaking out.
Don't be violent! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!
Because we had waited so long
for anyone to ask us to do something
that we were saying yes, yes, yes.
That was a moment where it was really evident
that there was always gonna be
one more thing they were gonna want you to do.
At some point, you had to say no.
That was the birth of no.
Let's keep things rolling here, Tab.
"Grunge rockers Pearl Jam."
We don't have time to explain the puzzle to you,
but we'll be back.
Shit got fucking crazy.
- Who are Pearl Jam? - Right.
This is MTV's "Smells Like Grunge" countdown.
I was just screaming for anything.
I wanted something of Eddie's.
And they gave me the wine bottle.
What did you think of the show?
It was fucking so awesome.
Could you do a Week in Rock open for us?
What is that?
We're just about to launch MTV in Latin America.
I don't know if you feel comfortable
doing a couple of l.D.'s for us...
- Sure. - Sure.
In Spanish. So if you could just hang on. Josh.
Pearl Jam.
MTV.
What do you think grunge means?
I don't even say that word.
Really?
All your friends are talking about is Pearl Jam.
Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam.
I've always hated their band.
The first Pearl Jam record came out two months
before the Nevermind record, so it turned into
a Pearl Jam versus Nirvana thing.
Nirvana's Kurt Cobain made
some rather disparaging remarks about Pearl Jam's music,
which he thought was too commercial
to be truly alternative.
I was so naive and fresh when we first came out,
singing and opening up, and then everyone
just looked at it from a cynical point of view
or started copying it.
Eddie Vedder joins Creed front man Scott Stapp.
Eddie Vedder is attempting
to rip out Scott Stapp's larynx with his bare hands.
The group is called Pearl Jam.
I'm talking about Pearl Jam.
Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam.
Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam.
Pearl Jam...
Hi. I'm Tabitha Soren with "MTV News."
Pearl Jam will become the second Seattle band within a month
to enter the Billboard pop albums chart
at number one next week.
Since its release a week ago,
Vs. has sold 950,000 copies.
A million. You know, what's a million?
I'm having a hard enough time with one right now.
We played "Saturday Night Live" the second time,
and I remember talking to Stone the next day,
and he said, "What did you think of Daughter?"
And I thought in my mind, we played Daughter?
So I essentially blacked out on TV.
And that's how I dealt with how big we got,
kind of checking out and partying a lot.
I bought into the myth,
and it was killing me.
The last time I talked to Kurt,
we both agreed together that we were not
going to participate in the Time Magazine.
Neither band was going to participate
in the Time Magazine interview, and we didn't,
and then they put me on the fucking cover anyway.
I mean, sure, I could read it,
you know, and I read it. I read it on the airplanes.
But I don't take it seriously.
If I want to find out anything,
I'm not gonna read Time Magazine.
Time Magazine was just, you know,
your parents' magazine
or the magazine that's in a doctor's office,
and I just thought,
"We've been swallowed up by the mainstream,
"and no one's gonna want to listen to us."
I'm not gonna read Newsweek.
I'm not gonna read any of these magazines.
I mean, 'cause they've just got too much to lose
by printing the truth.
You know that.
How were you going to survive and not do something wrong,
not piss someone off?
You know, now you've sold too many records,
but these people are so happy to hear your music,
but these people hate you now.
And... And these people love you so much
they want to kill you.
So how do you relate to any of these people
from where you are?
Yeah, I think the one that I wanted to get impersonal with
was No Code because of stalker problems
and built a wall in front of the house
because... Because why?
Because I had been open and honest and intimate in lyrics,
that seemed really strange.
Now I'm having to build a wall in front of the house.
I mean, that wall... It saved my life.
Not because of privacy or anything, but literally,
because someone drove, trying to drive into the house
at 50 miles an hour.
So, you wonder what happened
or how did it mutate into this kind of situation?
You'll have to edit this part.
The young musician who made grunge music popular
had become an overnight spokesman
for many disaffected young Americans,
as his fans tried to sort out what it was
that caused him to take his life.
I was trying to, like, with my eyes
trying to tell them, "Don't hurt me."
And what's all this nonsense
about how terrible life is?
A young girl who stood outside his home in Seattle
with tears streaming down her face said,
"it’s hard to be a young person nowadays.
"He helped open people's eyes to our struggles."
Please wipe the tears from your eyes, dear.
You're breaking my heart.
I'd love to relieve the pain you're going through
by switching my age for yours.
I was trying to call him
because I'd read something he said,
that he couldn't keep it real,
and I just wanted to tell him, "Listen,
"you don't have to do anything
"anybody fucking tells you to do.
"Just stop fucking playing, cancel all your shit,
"and don't do anything."
I had a whole thing I was going to tell him,
but I never got a chance.
Sometimes people elevate you, you know,
whether you like it or not.
It's real easy to fall.
I don't think any of us would be in this room here tonight
if it weren't for Kurt Cobain, so...
People think that we're whining or crying about success
if we're just really trying to tell you
that there's some intense pressures
and really some things that could be helped.
He resonates in my life
in this... It always comes up, like, around a campfire
or playing music with a few guys he had known in a garage
for no particular reason.
I always just think, "He would have...
"He would have liked this."
I really like him.
I think he's a nice, really nice person.
I didn't like him a lot then,
when I was talking shit about him all the time,
but now I can... I can appreciate him, you know.
I mean, I've realized that, you know,
the same people that like our band like their band,
so why create some kind of feud over something?
He made us think about everything that we did, you know.
His critique of us early on
sure kept us on good behavior.
In terms of everything that we did,
we thought, "Okay, why are we doing this?"
If we're good now,
it's partly because of him.
It's not like you're friends or anything.
I mean, I can consider him
a person that I really like.
I mean, we've had a few conversations on the phone,
and I really like him.
I think he's a nice, really nice person.
Yeah, I remember the sound of his voice,
but I don't remember what we talked about.
Just normal stuff. It was just real...
Just real normal.
I haven't let myself change,
but the way people see you changes,
and that's not in my hands, that's not in my control.
And maybe what is in my control
is not doing interviews, or not being on the TV,
and not anything to kind of glorify your face or position.
I was talking about this band being a bit more faceless,
and it can be done, you know.
Pink Floyd and...
I mean, it can be done.
Ed couldn't be anonymous, and it was affecting him.
So I think psychologically,
he needed to take control of something.
So then he was like, "Okay. I can have control over music."
I felt that anything that we put out was highly representative of me,
because I was kind of becoming the most recognizable guy.
Vitalogy was the first record
where it was like we were making a record in a different way.
I was writing a few songs,
but all of a sudden everybody was starting to write,
and he was writing more, and I was like,
"Wait a minute, you know. I'm the guy.
"You know, let me get in there and do this thing.
"I know how to do this thing."
And at the time I thought, "This isn't our best record."
The dynamics of the band of how they have changed
to who was "in power, "
Stone early on,
Ed now.
As much as I'm excited to play,
I'll cop to it, it's a surfing tour.
I plan on having a surfboard with me at all times.
That was a big worldwide tour.
I think it was the first time we went to Australia.
It was a challenging time, to kind of go,
"I don't know if we're the same band right now,
"but we might be a different band right now,
"and maybe they'll like the new band."
Jeff and I have always had this adversarial relationship.
It’s all been muted now
because what we thought of as our new band
that we might try to control together
immediately was taken over by Ed.
But we learned the greatest lesson of all,
which is just as you're fighting over the scraps of control,
you meet somebody with so much artistic energy
that your argument becomes pointless.
We were always kind of going towards something else.
I think we wanted to be more like Zeppelin.
I think we wanted to be more of a chameleon type of band.
We didn't want to be locked into, like, a real specific style.
But the business aspect of the record company,
it's all about fucking making money now
and fucking wind this thing up, and you know,
they could care less if it's gone tomorrow
because they've got something coming up the fucking backside
that's gonna replace it.
And we were just trying to figure out
how we were gonna be a band down the road, you know.
Like, there wasn't anybody to go to at that point, you know,
not until we met Neil.
The first time we got asked
to play The Bridge School in San Francisco,
we just made a connection there.
He said, "Hey, man, thanks for doing this."
And a few months later, he asked us to go to Europe with him.
Like, it all seems like... All seems like a dream to me.
Doing a record with him, we did Mirror Ball,
it was so educational, listening to him talk about his career.
Playing in stadiums one minute,
and then the next time he's playing in clubs,
and then he's playing in medium-sized places,
but all along, he's doing whatever he wants to do.
His point is to kind of roll with the punches.
I'm happy to finally have an adult in my life
that leads by example.
I've had some crazy adults in my life.
So it's about time I got one that inspires me.
I hope Neil’s feeling feisty tonight,
and speaking of feisty,
some smart-ass who arranged the tables
put our table right next to Ticketmaster's table over here.
So I predict a food fight by the end of the evening,
and I would recommend to the classy people over there
to scoot away or join in.
Maybe we should all join in while we got them right here.
In the United States, the hit rock band Pearl Jam
has taken battle against what it claims
is the greed of the entertainment industry.
It’s tackling the high cost of buying
from the country's biggest ticket agency, Ticketmaster.
All the band wants, it says, is a fair deal for the fans.
We don't want to be doing a press conference.
We want to be playing.
The nation's top rock band is accusing
the biggest ticket distributor in the business
of unfair practices and price-gouging.
If they don't agree to Ticketmaster's terms, they can't perform.
A spokesman insisted Ticketmaster never told
any promoter not to book Pearl Jam.
He dismissed the band members as,
Last month, the band took the extraordinary step
of filing a complaint here at the justice department.
When you're on that big of a stage, it's not in your control.
You're sort of playing a part to some larger drama.
We had a very specific problem with Ticketmaster,
and they asked us to come and testify
about our specific problem
in regards to a larger lawsuit that was being brought,
but it's always been perceived as, like,
we were trying to break up Ticketmaster.
The subcommittee will come to order.
We are honored to have representatives
of both Pearl Jam and Ticketmaster here with us today.
The key question is whether recent contractual agreements
between Ticketmaster and most major stadiums
and concert promoters have violated federal antitrust laws.
Who would like to go first? Stone?
All the members of Pearl Jam remember what it's like
to be young and not have a lot of money.
Many Pearl Jam fans are teenagers
who do not have the money to pay $30 or more
that is often charged for tickets today.
We have made a conscious decision
that we do not want to put the price of our concerts
out of the reach of our fans.
Mr. Chairman, this is really about choices.
Fans can go from one music store to another
to find the best deal on a CD,
but they can't go anywhere but Ticketmaster
for concert tickets.
Do you think Ticketmaster is entitled to a profit?
I don't think that question matters, you know.
You do have a contract with your record company,
and it is exclusive. Is that correct?
I think this line of questioning is very strange,
because it seems like what does that really have to do with anything?
The issue at hand here is whether Ticketmaster
is a monopoly, not whether...
Or to have anything to do with our business
or what our relationship is with our manager.
Let's just get it on the record.
- Mr. Horn. - Now I gather...
Do you want these guys to play Long Beach or not?
What I want is a record.
What I want is a record here.
Let's just get it on the record.
A record here.
First of all, I want you to know I think you're just darling guys.
This is so great.
When we got involved in this issue,
I did not know very much, and still don't, about alternative music.
After some requests, I tried to learn some Pearl Jam songs,
but I think it's a little beyond me.
Having been a fan for many, many years,
I don't want to become
something that I despised as a kid, you know.
When my staff told me we were going to have this hearing,
I have to tell you, I knew nothing about grunge,
but I know a lot about the importance of fairness and equity,
and I think you've raised some very important questions.
Who were the powers-that-be that wanted to be perceived
as putting some pressure on Ticketmaster?
It’s like, you know, those are back-room,
David Lynch-ian guys in hotel rooms
who need oxygen tanks, darkened L.A.
That's who I always think of.
It’s like, he understands.
Almost a year after picking its fight with Ticketmaster,
Pearl Jam remains alone among major rock bands
who could have joined the Seattle group in its boycott
but never did.
It’s just a few lonely voices
because not many of the other groups joined up.
There's no deal between us and Ticketmaster.
We're not playing Ticketmaster shows this summer.
Shows where we're going outside of cities
and building shows from the ground up,
that was a really tough time.
We're trying to find how many counterfeit tickets are out there.
We saw some people selling tickets.
So we bought them. We were all psyched.
And then we got up to the door, and they said they were counterfeit.
Right now, we're trying to figure out
how to help these kids get into the show.
Let me just leave you with this observation.
When art is successful,
it unavoidably becomes a business.
The question then is
whether artists have an inherent right
to control the limits of their business
and how it relates to the growth of their art.
The answer, I'm convinced,
is that artists do have a right to that control.
I think we've always just fallen into ways
of doing things the way we felt they should be done,
and whether they were right or whether they were wrong,
they were just our ways of doing it.
I've never heard of Pearl Jam, I must admit.
That makes two of us.
And here we are in your fine place.
And what are the things that you've kept
that remind you of the experience the last 20 years with the band?
I'm sure I've kept the least amount of things of anyone in the band.
How I've always justified that is,
one, I lose everything all the time.
So it comes naturally to me.
And two, Jeff Ament keeps so much,
and really, if all I have to do is just maintain
my good relationship with Jeff Ament,
I can always go over to his house
and look through all the stuff that he has,
and celebrate his keeping of the things.
Pearl Jam in Mexico City
memorial... These are some of the Mexico City coffee cups.
So that's a... it’s a little faded now.
Because you use it.
This one clearly needs to go back in the dishwasher.
Here's something.
Mike McCready just sent me this.
It’s the demos from Temple of the Dog.
I've got a few...
This is a box full of Pearl Jam "Touring Band" DVDs.
And that's 2000.
I don't know why they're still there.
I haven't... I'm not sure...
And a few Pearl Jam CD’s here,
the kind of stuff probably I had someone bring by
because I was trying to remember how to play some songs.
I don't know if there's anything else in here.
Let's see here. Yep, that might be it.
There might be something in the basement.
Look it. There's a Grammy.
I knew this was gonna come in handy.
You can tell how I feel about the Grammys.
You know, at the Grammys,
I was having kind of a bad day.
I was getting thrown out by security people
for trying to sneak a cigarette in the backstage,
and you couldn't go out because of all the photographers there.
So that was part of it.
Spin the Black Circle, Pearl Jam.
I hate to start off with a bang.
I'm gonna say something typically me
on behalf of all of us. I don't know what this means.
I don't think it means anything.
That's just how I feel.
I remember arguing with tons of my friends,
because my friends were like,
"Man, what the fuck was your boy doing?
"Like, if he doesn't want to be there,
"then he shouldn't be there, " and kind of all this stuff.
And I was kind of like, "Fuck you, man."
Like, what does it mean, you know?
Like, are you fucking kidding me?
You get an award for art? Like, that's just ridiculous.
Like, if I would have had the balls, I would have said the same thing.
I should have started a fight right there.
It would have been much more exciting.
What would all these young people be doing
if they had real problems like a depression or Vietnam?
Do they work at all?
Are they contributing anything
to the world they're taking so much from?
It was kind of around the Ticketmaster tour.
The four of us, Jack, Stone, Jeff, and I were traveling in a jet.
Eddie was traveling in a van, doing a radio show,
and then driving all night to the next show.
So there was a huge physical disconnect,
but also an emotional one.
And nobody was kind of really talking.
He was trying to maintain something
that was more a Fugazi or do-it-yourself type mentality.
You know, and we loved them, but we weren't that band.
We needed to sit down with him and go, "Look,
"are you embarrassed by us?
"Do you want to be in the band anymore?"
We thought we were going to break up essentially.
I thought... I thought that was going to happen.
And we all agreed we needed to take some time off and figure it out.
That's highway 200, and we're like right...
We just passed Ovando.
We're headed towards Lincoln.
And then we just keep going to the northeast.
That's the spot right there, Big Sandy.
That's your hometown?
This is the middle of nowhere, man.
I was sort of pissed off at my parents
for making me live in this desolate...
I mean, I was hundreds of miles away
from anybody that I could even relate to.
I was ready to leave at about 14.
A couple trips to California,
like, really fucked me up.
My mom's brother, my uncle Pat,
he had long hair,
and he had tapestries up in his room,
and he'd put the headphones on me,
and he'd play, like, Abraxas by Santana,
and it would just blow my mind.
I remember just getting, like, a huge buzz off of it, like,
and getting, like, kind of emotional.
And I would go out and try to look for records.
It was really hard to find. There was no record store in our town.
So I started subscribing to Circus and Cream magazine,
and my uncle got Rolling Stone magazine.
And I mean, you'd study that stuff.
In a lot of those punk-rock records, you could really hear bass, you know.
You could fucking hear Dee Dee on those Ramones records.
You know, he was on the right side, and Johnny was on the left side.
So if you were trying to learn the songs,
you could just turn the dial over to the right side
and learn all of Dee Dee's parts.
I moved to Seattle in 1983,
and I think all I wanted to do up to that point
was to live in a bigger city
where there was more like-minded people
and more culture and a punk-rock show,
if I wanted to go see a cool movie.
There were all these... You know, "Eraserhead."
I was hearing about all these movies
that I never got a chance to see.
I don't know if it was the first contact, it must have been,
was from Jeff,
and I do remember there being a...
A real connection made on the phone,
and talking about artwork, how he was into artwork,
and your responsibilities as a band member
or working with people that get that it's not a slacker job,
or it's not a rock star thing, or it's not...
it’s about music. it’s about art.
It’s about... We had all these things in common,
which is probably why we ended up roommates
when we first started touring.
I think that we just connected and became really close.
It’s amazing now to look back.
I remember when Ed first came to town.
It seemed like it was something
that he had been kind of waiting for his whole life,
and it was obvious within the first few minutes
that it was something that I'd been waiting for also.
I think it would be a very easy band
in some ways for us not to be a band,
and nobody can really kind of put a finger on what it is
that, you know, kind of keeps us coming back together,
but it's a strange marriage.
I met Mike McCready when I was in seventh grade.
He was good. You know, he played solos
and had a whammy bar and, like, could do the...
And all this stuff.
I had lived in Los Angeles,
trying to make it in my band Shadow in 1986 for a year,
and I paid to play, paid to play at The Roxy,
$700 on a Sunday night in December. And there was five people there.
So I struggled and went through that,
and I gave up playing music for a little while,
moved back to Seattle and said, "I can't. I'm done."
And then, lo and behold, I get a call out of the blue from Stone.
I got to see him play at a party one night
when he was just sitting around
and playing lead guitar with somebody
and was just, in the way that he does, unconsciously,
giving you these jolts.
He's channeling stuff that sounds like
it's coming from the fucking heavens,
but I think it's coming from inside.
There's something spiritual about the way he plays.
And that's when he's in tune with the good stuff, you know.
As you know, the song Reach Down, which was the second song I wrote
for the Temple of the Dog record,
I wanted it to be sort of like a Neil Young,
"Fuck you to the world of people
"who don't want to hear a guitar solo.
"I'm gonna make an 1 1 or 1 2-minute song that's mostly guitar solo,
"and that's gonna be the first song on the album,
"and you can fuck off."
When I heard Cready play guitar,
I was like, "We're gonna pull it off for real.
"This isn't gonna be a joke. He can actually fucking play."
Because I couldn't.
He went out of his mind.
This guy's a... he's a fucking rock star.
Like, he's got problems,
and we just thought he was a nice little kid.
And he's got something in there, like, he's infected,
and that's gonna come out again somewhere. Good luck, guys.
He knows me. That's...
I would say that's 100 accurate.
Eddie said, "Ask Mike about the drummers."
Ask me about the drummers?
Yeah. He says, "Mike will give you the drummers rap."
Here we go.
We started out with Dave Krusen. It didn't work out.
Matt Chamberlain, he didn't want to go on the road.
He knew of a drummer named Dave Abbruzzese.
It’s very Spinal Tap of us to have this many drummers.
Jack lrons.
- Good drummer. - Great look. Good drummer.
Jack was the guy that gave the tape that he got from Stone to Ed.
Ed wanted to repay that favor
and say, "Hey, you want to come and try out?"
And we toured with him after we did Yield,
and he played on that whole record.
That's when it was starting to get too much for Jack.
He called up and said that he couldn't tour.
We already had a tour booked.
Who can we call that can do that? Matt Cameron.
Soundgarden had broken up, so Ed called him.
Eddie, what's going on?
And he's like, "Hey, what are you doing this summer?"
Nothing.
We need to leave in three weeks.
- In 10 days, he learned 80 songs. - They had a list of, like, 60 or 70.
Something crazy like that.
I would just sort of, like, close my eyes,
and I'd go like that, and it was like,
"Okay, do I know that song?" it’s like, "No!"
Matt Cameron made us a better band than we've ever been.
When we'd... We'd have to switch,
let's say, a drummer or something,
you do it out of survival mode.
It’s just like removing an organ.
And when you remove, like, the drummer,
you're removing, like, the heart.
So it's like you had a heart transplant.
Binaural is a dark time for me for sure,
because I had my Crohn's. I have Crohn's disease.
I was struggling with that,
struggling with addiction.
I was taking pills to take care of that,
and then that got out of hand.
For me, it was a struggle, for sure.
In the early years, we had those transcendent shows
where it was just like everybody was drunk,
and it was just the "lose your mind" shows.
Everybody lose your mind at once, you know.
It was harder to lose your mind at that point
because everyone was more like, "I'm 32.
"You know, we've got some records out.
"I've got this relationship, or you know..."
We just became more self-conscious
and more aware as you do as you're an adult,
but it's more difficult to kind of go, "Okay.
"We got to just go out and get crazy."
And around this time, I think we were...
You know, we were less popular.
I don't think we were doing any press.
We'd have meetings about those things.
It’s like, "How far are we gonna do press on this tour?
"Are we gonna do this? Are we gonna do that?
"Or are we not going to do any of it?"
And when you don't do any of it and the changing times,
you know, you fluctuate, people get over you, you know.
That's probably around that time Binaural is.
Maybe people were like, "Okay. We're kind of over these guys.
"What's next?" you know.
But some people stayed with us
because we stayed true to whatever our vision was.
How important is commercial success to you?
Does grunge still exist today?
How did the second 10 years happen?
You did survive.
And what are the turning points to you?
Change your position. Moving back.
We still have a problem here.
It’s one of Europe's worst concert tragedies.
The band had stopped playing just before the incident.
Deadly trouble in the shape of a crowd 40,000 to 50,000 strong.
There has been a lot of pushing and pressure up here,
and 10 to 15 people have been badly hurt.
We don't know how bad yet.
Tragedy occurred in the rain and mud
late Friday night at the annual "Roskilde Rock Festival"
outside the Danish capital, Copenhagen,
when rock fans surged forward during a performance
by the American group Pearl Jam.
Fans at the outdoor rock concert
packed closer and closer to the stage,
ending in a crush that killed nine people and injured three more.
I just wanted to get out of there.
I just didn't want it to be true.
It was happening right in front of us,
but I just didn't want it to be true.
And something as horrific and as shocking
as people being pulled over the barricade
that aren't alive anymore,
what the impact of that was on us
is, you know, it will never really go away.
From that point on, we rethought everything.
I didn't know what I was feeling, you know.
I think I had such an onslaught of confusion that...
I mean, the last time that I felt like that
was when Andy Wood died, and...
I didn't know if I wanted to play music anymore.
You know, I think we kind of quantify everything that's happened to us
as pre "Roskilde" and after "Roskilde, " and...
You know, if early on there was the birth or the beginning of "No, "
for us Roskilde was the beginning of "What?"
What are we doing?
What do we do to assist the families?
And what have we become?
And what do we... What do we do to survive?
I think even since Roskilde in 2000,
I think that made everybody get into a real unique perspective
on where we were at and how fragile life is,
and I think ever since then, every once in a while,
we'll just say to one another, like, "Can you believe it?
"Can you believe we're still doing this?"
When I interviewed the band in 1993
for Rolling Stone magazine, I asked Eddie Vedder
if there was an Andy Wood song
he would ever be interested in singing.
He said there was one and one day he would sing it.
On the band's 10th anniversary show in Las Vegas,
he announced to the group that he wanted to sing Crown of Thorns,
one of Mother Love Bone's greatest songs.
And in that moment, the two bands united.
We wouldn't...
We wouldn't mind attempting something
that's even older than 10 years.
For Ed to kind of acknowledge the past and sort of say,
"Yeah, this is part of where we came from, "
and that he would be generous to Jeff and I and say, "Yeah, of course."
That was another huge, huge gift.
I used to think of Andy all the time,
especially when the band got bigger,
because I used to think,
"He would have loved to play this place.
"He'd love to play The Garden."
He would have tore this shit up.
And I wrote down on this paper "Andy and Ed, "
just because I think about Andy all the time,
and in the creative process, I always think about
how lucky I am to still be able to, like, you know,
go in my basement or, like, pick up a guitar and, like, write a song
and then manifest it if I want,
figure out how to, like, record it or whatever, and that...
That's kind of all he ever hoped for,
is just somebody that would just record him
and, like, some group of guys that would just, you know,
play these songs for him or whatever, and l...
I wish that we could go back in time and be the band for him.
He was playing in those places in his head...
for a long time.
So the thing is, is he got to play them.
Andy.
We played a show in Nassau.
I would say three-quarters of the crowd fucking booed us.
It actually really bummed some of the band out.
They were just, like, "I never want to play that song again."
I actually fucking dug it. It was art.
I remember there was a fireman in the front row,
and he was, like, showing me his badge.
Fuck you, asshole!
It was just a bad time in American history in my mind,
and we were trying to say what we thought.
When you know the crowd has turned
and there are that many people,
it just feels like you might not make it out of there alive.
That was Ed really trusting his instincts
about a very specific thing that he needed to say,
and he wanted to do it in a way that was antagonistic.
I think if you have the opportunity,
you have to... You have to take on that responsibility.
You didn't like that one.
It’s great to be in a band
where, you know, we're not afraid to do that,
not afraid to speak our minds
and get booed once in a while. It's all right.
It was an uncertain time for Pearl Jam,
a period when many bands quietly break up and move on.
But from the beginning, Stone and Jeff
had always wanted a band that would last,
one that would keep writing and recording music,
and that's what Pearl Jam did.
Show by show, they became
one of the most dependably unpredictable bands in rock.
Ed has a feeling pretty much everywhere that we play,
and it's such a great gauge of, you know,
how the crowd's feeling, and that's, a lot of times,
why the set list doesn't get done until...
I mean, oftentimes, it's done 10 minutes before we play.
As difficult as it was at different times,
where you're like, "We can go out and kill this crowd.
"We can go out and kill them right now.
"Let's just start out with these five songs."
And you know... "Yeah. No. We're gonna go on,
"we're gonna play this one to start out with."
"We haven't played this one together, but let's...
"We'll work it out backstage. It'll be fine."
And inevitably, you're so nervous
that you go out there and fumble it,
and then you're like, "God! Let me just...
"Let's play a hit, you know."
You know, it would be a lot easier to play a similar set every night.
It would just be so much easier,
and yet we can't find it in ourselves to do that.
That's why you see Pearl Jam.
It’s fucking different every night.
Every night it's different.
It’s funny, but lots of those decisions we made,
it took 10 years to see why they were good.
In that regard, you know,
mixing our set list up every night,
it's the greatest blessing we could have ever done.
The door is so open for us to be who we are every night
that we just trust it.
You know, I think that all of us
have been totally influenced by the seventies.
We're all, like, products of it, but yet we're not, like, stuck in it.
Our classic guitar heroes, you know, like Hendrix for Mike
and, like, Jimmy Page for me,
and, like, for Eddie, it's like he totally loved The Who.
The Who was the greatest rock band ever.
It's like all these bands, so in a sense,
it's a total tribute to the seventies.
Roger Daltrey wrote me a letter saying would I like to come play,
and I told him no way, because that's it.
That's the ultimate. That's the pinnacle for me,
is that band, you know,
that arrow on the mod sign, you know.
We have to decide whether or not we're going to remain a circus act.
In other words, doing what everybody
knows we can do and what we know we can do. Right?
Until the band eventually turns into a cabaret act,
- which is inevitable. - No, that's ridiculous!
Here's me and Johnny Ramone. I'm wearing a Bob Dole mask.
Uncle Neil.
This is me and Joe Strummer.
And that's the night I met Jack lrons.
This was hanging in a dressing room.
It was actually the first night I had met Pete.
I was terrified.
And the first thing he said was,
"I've waited so long to meet you."
Now we're just grateful for our band and who we are
and what we've become,
and grateful that we finally figured out how to do it.
I think that there was a huge element
of our fans that just kind of carried us
through a period of time where we were not there all the way.
You see their belief, and even when you don't have it,
you go, "Okay. I've got to figure this out."
Joining the band, I was super impressed
with how in-house everything is.
Like, there's no outside influence going on, you know.
It's like it all comes from the band.
They saved me in a certain way.
You know, we've been doing it for 10 records or 20 years,
and I can't think of a show where I ever felt
like I was just phoning it in.
It’s always pure stoke, you know, like...
I think that there really is, like,
a collective understanding of how lucky and how fortunate we are
to still be playing music with the same group of people.
I mean, everybody, you can feel it,
and it makes being in a band a joy.
There's a... This communal exchange.
And there's obviously a line drawn
between who's on stage and who's in the crowd,
but not really.
I fucking loved it. We were two rows from the front.
It was fucking incredible.
- This was my fifth show. - 24.
- 61. - 54.
153.
Pearl Jam are a band for the fans.
"If you love us, stick with us, "
and we've stuck with them all the way,
because what we get out of them is overwhelming.
These guys flew from Bucharest this morning.
Budapest.
We came from Denver.
- Townsville, Australia. - London, England.
Took two weeks off from my job,
and traveled to nine shows in a row last tour.
There's not another band like them.
Everybody rode the whole crest of a wave with Ten,
and it was just the thing to be into,
but after that, they've come out a lot stronger,
because they didn't play the game.
They took on Ticketmaster. They were pissed off
that people were getting ripped off,
and they took on the man,
and they could have lost, but they didn't.
I think this band is really only beginning.
There was a rumor
that it was sort of gonna be like The Kids Are Alright.
That would be a misconception, because The Kids Are Alright
is really super genius,
and what we're gonna put out is gonna be really super us.
Hey, Josh. How's it going?
Fuck you, Kevin.
They stay true to fans as well,
about them releasing the bootlegs of their albums
so that other people can't bootleg them and make a sly penny off it,
and that's clever shit.
We're not filming this conversation, are we?
Yes, we are.
Now you're back. Why do you keep doing it?
I don't know whether they realize exactly how much they have given to us, the fans,
...and how much we really appreciate.