I listen every sunday here in Edmonton.
I will have to figure out if I can get it in Kelowna when Im there this sunday though. Otherwise I will have to see if I can listen on the web after its aired before the second part.
the person below me smells like cat pee and raisins...
Pearl Jam - Part 1 - Seg. 1
Pearl Jam is one of the biggest bands of the 90s. Since their debut album Ten was released on August 27th 1991, it has sold more than 10 million copies, making it the biggest-selling rock album of the 90s, so far.
Welcome to part one of our two-part look at Pearl Jam.
This has to be a two-part show because there's just so much to talk about with these guys: their history, their live shows, the bonus tracks, the bootlegs, the Ticketmaster controversy. And since we like to be thorough around here, we're going to devote some extra time to Pearl Jam.
I think the best place to start is with a basic history of the group, which, I figure, will take up all of part one. Ready?......here we go.
The birth of Pearl Jam begins with the death of a Seattle singer named Andrew Wood.
Andrew's band was called "Mother Love Bone" The group also featured guitarist Stone Gossard (a veteran of such forgotten bands as "March Of Crimes" and "The Ducky Boys") and bassist Jeff Ament (who once was a part of a Seattle band called "Deranged Diction”)
Stone and Jeff first joined up in a band called "Green River", they produced a compilation called Deep Six in 1985.
Deep Six was like a snapshot of what was happening in Seattle in the mid-80s. The album was released on Tie Records, but then went out of print for years until it was resurrected on CD in 1994.
Green river lasted through a couple of records before breaking up in October 1987. And they broke up for a stupid reason, one night, the band was opening for Jane's Addiction when a fight started in the dressing room over who could add more people to the guest list.
Singer Mark Arm quit on the spot, he went on to form a new band called "Mudhoney" while Stone and Jeff had to pick up the pieces of Green River.
They hired a guy named Greg Gilmore to play drums. And then they picked up Andrew Wood, a very intense singer and full-time heroin addict. Andy had picked up the habit while performing with a Seattle glam-punk affair called "Malfunkshun"
Andrew had been into junk and coke since high school because he thought it was the "rock star thing to do" He also loved to wear big fur coats, spandex and big red scarves. His idol was Freddy Mercury of Queen, and anything Freddy was into was okay by Andrew.
The new band was supposed to have been called "Lords Of The Wasteland", but that was dumped after Stone and Andrew wrote a song together called "Capricorn Sister" that featured the line "Mother Love Bone"
With their new sound, it's not surprising Mother Love Bone found themselves "discovered" by Gene Simmons of Kiss, who talked about the band whenever he was given the chance.
That was nice, but Mother Love Bone had other things to think about, namely the health of their singer. Andrew's rock star excess had finally begun to consume him, especially after the band scored a major record deal complete with a big advance.
By November 1989, Andrew was so out of it that he was sent to dry out for a month at a rehab centre in California. When he re-joined Mother Love Bone, he was clean, but that was only temporary.
Two weeks before the group's album was to be released, Andrew was found in a heroin coma in his girlfriend's apartment. He never woke up, on March 19th, 1990, Andrew's family ordered his doctors to shut off the life-support machines.
Mother Love Bone was finished; literally just days before they were supposed to break it wide open. More than a thousand music fans turned out to Andrew's memorial at Seattle's Paramount theatre, the site of Mother Love Bone's last gig.
The remaining members split into two camps, guitarist Bruce Fairweather and drummer Greg Gilmore formed a band called "Blind Horse" while Stone and Jeff dropped out of the music scene altogether for a while.
But by the end of the year, they were both bored with their day jobs and decided they should get back to playing again. Here's where Pearl Jam starts coming together.
Stone and Jeff formed a band called "Luv Company", that's where they met guitarist Mike McCready. Luv Company went through a couple of drummers. First, Matt Cameron of Soundgarden sat in part-time, just so the guys could rehearse and record a quick demo. He then was replaced by a fulltime drummer by the name of Dave Krusen.
Next stop was a singer, the demo was good, but it was all instrumental. They needed a frontman. Stone and Jeff knew they wanted someone who was the exact opposite of Andrew Wood, but where could you find such a guy, especially in Seattle?
A copy of the Luv Company demo was given to Jack Irons, who used to play drums for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He knew this surfer dude who worked the night shift at a gas station in San Diego. Jack and this guy played pick-up basketball a lot, and after one game, Jack passed the tape along to this kid.
The kid's name was Eddie Vedder. Eddie had played in several bands with names like "Bad Radio" and "Surf And Destroy", but they were going nowhere.
As soon as Eddie got the tape from Jack, he started listening to it over and over. One morning, after getting off the night shift, Eddie went surfing. At the end of the day, exhausted and unable to sleep, he sat down and wrote words to three of the five songs on the tape.
He dubbed the words and music onto a new Cassette and sent the package up to Seattle, and when Jeff and Stone heard Eddie sing, they knew they had found their frontman. That's when Eddie flew up to Seattle and began to jam with the guys.
Okay, quick detour back to Andrew Wood. By the end of 1990, Chris Cornell of Soundgarden (Andrew's old roommate), had written two songs in memory of his friend. Neither song was suitable for Soundgarden, so it was decided that they would become part of a memorial album dedicated to Andrew and featuring various members of the Seattle music scene.
Pearl Jam - Part 1 - Seg. 2
This temporary group was called "Temple Of The Dog" after a line in the Mother Love Bone song "Man Of Golden Words". The album was recorded over several weekends late in the fall of 1990, released in April 1991, it featured contributions from Stone, Jeff, Mike, …and Eddie.
All right, we can finally start talking about Pearl Jam. In between Temple Of The Dog sessions, Eddie, Stone, Jeff, Mike and Dave were working on their own material.
At first, there was no Pearl Jam, the band was called "Mookie Blaylock" after the basketball player from the New Jersey Nets. Legend has it the guys in the band found his basketball card in the box with their demo tape. I guess they figured that was some sort of omen, so they decided to name their band after him.
The first Mookie Blaylock rehearsals were held in the basement of a Seattle art gallery. And things came together very quickly. Within five days, they had eleven songs together and were ready to try them in front of an audience.
Mookie Blaylock played their first gig on December 22, 1990 at the Moore theatre in Seattle. They were the opener for another local band called Alice In Chains.
Let me read from the review that appeared the next morning in the Seattle Times. "Alice In Chains gave a better representation of the Seattle sound that those that should have: opening band Mookie Blaylock, whose music leaned more towards bad 70s country rock (Bad Company came to mind) than the punk-metal angst of Green River or Mother Love Bone"
Okay, so the first gig didn't go well. But things got better the more they played.
Mookie Blaylock played a grand total of nine gigs before they guys got tired of that name, and Mookie himself was less than flattered. He wasn't crazy about a bunch of long hairs from the northwest appropriating his name, and had asked his lawyer to investigate.
A couple of alternates received serious consideration. The first was "Reenik Roink", but that was just too dumb, the other was "Pearl Jam" and here's the story behind that...
Eddie had a great grandmother named Pearl. Her husband was an American Indian who was into natural hallucinogens like Peyote, and to make him happy, Pearl used to add Peyote to the recipe for the fruit preserve she used to make in the fall, hence the name "Pearl Jam"
There was time for a quick line-up change, Dave Krusen quit the band. He and his girlfriend had a new baby and the pressure of being in a band and recording an album was just too much.
Dave suggested a guy by the name of Matt Chamberlain, who used to play with Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians. But he couldn't stick around for long because he was offered the gig of playing drums for the band on Saturday Night Live. He agreed to sit in for a while until the band found a permanent replacement for Dave.
At the end of May, 1991, they formally announced the name change from "Mookie Blaylock" to "Pearl Jam" And also they let it be known that they had a major record deal and a full album was ready to go.
It was called Ten, after the number of Mookie Blaylock's New Jersey nets uniform. The first single came out twice, first on a compilation tape put out by Coca-Cola early in the summer, and second, on its own in August 1991…the song was called "Alive"
There's a long story regarding how that song came about. Eddie first heard the song on that tape Jack Irons gave to him, but back then, it was entitled "Dollar Short"
Eddie took an auto-biographical approach to writing the lyrics. The song is about a boy who grows up to find the person he thought was his father wasn't and the confusion that follows.
Here's where we gotta talk about Eddie for a second. He was born in Evanston, Illinois and his name was Edward Louis Severson, Junior. Years later, he discovered his mother had separated from his biological father when Eddie was still a baby. He grew up thinking his stepfather was his real father. He was even using the man's last name: Mueller.
This really messed him up and when Eddie left home for good, he changed his last name to "Vedder", which was his mother's maiden name.
To make matters even more confusing, Eddie soon found that his real father had died of multiple sclerosis, he died without Eddie ever really meeting him.
Ten was officially released on August 27th, 1991, and when the album came out, the band had a new drummer. His name was Dave Abbruzzese, Dave was from Connecticut by way of Dallas and was so happy to be in the band after the second show he did with them, he went out and got a tattoo of the stick figure we see on the cover of the "Alive" single.
So let's run over the drummer situation again...its Dave Krusen you hear on the Ten album, in the early videos for songs like "Alive" it's Matt Chamberlain, and from August 1991 on, it was Dave Abbruzzese behind the kit.
At first, Ten sold only moderately well. But by beginning of 1992 (and after going out on the road with the Red Hot Chili Peppers), the album started selling like crazy. By the time they left for their European tour in February, Ten had sold more than a million copies, and the cult of Pearl Jam had begun.
The rest of 1992 was very busy. The crowds at Pearl Jam shows kept getting bigger and bigger. Pearl Jam played 34 dates on the 1992 Lollapalooza tour, and Eddie became more outspoken and more of a character. He pushed himself to exhaustion on stage, often diving into the pit, and sometimes stopping shows in mid-song when he saw a mosher in trouble. There was a very public war of words over music principles with Kurt Cobain. Eddie began railing against music videos, and he refused to allow Pearl Jam's record company to release "Black" as a single, simply because he didn't want it to be a single.
Pearl jam fans loved him for it. They saw Eddie as a man of principles, an icon of integrity. And they showed their appreciation by buying more albums and more concert tickets.
It finally became time to record a second album in May 1993. Things got off to a rocky start when Eddie freaked out after losing his notebook full of song ideas. But he eventually calmed down long enough for the band to tear through 12 songs, many of them recorded live off the floor.
The songs were harder and without the old-style rock pomp of tracks like "Alive" That became very apparent when the first single came out in early fall, it was called "Go"
As Pearl Jam was getting ready to release their second album, there was a lot of confusion, when was it going to come out? And what was the record going to be called?
Pearl Jam - Part 1 - Seg. 3
At first, the album was going to be called a Shark In Blood Waters. That's what Mike wanted, Jeff suggested Paul's Dead. Eddie wanted Al, after Aleister Crowley. Five Against One.....then we heard it was going to be called Five (as in "half of ten") and designated with the roman numeral "V" But in the end, the name became VS.
Now, the release date. Originally, it was supposed to be out in September 1993, but that conflicted with the release of Nirvana's In Utero album, so it was delayed.
And finally, there was the matter of what format. Epic Records wanted a CD-only release. Pearl Jam wanted a vinyl copy in the stores.
So, as a compromise, VS came out on vinyl one week before the CD and Cassette: October 11th, 1993. Fans were so crazy for something new that all 30,000 copies sold out almost immediately. But that was nothing compared to what was about to happen...
When the CD and Cassette was released on October 19th, Pearl Jam set an all-time sales record. 950,378 albums were sold in the first week. The only other band that came close was Guns'n'Roses who sold 770,000 copies of their Use Your Illusion II album in 1991.
By way of comparison, Nirvana's In Utero only sold 180,000 copies in its first week.
Meanwhile, Ten was still selling at the rate of 40,000 copies a week. In the space of a little more than two years, Pearl Jam had become one of the biggest bands in the world.
Just in case you were wondering, there are at least three different cover photos for VS.
Before the third album came out, there were two changes to Pearl Jam. One union and one split. First, Eddie got married, he and his long-time girlfriend from San Diego, Beth Liebling, got married during a quick, private ceremony in Italy on June 3rd, 1994...that's the union.
The split came in August 1994, when there was another change in drummers. Dave Abbruzzese was fired, almost 3 years to the day he was hired. Stone Gossard apparently did the dirty work. At first we were told he quit to study music, but then Stone called the press and gave his side of the story, which was totally different. Bottom line is we still don't know why Dave isn't in Pearl Jam anymore.
The new drummer is Jack Irons, a former member of the Chili Peppers and the guy who gave Eddie the gas bar attendant that demo tape, way back when…
Like VS, Pearl Jam's third album was also released in two stages. The vinyl version hit the stores on November 22nd, 1994. Anyone who wanted the CD or Cassette had to wait until December 6th. Like VS, the album sold incredibly fast, more than 877,000 were snapped up in the first week.
And like VS, the first single was harder and punkier than what people expected. It was a tribute to vinyl records called "Spin The Black Circle"
The Vitalogy album took its name from an old medical advice book that Eddie had picked up somewhere.
The other was Dr. E.H. Ruddock, who was a 19th specialist in clean living. He wrote books with titles like Consumption And Diseases Of The Lungs and The Ladies’ Manual. Vitalogy was one of his guidebooks to good health, parts of the book were used in the very elaborate liner notes that came with the album.
And in case you're counting, Vitalogy has sold something like 4 million copies so far. Worldwide, Pearl Jam has moved almost 30 million copies of three albums.
Okay, so that brings us more-or-less up-to-date as far as the basic history of Pearl Jam goes. But there's way more to the band than this. In fact, we've barely scratched the surface.
Now that we know where Pearl Jam came from, we really start getting into detail.
For example, in Part II of our look at Pearl Jam we'll examine the whole Ticketmaster fiasco, we'll enter the world of pearl jam bootlegs, talk a bit about the official Pearl Jam fan club, Pearl Jam's political causes, the live shows, the radio broadcasts, the reason the band won't do videos, the hard-to-find studio tracks like "Yellow Ledbetter" and "Dirty Frank". Plus we'll get into some really cool trivia, ranging from the tattoo on Eddie's calf to the true story behind the song "Jeremy"
Pearl Jam - Part 2 - Seg. 1
This is the second half of our look at Pearl Jam. Last time, we when through a basic history of the band, where they came from and how they got to where they are now.
This time, we're gonna go a little deeper. We're gonna talk about videos, the live shows, the radio broadcasts, the Ticketmaster fiasco, the hard-to-find studio tracks. And we'll talk a bit about Pearl Jam's fans, some of the most devoted and loyal music fans anywhere.
Which brings us to this, what was the 1991 Pearl Jam Christmas 7" that was issued only to members of their official "Ten" fanclub?...That's easy, it's called "Let Me Sleep"
There are less than 15,000 original copies of that release. Like REM, the group likes to issue a Christmas 7" every year. In 1992, it was "Who Killed Rudolph", in 1993, it was a track called "Angel", plus there's the multi-part b-side entitled "Ramblings"
There are a lot of Pearl Jam songs like this; tracks that have never appeared on a proper Pearl Jam album. And a lot of die-hard fans have a lot of fun trying to hunt them all down.
Lemme illustrate, to date, Pearl Jam has three full domestic albums in release in North America. They contain a grand total of 38 songs, but if you count up all the b-sides, bonus tracks and covers on all of Pearl Jam's singles and albums (both domestic and import), you'll find that there are more than 50 Pearl Jam originals officially available. And then if you count up all the cover versions that are available both officially and unofficially, you'll end up with something like a hundred different Pearl Jam tracks.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about. One of Pearl Jam's most famous b-sides is a song entitled "Yellow Ledbetter" It's become a concert highlight for many fans and a lot of die-hards have spent hours trying to figure out what the song is about.
"Yellow Ledbetter", the infamous Pearl Jam bonus track, first appeared on the CD single for "Jeremy" in 1992. A live version can be found on the CD single for "Daughter"
It seems no one but the band knows what that song is all about. Eddie mumbles through most of it, so any lyric transcriptions are just rough approximations. To make things even more mysterious, Eddie often decides to improvise whenever Pearl Jam plays the song live.
But that hasn't kept hundreds of fans from spending literally hours analyzing the words they can make out and discussing the deeper meanings of that porch where people don't wave.
A lot of fans forget that three-fifths of Pearl Jam once appeared in a movie. In fact, they were in a movie together before they were known as Pearl Jam.
The movie was Singles and it was filmed in Seattle between March and May 1991. Director Cameron Crowe was a big fan of what was happening in the city and wanted to make things as authentic as possible.
Chris Cornell of Soundgarden almost got the starring role, but studio executives insisted on an actor with some kind of box office potential. That's when Matt Dillon was cast as Cliff, the lead singer of a fictitious band called "Citizen Dick"
Now that Cameron had his star, he needed to find Matt a back-up band. That's when he found Mookie Blaylock, which, of course, was an early name for the band that would become Pearl Jam.
Stone Gossard was cast as Citizen Dick's guitarist, Jeff played bass, and the drummer was Eddie Vedder. All three appear together in several scenes doing things like watching nature documentaries on TV, and another scene where Matt, Eddie, Jeff and Stone sit around reading a review of Citizen Dick's new single.
And by the way: all the clothes Matt Dillon wore on screen came out of Pearl Jam's real wardrobe.
When the movie finally came out in September 1992, the soundtrack featured two previously unreleased Pearl Jam songs "State Of Love And Trust" and “Breath”
There's a natural segue here from movies to videos. In the beginning, Pearl Jam made videos like everyone else. And they did very well, the video for "Jeremy" won them three awards at the 1993 MTV video awards. But after shooting a grand total of just four video clips, Eddie declared that the band wouldn't do them anymore.
You see, Eddie wasn't comfortable with the whole concept of videos. To him, they were just too "rock star", but in the beginning, he went along with the idea because it was just something that every new band had to do. But then he ran into Mark Eitzel, leader of the band American Music Club. He's the guy you can blame this whole video thing on.
Eddie respected Mark a lot, and when he told Eddie that the video for "Jeremy" sucked, it really hit him hard. Eddie had felt all along the concept for the "Jeremy" video was too artsy, they should have shot a straight performance video or nothing at all.
After that conversation with Mark, Eddie got it in his head that for Pearl Jam to become credible again, they had to stop doing videos, and that was that.
By the way: can you name the four Pearl Jam videos?.....there's "Jeremy", there are the clips for "Alive" and "Evenflow"....but what was the fourth? Chances are you would have had to have been in Europe if you were gonna see it because that was the only area of the world where it was officially released. It was a grainy, black-and-white clip featuring the band surfing in Hawaii, the song was "Oceans"
Like a lot of songwriters, Eddie Vedder draws much of his inspiration from personal experience. But he's also affected by the experiences of other people. And one person who really moved him was 16 year-old Jeremy Delle, who was in his second year at Richardson High School in Richardson Texas.
Jeremy was a pretty troubled kid, he had been in family counselling with his father and was missing an awful lot of school. People who knew him described Jeremy as a loner, a quiet kid who appeared to be really sad sometimes.
On the morning of Tuesday, January 8th, 1991, he left a note with a friend and walked into his English class. It was quarter to ten, which meant that he was late.
His teacher, Ms Barnett, told him if he wanted to stay, he had better go to the office and get an admittance slip. That's when Jeremy looked at her and said "Miss, I got what I really went for"
To quote the 10C from Newsletter #8: "Please understand we have a lot of members and it is very hard to please everybody. If you are one of those unhappy people...please call 1-900-IDN-TCAR."
"Me knowing the truth, I can not concur."
1996: Toronto - 1998: Chicago, Montreal, Barrie - 2000: Montreal, Toronto - 2002: Seattle X2 (Key Arena) - 2003: Cleveland, Buffalo, Toronto, Montreal, Seattle (Benaroya Hall) - 2004: Reading, Toledo, Grand Rapids - 2005: Kitchener, London, Hamilton, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Quebec City - 2006: Toronto X2, Albany, Hartford, Grand Rapids, Cleveland - 2007: Chicago (Vic Theatre) - 2008: NYC X2, Hartford, Mansfield X2 - 2009: Toronto, Chicago X2, Seattle X2, Philadelphia X4 - 2010: Columbus, Noblesville, Cleveland, Buffalo, Hartford - 2011: Montreal, Toronto X2, Ottawa, Hamilton - 2012: Missoula - 2013: London, Chicago, Buffalo, Hartford - 2014: Detroit, Moline - 2015: NYC (Global Citizen Festival) - 2016: Greenville, Toronto X2, Chicago 1 - 2017: Brooklyn (RRHOF Induction) - 2018: Chicago 1, Boston 1 - 2022: Fresno, Ottawa, Hamilton, Toronto, NYC, Camden - 2023: St. Paul X2, Austin X2 - 2024: Vancouver X2, Portland, Sacramento, Missoula, Noblesville, Philadelphia X2, Baltimore
Pearl Jam - Part 2 - Seg. 2
With that, he pulled out a .357 magnum and shot himself in the head.
The story received quite a bit of attention in the media. And one person who was deeply affected by the story was Eddie Vedder. The result was a song he called "Jeremy"
Throughout their career, live shows have always been a major part of Pearl Jam's appeal. The first time the members of Pearl Jam appeared onstage was on November 13th, 1990 at the Off Ramp Cafe in Seattle. They weren't even "Pearl Jam" yet, this was a Temple Of The Dog show.
The next gig was December 22nd, 1990 at the Moore Theatre in Seattle. They still weren't Pearl Jam yet, they were Mookie Blaylock, and they were the opening act for another Seattle band called "Alice In Chains"
The first show under the name "Pearl Jam" was a private affair, May 25th, 1991 when they performed at the wrap party at the end of the filming of Singles.
At first, Eddie was pretty reserved onstage. In the beginning, he looked pretty unsure of himself, but all that began to change when the band played a club called Harpo's in B.C. The crowd was pretty indifferent that night, which got Eddie mad. In frustration, he threw the base of his mic stand across the stage, nearly braining a few people.
From that point on, Eddie began to go wild whenever the band played live. He’d climb up the lighting rig, climb over the amps, dive into the crowd, whatever it took to get the audience going.
For example, on October 29th, 1991, Pearl Jam played in Toronto, with this other unknown band called "The Smashing Pumpkins," supporting the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Eddie appeared wearing nothing more than a pair of Chili Pepper boxer shorts, and at one point, he ripped off the shorts and dove into the crowd buck naked.
From about that point on, after that Chili Peppers tour, tickets for Pearl Jam shows began to sell out just minutes after they went on sale.
Speaking of live shows, next to The Grateful Dead, Pearl Jam is probably the most bootlegged band in the world. I know of at least 153 different Pearl Jam bootlegs. Some are live (from gigs from San Diego to Switzerland) some are from radio and TV broadcasts. Others feature unreleased mysterious studio outtakes, and some of the most interesting are demos.
For example, two of the most collectible boots are called Bad Radio and Hallucinogenic Recipe. "Bad Radio" was the San Diego band Eddie was in before he flew up to Seattle to join Pearl Jam. It's especially interesting to hear Eddie sing a song called "Stand By," which, years later, eventually evolved into "Betterman" for the Vitalogy album.
There's even a Bad Radio video bootleg floating around somewhere, it was shot sometime in April, 1989 and runs about 35 minutes.
Hallucinogenic Recipe is a huge, very comprehensive 5 CD bootleg boxed set that features bad radio home demos plus Mother Love Bone stuff plus Green River demos plus outtakes from Ten and Vs plus the fanclub Christmas singles plus some live material from shows in Las Vegas, San Francisco, New Orleans plus a jam from a rock and roll hall of fame induction dinner.
So what does Pearl Jam think about their status as "the most bootlegged band in the world?" Well, their record company obviously isn't crazy about it, but the band really doesn't seem to mind. Hell, Eddie admits to sneaking a tape recorder into a Pete Townsend show once.
Basically, Pearl Jam's attitude towards bootlegs is the same as the one held by REM: "bootlegs are for the fans, just make sure that if you are gonna bootleg our stuff, make it good. Make sure the sound quality is worth the money, don't sell crap"
This would be a good time to segue into the whole the whole Ticketmaster fiasco...
Lemme see if I can give you a simple explanation of this ongoing battle between Pearl Jam and Ticketmaster.
The big fight is over the service charge Ticketmaster tacks on the price of each concert ticket. The band contends these extra charges make tickets too expensive for the average fan to afford.
If you've ever bought a concert ticket, you know what I'm talking about. Service charges add up quickly, sometimes increasing the cost of a ticket by as much as a third.
In the beginning, they tried to work out their differences, Pearl Jam proposed that tickets for their shows go for $18 plus a 10% service charge. Ticketmaster said "no"
Pearl jam said "fine, we'll tour without you" and with that, they cancelled their 1994 summer tour until they could make arrangements to distribute tickets without Ticketmaster.
Pearl Jam - Part 2 - Seg. 3
In May 1994, the band filed a complaint with the U.S. Justice department, accusing Ticketmaster of threatening to sue promoters who work with the group to set up an alternative tour featuring lower ticket prices and lower service charges.
At first, it looked bleak for Ticketmaster, the justice department subpoenaed all the company's financial records and in late June, congress began investigating anti-trust charges against Ticketmaster. Stone Gossard appeared and gave three hours of testimony, alleging that it's almost impossible for any band to launch a large-scale tour of America without using Ticketmaster, saying there are all these exclusive contracts between the company and big concert promoters.
On July 30th, 1994, Pearl Jam filed another complaint with the justice department, saying that Ticketmaster's testimony in their own defense was misleading.
Nothing much happened for months, sure, a lot of artists came out in support of Pearl Jam's stance (REM, Neil Young, Aerosmith, Garth Brooks), but did any of them take up the fight?.....no.
On January 12th, 1995, there was an interesting faux pas at the rock and rock hall of fame induction dinner in New York.
In the spring of 1995, pearl jam announced with much fanfare that they will tour using a new computerized ticket distribution company called "ETM" But it doesn't go well, on June 14th, manager Kelly Curtis hints that Pearl Jam may drop its fight with Ticketmaster. Two days later (on June 16th, when the tour starts in Casper, Wyoming), Eddie tells the crowd the battle will continue.
The ETM plan was really ambitious involving special phone numbers and intricate screening procedures for fans wanting to buy tickets. But by the time the tour pulled into San Francisco on June 24th, people were starting to have some major complaints.
To make matters worse, the show did not go well that day. Eddie had the flu and had to pull out after seven songs, leaving Neil Young to carry the rest of the gig. That didn't sit well with everyone who went through the hassle of getting tickets.
Finally, on June 25th, Pearl Jam announced they were cancelling the rest of their tour. They cite "continued controversies associated with attempting to schedule and perform at alternative venues" in other words, the fight to stage a tour without using Ticketmaster is more trouble than it's worth.
And what about that justice department investigation?, on July 5th, they issued a terse, two-line statement saying they could find no evidence to support Pearl Jam's claims of anti-trust activities.
Bottom line: we don't know if Pearl Jam will ever tour North America again.
Pearl jam has never been afraid to take up causes. Aside from the Ticketmaster controversy, there's the band's stand on gun control and censorship. And of course, we've heard a lot about Eddie's position on reproductive choice.
And Pearl Jam has some interesting platforms from which they make their views known, and one of those platforms is radio.
On January 8th, 1995, Eddie took to the airwaves in a special satellite-delivered broadcast he called "self-pollution radio"
The show went on for almost five hours, and the highlights were definitely when some of Eddie's friends dropped in to play live, including the rest of Pearl Jam.
But it wasn't Eddie's only foray into radio. When the band did managed to get out on the road, one of the things they liked to do was set up a low-powered fm transmitter and as people were leaving the parking lot, they could tune in to this character called "Eddie the janitor" It wasn't very professional, but I think that was the point.
There's one more thing I wanna cover quickly, and that's Pearl Jam side projects.
Everyone knows about the collaboration with Neil Young on the Mirrorball album, but do you know about all the other Pearl Jam satellite projects and guest appearances?
There really aren't that many, Eddie sings on a couple of songs on Bad Religion's 1993 album, Recipe For Hate. Dave Abbruzzese shows up on a 1991 album by a group called "Course Of Empire" There's a duet with Cypress Hill on the Judgement Night soundtrack along with a couple of other assorted quick appearances.
The one side project everyone knows about is the band "Mad Season" (which features guitarist Mike McCready and Alice In Chains singer Layne Stanley) but Stone Gossard also recorded an album on the side, anyone remember the name of the band? They were called "Brad", and in the spring of 1993, they released an album entitled "Shame"
That just about does it for our two part special on Pearl Jam. 'Course, there's enough material left over we could continue this for a couple more parts, and I know that there's a lot of things we missed out.
But I'll tell you what, I'm gonna at least give you an idea of where you can learn all you need about Pearl Jam, get a pen and paper.
The best book on the subject of Pearl Jam right now is simply entitled Pearl Jam by Mick Wall. It's a little outdated right now, but it's still a good place the start. The publisher is Sidgwick And Jackson out of England.
Another book that's worth a look is Pearl Jam by Mark Bloke, it's a little thing about the size of a CD jewel box, it's put out by Carlton Books.
If you really want to get into Pearl Jam, you'll need a computer. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of pages available on the internet. Everything from a complete list of bootlegs, to the set lists for virtually every show the band ever played.
Here's the address of the best place to start, it's the "Garden Of Stone" home page, along with some really solid information, it provides links to everywhere a Pearl Jam fan might wanna go.
Here it is: http://www.skypoint.com/members/caleb/gos.html
Pearl Jam - the Secrets - Seg. 1
Grunge was one of the biggest deals in rock’n’roll over the last twenty-five years. Not only was the music pretty cool but grunge bands led a regime change in the world of rock. It was out with the old and in with the new – the alternative nation of the 90s.
It was a pretty seismic time. Hell, we are still talking about it and listening to the CDs: Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam.
Wait – let’s go through that list again: Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam. It is like Sesame Street: one of the things is not like the other; one of these things does not belong.
Out of all the major grunge bands of the early 90s, there is precisely one survivor: Pearl Jam.
Somehow, Eddie and the guys have outlived all their peers. They continue to make records and they continue to tour. And no clubs, either. They can still pack arenas and stadiums.
So what is their secret? Something in the water? A healthy diet? Botox? To be honest, I don’t have a clue.
I do, however, have a bunch of other Pearl Jam secrets. Want to hear some of those? Ok.
You heard me. Between 1990 and mid-2006, the band released 98 albums. If you have all those CDs then you are hardcore. And if you have al the unofficial releases – and there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bootlegs – well, I’m in awe. Seriously.
Few bands in the history of rock have inspired the kind of devotion that we see from Pearl Jam fans. They are the successors to the obsessive crown formerly owned by fans of The Grateful Dead.
Not that there is anything wrong with this. Every band should be so lucky to have a fan base so devoted to the cause. They document, archive and study the group with scientific precision. There are facts, theories, myths and areas of speculation. And thanks to all this work by all these people, there are vast Pearl Jam resources from which we can all draw. This show will include some of the secrets the diehards have dug up.
Let’s warm up with the controversy surrounding one of Pearl Jam’s big concert favorites. “Yellow Ledbetter” was an unlikely hit. It was originally only available as a bonus track on the UK import version of the “Jeremy” CD single. It was also found on a Japanese issue of the CD single of “Daughter”. Its obscure availability did not stop it from becoming a major hit in the Pearl Jam world.
But what is the song all about? This has been the subject of intense debate for more than a decade.
First of all, Eddie does not exactly enunciate his words in the original “Jeremy” EP version. That Japanese CD does include a lyric sheet, but they do not seem to be very accurate. There is some debate over whether those lyrics are the “official” ones.
To complicate things even further, when Pearl Jam performs the song live, Eddie tends to improvise, changing the words here and there.
If you had been recording every single version of “Yellow Ledbetter” since it was written – and there is no doubt there is someone who has – you will have a collection of the countless different lyrics.
And even if you can decipher what he is saying at any given time, what the hell is the taking about? There is a porch and a bunch of people who refuse to wave and a box or a bag of something. And despite thousands of letters and emails to various areas of the Pearl Jam organization pleading for a copy of the “real” lyrics, they have never been released.
This has led to a series of theories. Let’s recount the major ones:
1. The song is a tribute to Leadbelly, the legendary American blues singer from the early 20th century. His real name is “Huddie Ledbetter”.
2. The song is non-sensically based on a tongue-twister that is a favorite of Eddie’s. It is a warm-up that involves saying the phrase “Yellow Better, Red Better” as fast as you can.
3. It is an anti-war song inspired by the fact that Eddie’s brother is allegedly a soldier. This could explain the “box or bag” reference. A coffin? A body bag? And is it a “Yellow Letter” the official notification of a soldier being killed in action?
4. There is a “Ledbetter Park” and a “Ledbetter” beach in Santa Monica, which is a decent surfing area. Eddie is a surfer. And the signs for the beach and the park are yellow.
Or 5. It is just a joke, something that got out of hand. Eddie just improvised the song in the studio, using whatever words or phrases that popped into his head at the time during this one-take vocal session. The title is nothing more than an inside joke poking fun at Tim Ledbetter, one of Eddie’s old friends from Chicago.
So take your pick. You will be as correct as anyone else. Bottom line is that if you think you know the real story behind the song, you are pretty much 100% wrong. There is no right answer. Even Eddie does not seem to have a handle on things.
“Yellow Ledbetter” is not the only case where there seems to be a disconnect between what we hear and what is written down. If you sort through any number of Pearl Jam song books, you will find that things often do not sync up.
Maybe it is the wine. One of the perks of being a rock star is that you get to do and have things that regular people don’t - like wine.
These days, before Pearl Jam goes on tour, Eddie has someone pack him up some cases of some custom-bottled vino from the “Flowers” vineyard and winery in California’s Sonoma Valley. He is apparently partial to their Van der Kamp Pinot Noir with its fruity aroma and a finish that reminds one of cloves.
The bottles have no label. They are simply inscribed in bold with the name of the wine, the bottle number and the words “Eddie with Aloha”. Like I said, it is good to be a rock star.
This wine that Eddie takes on tour is certainly better than what he ingested during the 1992 Lollapalooza tour. If you were able to attend one of the gigs that year, you will know that one of the acts was something called the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow. This consisted of a bunch of freaky people who could do really freaky things – like Mr. Lifto whose specialty was hefting things with his nether region.
There was also Matt “The Tube” Crowley, a guy who could eat and then regurgitate just about anything. Well, that is not the whole story. He would swallow part of a seven foot hose. At the other end was a hand pump. Matt would pump all manner of things into his stomach and them pump it back out again, offering this new cocktail to anyone willing to drink it. Hey, it was the 90s and the drugs were bad.
On one particular stop on the ’92 Lollapalloza tour – which featured both Pearl Jam and Soundgarden – Eddie and Chris Cornell decided that they would have a drinking contest. But instead of using, say, beer, they went for bile – the stuff pumped out of Matt “The Tube” Crowley’s stomach. For the record, Eddie outlasted Chris. He “won” this particular contest. I hope it was worth it.
Eddie and the band have had their share of stalkers, especially back in the middle 90s when Pearl Jam was at the peak of their fame.
One particular nasty dude was messed up mentally. He had this idea that every Pearl Jam song was about him – which made sense because to this guy, Eddie was actually Jesus. And not just any Jesus but the one who raped this guy’s wife and produced two children that way.
Pearl Jam - the Secrets - Seg. 2
But this was not the only weirdo. One woman found out where Eddie lived and then drove her car into the wall of the house.
So if you have ever wondered why Eddie feels the need to have big fences around his house in Seattle and full-time 24/7 security, now you know. It is also part of the reason he turned into something of a hermit, a recluse. He does not live in Seattle anymore, either. He will not say where he lives. Do you blame him?
By the way, the song “Lukin” on the No Code album in 1996 has its roots in these stalker situations.
We should address the issue of Pearl Jam drummers. There have been a lot of them. In fact, you can make the argument that it is easier to be a drummer in Spinal Tap than it is in Pearl Jam.
The first guy was Matt Cameron, the Soundgarden drummer. He played on the very first demos for the band that would eventually be known as “Pearl Jam”.
Dave Krusen was the first permanent drummer. He was hired away from a band called “The Boibs” to play on Pearl Jam’s Ten album and to tour with the band for the first part of 1991. But then his girlfriend had a baby – and Dave’s drinking problem got completely out of hand. There are stories of him beating up his girlfriend and putting her in hospital. When that happened, he was fired. That whole situation is still extremely murky and few people want to talk about it.
Krusen was replaced by a guy from Texas named Mat Chamberlain, who had just come off a gig with a band called “Eddie Brickell and New Bohemians”. Remember them? They had that song “What I am”.
Matt stayed with Pearl Jam through a couple of tours and through the filming of the “Alive” video. But then he received an offer to join the house band on Saturday Night Live. That was permanent, stable work with a regular paycheque, so he took it.
But before he left for New York, Matt recommended a guy - a really heavy-hitter - named Dave Abbruzzese. He had a very distinctive style which includes excellent bass drum technique. He stayed with Pearl Jam until August 1994 when he was mysteriously fired by Stone Gossard. Again, the circumstances behind his departure are pretty murky.
Next up was Jack Irons, the first guy ever asked to play drums for Pearl Jam back in 1990. He was unavailable, which is how Matt Cameron and Dave Krusen ended up with the band in those early days. But he still played a crucial role. It was Jack that gave his San Diego basketball buddy, Eddie Vedder, a cassette copy of that very early Pearl Jam demo. If it weren’t for Jack, Eddie would have never joined the band and we would not be talking about Pearl Jam now.
After that basketball game with Eddie, Jack took a number of career detours, one of which included a stint in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He finally got his chance to be a member between 1994 and 1998. After that, he retired from playing in bands and began to concentrate on teaching and consulting.
Jack’s departure just happened to sync up with the break-up of Soundgarden, which meant that Matt Cameron – who, like I said, played on that very first demo – was now available. He has been with the group ever since.
To recap, it was Matt, Dave, another Matt, another Dave, Jack and then back to the original Matt. Glad we could clear that up.
This next piece of information also involves a Soundgarden connection. In fact, you can make a very strong argument that Pearl Jam was directly responsible for Soundgarden emerging as a superstar act in the middle 90s. This is one of those “butterfly effect” stories. You know, a butterfly flaps its wings in your backyard and through the wonders of chaos theory creates a typhoon in the west coast of Australia.
It begins with this premise: the big breakthrough song for Soundgarden was “Spoonman” from the Superunknown album. That one track blew things wide open for the group when it came to mainstream success.
We must now go back to the movie Singles which came out in 1992. Remember that Cameron Crowe movie about single people living in Seattle just as the grunge thing was taking off? That, by the way, was an accident. Crowe had been working on the movie since 1984, but it was delayed and delayed until the early 90s – and it just happened to catch the grunge wave. It was a happy coincidence.
Anyway, if you have seen the movie you will know that Matt Dillon stars as a singer of a struggling rock band called “Citizen Dick”. The other guys in his band consist of a pre-Pearl Jam Eddie Vedder, Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard. There are identified by their real names in the movie and even have some short speaking parts.
But that is not where I am going with this. To add authenticity to “Citizen Dick”, Jeff created a Citizen Dick demo tape as a prop, complete with a tracklisting. Jeff just made up a bunch of titles.
Chris Cornell – who is now in Audioslave and then in Soundgarden – is a friend of Jeff’s. He also makes a cameo in Singles, so he was obviously on the set during shooting. At some point, he saw Jeff’s list of fictional song titles. As an artistic exercise, Chris decided to try and write actual songs to match those fake titles.
One title Jeff made up was “Spoonman”. He took that from the nickname of a real-life Seattle street performer named “Artis” who was famous for playing the spoons. And if you are listening, a rough clip of Chris’ new song based on that title shows up in the movie very briefly. It also shows up in a finished form on Soundgarden’s Superunknown album. The song was a hit, the video was a hit, the album was a hit – and Soundgarden became one of the giants of grunge.
If you read the credits carefully, you will see that Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam is acknowledged for his contribution to a Soundgarden track.
Here is another song not by Pearl Jam but is related to the topic of the show.
Pearl Jam - the Secrets - Seg. 3
Who is “Sadie 7”? She is a bass player for a group called “Hovercraft”. Her real name is Beth Liebling. So what? She is the former Mrs. Eddie Vedder.
Eddie met Beth in 1984 when he was working as a waiter at a place called “Don’s Fishmarket” in Chicago. She worked at the place next door. They decided to move to San Diego, so Eddie took a second job as a bass player in a wedding band to earn some extra cash. He apparently played about ten gigs and had to learn a bunch of songs by Styx and Journey. But hey, it was a job, right?
When they both moved to Sand Diego later that year, Beth became the booker of a Goth nightclub band called “Red Tape” at a local club called “Bacchanal”. During the day, she went to school at San Diego State. Later, when Eddie moved up to Seattle, she followed him. Hovercraft came together shortly after Beth met a dude name Ryan in her surgical studies class. They were very atmospheric and instrumental. Eddie even lent a hand by playing some drums occasionally.
Eddie and Beth were married on June 3, 1994 but were eventually divorced in 2000. They had dated since they were teenagers. The last straw in the relationship might have been that horrible tragedy at the 2000 Roskilde festival in Denmark where nine fans were crushed to death during Pearl Jam’s set. Eddie was in a pretty dark place after that.
Since then Eddie hooked up with a model named Jill McCormick and they have a daughter named Olivia born on June 11, 2004.
Back to Hovercraft for a moment: they have at least four albums, the best of which is probably a record entitled Akathisia from 1997
One thing we have not tackled is the whole controversy surrounding the name “Pearl Jam”.
First of all, this is not the band’s original name. If you want to go right to the beginning, the group that would become Pearl Jam was originally known as “Luv Company”. This was the name on the demo of the instrumentals by Jeff and Stone that Jack Irons gave to his basketball buddy, Eddie Vedder.
After Eddie and drummer Dave Krusen joined, the group recorded without a name. Then, according to the legend, a basketball card mysteriously fell out of one of the tape boxes. The card was for a point guard from the New Jersey Nets: #10, Mookie Blaylock.
Taking this as some kind of sign, the new group became known as “Mookie Blaylock” and the title for their debut album became Ten.
They played exactly 14 gigs under that name. But in early February 1991, the real Mookie Blaylock heard about this and was not terribly flattered. His lawyers started calling to demand that they get this freaky, long-haired Seattle band stop using his name without his permission. And he was not interested in giving permission because it messed up his revenue stream with endorsements. This is the REAL reason behind the name change.
For example, what was Mookie (the basketball player) to do if he was offered a shoe deal with Nike? If Mookie Blaylock (the band) trademarked the name first for material goods like, let’s say, clothing and shows, it would mean that Mookie (the basketball player), would have to pay the Mookie Blaylock (the band) a royalty for just the privilege of using his own name.
Of course, the same thing could happen in reverse. Say that Mookie (the band) got an endorsement deal from say, Gibson guitars. If Mookie (the basketball player) had smart lawyers arrange a blanket trademark deal that covered all manner of consumer goods, then Mookie (the band) would have to pay a royalty for the opportunity to get all the guitars for free.
In other words, it was just too much hassle for Mookie (the band) to continue to use that name. I was easier to just change things. But to what?
As everyone who has ever played in a band knows, finding a name is a torturous thing. And it was no different for Eddie and the boys. The first suggestion was “Reenik Roink”. I don’t know why but it is not important. And besides, who would take a group named “Reenik Roink” seriously?
This is where great-grandma Pearl comes in. The mythology evolved this way: Eddie says he had a great-grandmother named Pearl. It is said that she was married to a very spiritual Native-American man who liked to get high in a natural and traditional way.
His favorite high was from peyote, which comes from a particular species of cactus.
A part of the peyote plant – the button – contains mescaline. If you chew or make tea from the buttons, you get a potion that produces a very introspective (some say spiritual) high that can last for up to twelve hours.
Grandma Pearl was apparently into peyote, too. Not only that, but she was resourceful. Taking some of her husband’s stuff, she made it into this weird hallucinogenic fruit spread. Adding a little sugar and creating a jam started the day off nice. Everyone called it “Pearl Jam”.
What a great story. Too bad that it is completely untrue.
Sure, he talks about having heard about the jam, but he also admits to never seeing the recipe, let alone tasting it. It is just something he says was passed down through the family.
But the truth is that Eddie made the whole thing up. His great-grandmother was named Pearl – Pearl Hazel Howard. She was a Scottish-Irish woman. But she was not married to some Native-American shaman. She was married to a circus contortionist from Denmark.
There was no peyote spread, no shaman – and Eddie does not have a drop of Native-American blood in his body. And trust me: many genealogists have checked on this.
And just to put the final nail in the coffin, Eddie admitted that the whole story was crap in a 2006 interview in Rolling Stone. He did have a grandma Pearl, but the rest is just made up.
The truth is that they were sitting around in a restaurant, trying to come up with an alternative to “Mookie Blaylock” when Jeff – Jeff! Not Eddie! – suggested the word “pearl”. But then they got stuck.
A little later, the band flew to New York to sign their big record deal and while they were there, they saw a Neil Young concert out at the Nassau Coliseum. Apparently, Neil played nine songs in three hours. In other words, the show was an entire big jam. And that is how this band became know as “Pearl Jam”.
Pearl Jam - the Secrets - Seg. 4
One final thing about Pearl Jam before we wrap up. The diehards know that Pearl Jam has no trouble with fans recording and trading live bootlegs of their shows. This is one of the things that have helped create such a close-knit community among fans. It drives their record label nuts but the faithful loves it.
But do you know why Pearl Jam is into bootlegging? Because when Eddie was a kid growing up he used to sneak a walkman with a recording function into shows. He got pretty good at it, too. He had this small unit connected to a tiny mic on his lapel.
He would try to record every show he went to: The Who, The Pretenders, a variety of punk bands. He had hundreds of tapes. And he never sold them. If someone was into a particular band as much as he was, Eddie would make them a copy.
And, yes, he was caught many times and occasionally roughed up by security – but that only strengthened his resolve. And it also explains why Eddie believes that it is the Pearl Jam’s right to make personal recordings of Pearl Jam shows.
It also explains why there are dozens and dozens of official Pearl Jam bootlegs on CD – and why the band makes performances available in the digital era.
A couple final things about Pearl Jam before we leave everything alone:
Pearl Jam has famously hated doing videos for their entire career. Up until 2006, they had gone 14 years without making a proper video. The last proper one was the clip for “Jeremy” in 1992. That embargo was broken with a clip for “Life Wasted” in 2006.
Jeff Ament loves to skateboard. He always has.
One more: Eddie has been singing since he was six. He used to be able to hit all the high notes in all his favorite Michael Jackson songs.
It is one thing to be in a band. It is another thing to be in a band that writes a lot of music that lots of people want to hear and own. But only few bands get to have their own proper mythology. Sure, you can try and invent one – you know, fake it. But that will only get you so far. To truly transcend the ordinary, your mythology (those wonderful mysteries that surround everything about your existence) needs to be invented, nurtured, augmented and perpetuated by the fans. It’s got to have that organic aspect to it. Otherwise, it is just some kind of marketing thing.
Pearl Jam has had this going for them since they began. The music, the charisma, the causes, the community of fans – it is all gone into making up something pretty special.
Comments
I will have to figure out if I can get it in Kelowna when Im there this sunday though. Otherwise I will have to see if I can listen on the web after its aired before the second part.
Pearl Jam is one of the biggest bands of the 90s. Since their debut album Ten was released on August 27th 1991, it has sold more than 10 million copies, making it the biggest-selling rock album of the 90s, so far.
Welcome to part one of our two-part look at Pearl Jam.
This has to be a two-part show because there's just so much to talk about with these guys: their history, their live shows, the bonus tracks, the bootlegs, the Ticketmaster controversy. And since we like to be thorough around here, we're going to devote some extra time to Pearl Jam.
I think the best place to start is with a basic history of the group, which, I figure, will take up all of part one. Ready?......here we go.
The birth of Pearl Jam begins with the death of a Seattle singer named Andrew Wood.
Andrew's band was called "Mother Love Bone" The group also featured guitarist Stone Gossard (a veteran of such forgotten bands as "March Of Crimes" and "The Ducky Boys") and bassist Jeff Ament (who once was a part of a Seattle band called "Deranged Diction”)
Stone and Jeff first joined up in a band called "Green River", they produced a compilation called Deep Six in 1985.
Deep Six was like a snapshot of what was happening in Seattle in the mid-80s. The album was released on Tie Records, but then went out of print for years until it was resurrected on CD in 1994.
Green river lasted through a couple of records before breaking up in October 1987. And they broke up for a stupid reason, one night, the band was opening for Jane's Addiction when a fight started in the dressing room over who could add more people to the guest list.
Singer Mark Arm quit on the spot, he went on to form a new band called "Mudhoney" while Stone and Jeff had to pick up the pieces of Green River.
They hired a guy named Greg Gilmore to play drums. And then they picked up Andrew Wood, a very intense singer and full-time heroin addict. Andy had picked up the habit while performing with a Seattle glam-punk affair called "Malfunkshun"
Andrew had been into junk and coke since high school because he thought it was the "rock star thing to do" He also loved to wear big fur coats, spandex and big red scarves. His idol was Freddy Mercury of Queen, and anything Freddy was into was okay by Andrew.
The new band was supposed to have been called "Lords Of The Wasteland", but that was dumped after Stone and Andrew wrote a song together called "Capricorn Sister" that featured the line "Mother Love Bone"
With their new sound, it's not surprising Mother Love Bone found themselves "discovered" by Gene Simmons of Kiss, who talked about the band whenever he was given the chance.
That was nice, but Mother Love Bone had other things to think about, namely the health of their singer. Andrew's rock star excess had finally begun to consume him, especially after the band scored a major record deal complete with a big advance.
By November 1989, Andrew was so out of it that he was sent to dry out for a month at a rehab centre in California. When he re-joined Mother Love Bone, he was clean, but that was only temporary.
Two weeks before the group's album was to be released, Andrew was found in a heroin coma in his girlfriend's apartment. He never woke up, on March 19th, 1990, Andrew's family ordered his doctors to shut off the life-support machines.
Mother Love Bone was finished; literally just days before they were supposed to break it wide open. More than a thousand music fans turned out to Andrew's memorial at Seattle's Paramount theatre, the site of Mother Love Bone's last gig.
The remaining members split into two camps, guitarist Bruce Fairweather and drummer Greg Gilmore formed a band called "Blind Horse" while Stone and Jeff dropped out of the music scene altogether for a while.
But by the end of the year, they were both bored with their day jobs and decided they should get back to playing again. Here's where Pearl Jam starts coming together.
Stone and Jeff formed a band called "Luv Company", that's where they met guitarist Mike McCready. Luv Company went through a couple of drummers. First, Matt Cameron of Soundgarden sat in part-time, just so the guys could rehearse and record a quick demo. He then was replaced by a fulltime drummer by the name of Dave Krusen.
Next stop was a singer, the demo was good, but it was all instrumental. They needed a frontman. Stone and Jeff knew they wanted someone who was the exact opposite of Andrew Wood, but where could you find such a guy, especially in Seattle?
A copy of the Luv Company demo was given to Jack Irons, who used to play drums for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He knew this surfer dude who worked the night shift at a gas station in San Diego. Jack and this guy played pick-up basketball a lot, and after one game, Jack passed the tape along to this kid.
The kid's name was Eddie Vedder. Eddie had played in several bands with names like "Bad Radio" and "Surf And Destroy", but they were going nowhere.
As soon as Eddie got the tape from Jack, he started listening to it over and over. One morning, after getting off the night shift, Eddie went surfing. At the end of the day, exhausted and unable to sleep, he sat down and wrote words to three of the five songs on the tape.
He dubbed the words and music onto a new Cassette and sent the package up to Seattle, and when Jeff and Stone heard Eddie sing, they knew they had found their frontman. That's when Eddie flew up to Seattle and began to jam with the guys.
Okay, quick detour back to Andrew Wood. By the end of 1990, Chris Cornell of Soundgarden (Andrew's old roommate), had written two songs in memory of his friend. Neither song was suitable for Soundgarden, so it was decided that they would become part of a memorial album dedicated to Andrew and featuring various members of the Seattle music scene.
This temporary group was called "Temple Of The Dog" after a line in the Mother Love Bone song "Man Of Golden Words". The album was recorded over several weekends late in the fall of 1990, released in April 1991, it featured contributions from Stone, Jeff, Mike, …and Eddie.
All right, we can finally start talking about Pearl Jam. In between Temple Of The Dog sessions, Eddie, Stone, Jeff, Mike and Dave were working on their own material.
At first, there was no Pearl Jam, the band was called "Mookie Blaylock" after the basketball player from the New Jersey Nets. Legend has it the guys in the band found his basketball card in the box with their demo tape. I guess they figured that was some sort of omen, so they decided to name their band after him.
The first Mookie Blaylock rehearsals were held in the basement of a Seattle art gallery. And things came together very quickly. Within five days, they had eleven songs together and were ready to try them in front of an audience.
Mookie Blaylock played their first gig on December 22, 1990 at the Moore theatre in Seattle. They were the opener for another local band called Alice In Chains.
Let me read from the review that appeared the next morning in the Seattle Times. "Alice In Chains gave a better representation of the Seattle sound that those that should have: opening band Mookie Blaylock, whose music leaned more towards bad 70s country rock (Bad Company came to mind) than the punk-metal angst of Green River or Mother Love Bone"
Okay, so the first gig didn't go well. But things got better the more they played.
Mookie Blaylock played a grand total of nine gigs before they guys got tired of that name, and Mookie himself was less than flattered. He wasn't crazy about a bunch of long hairs from the northwest appropriating his name, and had asked his lawyer to investigate.
A couple of alternates received serious consideration. The first was "Reenik Roink", but that was just too dumb, the other was "Pearl Jam" and here's the story behind that...
Eddie had a great grandmother named Pearl. Her husband was an American Indian who was into natural hallucinogens like Peyote, and to make him happy, Pearl used to add Peyote to the recipe for the fruit preserve she used to make in the fall, hence the name "Pearl Jam"
There was time for a quick line-up change, Dave Krusen quit the band. He and his girlfriend had a new baby and the pressure of being in a band and recording an album was just too much.
Dave suggested a guy by the name of Matt Chamberlain, who used to play with Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians. But he couldn't stick around for long because he was offered the gig of playing drums for the band on Saturday Night Live. He agreed to sit in for a while until the band found a permanent replacement for Dave.
At the end of May, 1991, they formally announced the name change from "Mookie Blaylock" to "Pearl Jam" And also they let it be known that they had a major record deal and a full album was ready to go.
It was called Ten, after the number of Mookie Blaylock's New Jersey nets uniform. The first single came out twice, first on a compilation tape put out by Coca-Cola early in the summer, and second, on its own in August 1991…the song was called "Alive"
There's a long story regarding how that song came about. Eddie first heard the song on that tape Jack Irons gave to him, but back then, it was entitled "Dollar Short"
Eddie took an auto-biographical approach to writing the lyrics. The song is about a boy who grows up to find the person he thought was his father wasn't and the confusion that follows.
Here's where we gotta talk about Eddie for a second. He was born in Evanston, Illinois and his name was Edward Louis Severson, Junior. Years later, he discovered his mother had separated from his biological father when Eddie was still a baby. He grew up thinking his stepfather was his real father. He was even using the man's last name: Mueller.
This really messed him up and when Eddie left home for good, he changed his last name to "Vedder", which was his mother's maiden name.
To make matters even more confusing, Eddie soon found that his real father had died of multiple sclerosis, he died without Eddie ever really meeting him.
Ten was officially released on August 27th, 1991, and when the album came out, the band had a new drummer. His name was Dave Abbruzzese, Dave was from Connecticut by way of Dallas and was so happy to be in the band after the second show he did with them, he went out and got a tattoo of the stick figure we see on the cover of the "Alive" single.
So let's run over the drummer situation again...its Dave Krusen you hear on the Ten album, in the early videos for songs like "Alive" it's Matt Chamberlain, and from August 1991 on, it was Dave Abbruzzese behind the kit.
At first, Ten sold only moderately well. But by beginning of 1992 (and after going out on the road with the Red Hot Chili Peppers), the album started selling like crazy. By the time they left for their European tour in February, Ten had sold more than a million copies, and the cult of Pearl Jam had begun.
The rest of 1992 was very busy. The crowds at Pearl Jam shows kept getting bigger and bigger. Pearl Jam played 34 dates on the 1992 Lollapalooza tour, and Eddie became more outspoken and more of a character. He pushed himself to exhaustion on stage, often diving into the pit, and sometimes stopping shows in mid-song when he saw a mosher in trouble. There was a very public war of words over music principles with Kurt Cobain. Eddie began railing against music videos, and he refused to allow Pearl Jam's record company to release "Black" as a single, simply because he didn't want it to be a single.
Pearl jam fans loved him for it. They saw Eddie as a man of principles, an icon of integrity. And they showed their appreciation by buying more albums and more concert tickets.
It finally became time to record a second album in May 1993. Things got off to a rocky start when Eddie freaked out after losing his notebook full of song ideas. But he eventually calmed down long enough for the band to tear through 12 songs, many of them recorded live off the floor.
The songs were harder and without the old-style rock pomp of tracks like "Alive" That became very apparent when the first single came out in early fall, it was called "Go"
As Pearl Jam was getting ready to release their second album, there was a lot of confusion, when was it going to come out? And what was the record going to be called?
At first, the album was going to be called a Shark In Blood Waters. That's what Mike wanted, Jeff suggested Paul's Dead. Eddie wanted Al, after Aleister Crowley. Five Against One.....then we heard it was going to be called Five (as in "half of ten") and designated with the roman numeral "V" But in the end, the name became VS.
Now, the release date. Originally, it was supposed to be out in September 1993, but that conflicted with the release of Nirvana's In Utero album, so it was delayed.
And finally, there was the matter of what format. Epic Records wanted a CD-only release. Pearl Jam wanted a vinyl copy in the stores.
So, as a compromise, VS came out on vinyl one week before the CD and Cassette: October 11th, 1993. Fans were so crazy for something new that all 30,000 copies sold out almost immediately. But that was nothing compared to what was about to happen...
When the CD and Cassette was released on October 19th, Pearl Jam set an all-time sales record. 950,378 albums were sold in the first week. The only other band that came close was Guns'n'Roses who sold 770,000 copies of their Use Your Illusion II album in 1991.
By way of comparison, Nirvana's In Utero only sold 180,000 copies in its first week.
Meanwhile, Ten was still selling at the rate of 40,000 copies a week. In the space of a little more than two years, Pearl Jam had become one of the biggest bands in the world.
Just in case you were wondering, there are at least three different cover photos for VS.
Before the third album came out, there were two changes to Pearl Jam. One union and one split. First, Eddie got married, he and his long-time girlfriend from San Diego, Beth Liebling, got married during a quick, private ceremony in Italy on June 3rd, 1994...that's the union.
The split came in August 1994, when there was another change in drummers. Dave Abbruzzese was fired, almost 3 years to the day he was hired. Stone Gossard apparently did the dirty work. At first we were told he quit to study music, but then Stone called the press and gave his side of the story, which was totally different. Bottom line is we still don't know why Dave isn't in Pearl Jam anymore.
The new drummer is Jack Irons, a former member of the Chili Peppers and the guy who gave Eddie the gas bar attendant that demo tape, way back when…
Like VS, Pearl Jam's third album was also released in two stages. The vinyl version hit the stores on November 22nd, 1994. Anyone who wanted the CD or Cassette had to wait until December 6th. Like VS, the album sold incredibly fast, more than 877,000 were snapped up in the first week.
And like VS, the first single was harder and punkier than what people expected. It was a tribute to vinyl records called "Spin The Black Circle"
The Vitalogy album took its name from an old medical advice book that Eddie had picked up somewhere.
The other was Dr. E.H. Ruddock, who was a 19th specialist in clean living. He wrote books with titles like Consumption And Diseases Of The Lungs and The Ladies’ Manual. Vitalogy was one of his guidebooks to good health, parts of the book were used in the very elaborate liner notes that came with the album.
And in case you're counting, Vitalogy has sold something like 4 million copies so far. Worldwide, Pearl Jam has moved almost 30 million copies of three albums.
Okay, so that brings us more-or-less up-to-date as far as the basic history of Pearl Jam goes. But there's way more to the band than this. In fact, we've barely scratched the surface.
Now that we know where Pearl Jam came from, we really start getting into detail.
For example, in Part II of our look at Pearl Jam we'll examine the whole Ticketmaster fiasco, we'll enter the world of pearl jam bootlegs, talk a bit about the official Pearl Jam fan club, Pearl Jam's political causes, the live shows, the radio broadcasts, the reason the band won't do videos, the hard-to-find studio tracks like "Yellow Ledbetter" and "Dirty Frank". Plus we'll get into some really cool trivia, ranging from the tattoo on Eddie's calf to the true story behind the song "Jeremy"
This is the second half of our look at Pearl Jam. Last time, we when through a basic history of the band, where they came from and how they got to where they are now.
This time, we're gonna go a little deeper. We're gonna talk about videos, the live shows, the radio broadcasts, the Ticketmaster fiasco, the hard-to-find studio tracks. And we'll talk a bit about Pearl Jam's fans, some of the most devoted and loyal music fans anywhere.
Which brings us to this, what was the 1991 Pearl Jam Christmas 7" that was issued only to members of their official "Ten" fanclub?...That's easy, it's called "Let Me Sleep"
There are less than 15,000 original copies of that release. Like REM, the group likes to issue a Christmas 7" every year. In 1992, it was "Who Killed Rudolph", in 1993, it was a track called "Angel", plus there's the multi-part b-side entitled "Ramblings"
There are a lot of Pearl Jam songs like this; tracks that have never appeared on a proper Pearl Jam album. And a lot of die-hard fans have a lot of fun trying to hunt them all down.
Lemme illustrate, to date, Pearl Jam has three full domestic albums in release in North America. They contain a grand total of 38 songs, but if you count up all the b-sides, bonus tracks and covers on all of Pearl Jam's singles and albums (both domestic and import), you'll find that there are more than 50 Pearl Jam originals officially available. And then if you count up all the cover versions that are available both officially and unofficially, you'll end up with something like a hundred different Pearl Jam tracks.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about. One of Pearl Jam's most famous b-sides is a song entitled "Yellow Ledbetter" It's become a concert highlight for many fans and a lot of die-hards have spent hours trying to figure out what the song is about.
"Yellow Ledbetter", the infamous Pearl Jam bonus track, first appeared on the CD single for "Jeremy" in 1992. A live version can be found on the CD single for "Daughter"
It seems no one but the band knows what that song is all about. Eddie mumbles through most of it, so any lyric transcriptions are just rough approximations. To make things even more mysterious, Eddie often decides to improvise whenever Pearl Jam plays the song live.
But that hasn't kept hundreds of fans from spending literally hours analyzing the words they can make out and discussing the deeper meanings of that porch where people don't wave.
A lot of fans forget that three-fifths of Pearl Jam once appeared in a movie. In fact, they were in a movie together before they were known as Pearl Jam.
The movie was Singles and it was filmed in Seattle between March and May 1991. Director Cameron Crowe was a big fan of what was happening in the city and wanted to make things as authentic as possible.
Chris Cornell of Soundgarden almost got the starring role, but studio executives insisted on an actor with some kind of box office potential. That's when Matt Dillon was cast as Cliff, the lead singer of a fictitious band called "Citizen Dick"
Now that Cameron had his star, he needed to find Matt a back-up band. That's when he found Mookie Blaylock, which, of course, was an early name for the band that would become Pearl Jam.
Stone Gossard was cast as Citizen Dick's guitarist, Jeff played bass, and the drummer was Eddie Vedder. All three appear together in several scenes doing things like watching nature documentaries on TV, and another scene where Matt, Eddie, Jeff and Stone sit around reading a review of Citizen Dick's new single.
And by the way: all the clothes Matt Dillon wore on screen came out of Pearl Jam's real wardrobe.
When the movie finally came out in September 1992, the soundtrack featured two previously unreleased Pearl Jam songs "State Of Love And Trust" and “Breath”
There's a natural segue here from movies to videos. In the beginning, Pearl Jam made videos like everyone else. And they did very well, the video for "Jeremy" won them three awards at the 1993 MTV video awards. But after shooting a grand total of just four video clips, Eddie declared that the band wouldn't do them anymore.
You see, Eddie wasn't comfortable with the whole concept of videos. To him, they were just too "rock star", but in the beginning, he went along with the idea because it was just something that every new band had to do. But then he ran into Mark Eitzel, leader of the band American Music Club. He's the guy you can blame this whole video thing on.
Eddie respected Mark a lot, and when he told Eddie that the video for "Jeremy" sucked, it really hit him hard. Eddie had felt all along the concept for the "Jeremy" video was too artsy, they should have shot a straight performance video or nothing at all.
After that conversation with Mark, Eddie got it in his head that for Pearl Jam to become credible again, they had to stop doing videos, and that was that.
By the way: can you name the four Pearl Jam videos?.....there's "Jeremy", there are the clips for "Alive" and "Evenflow"....but what was the fourth? Chances are you would have had to have been in Europe if you were gonna see it because that was the only area of the world where it was officially released. It was a grainy, black-and-white clip featuring the band surfing in Hawaii, the song was "Oceans"
Like a lot of songwriters, Eddie Vedder draws much of his inspiration from personal experience. But he's also affected by the experiences of other people. And one person who really moved him was 16 year-old Jeremy Delle, who was in his second year at Richardson High School in Richardson Texas.
Jeremy was a pretty troubled kid, he had been in family counselling with his father and was missing an awful lot of school. People who knew him described Jeremy as a loner, a quiet kid who appeared to be really sad sometimes.
On the morning of Tuesday, January 8th, 1991, he left a note with a friend and walked into his English class. It was quarter to ten, which meant that he was late.
His teacher, Ms Barnett, told him if he wanted to stay, he had better go to the office and get an admittance slip. That's when Jeremy looked at her and said "Miss, I got what I really went for"
"Secrets of Pearl Jam" Episode (Original Broadcast Date 09/24/06):
http://cfnyfm.corusradionetwork.com/emmis/OHNM.cfm?recID=51&ell=8943&pge=1#
"Me knowing the truth, I can not concur."
1996: Toronto - 1998: Chicago, Montreal, Barrie - 2000: Montreal, Toronto - 2002: Seattle X2 (Key Arena) - 2003: Cleveland, Buffalo, Toronto, Montreal, Seattle (Benaroya Hall) - 2004: Reading, Toledo, Grand Rapids - 2005: Kitchener, London, Hamilton, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Quebec City - 2006: Toronto X2, Albany, Hartford, Grand Rapids, Cleveland - 2007: Chicago (Vic Theatre) - 2008: NYC X2, Hartford, Mansfield X2 - 2009: Toronto, Chicago X2, Seattle X2, Philadelphia X4 - 2010: Columbus, Noblesville, Cleveland, Buffalo, Hartford - 2011: Montreal, Toronto X2, Ottawa, Hamilton - 2012: Missoula - 2013: London, Chicago, Buffalo, Hartford - 2014: Detroit, Moline - 2015: NYC (Global Citizen Festival) - 2016: Greenville, Toronto X2, Chicago 1 - 2017: Brooklyn (RRHOF Induction) - 2018: Chicago 1, Boston 1 - 2022: Fresno, Ottawa, Hamilton, Toronto, NYC, Camden - 2023: St. Paul X2, Austin X2 - 2024: Vancouver X2, Portland, Sacramento, Missoula, Noblesville, Philadelphia X2, Baltimore
With that, he pulled out a .357 magnum and shot himself in the head.
The story received quite a bit of attention in the media. And one person who was deeply affected by the story was Eddie Vedder. The result was a song he called "Jeremy"
Throughout their career, live shows have always been a major part of Pearl Jam's appeal. The first time the members of Pearl Jam appeared onstage was on November 13th, 1990 at the Off Ramp Cafe in Seattle. They weren't even "Pearl Jam" yet, this was a Temple Of The Dog show.
The next gig was December 22nd, 1990 at the Moore Theatre in Seattle. They still weren't Pearl Jam yet, they were Mookie Blaylock, and they were the opening act for another Seattle band called "Alice In Chains"
The first show under the name "Pearl Jam" was a private affair, May 25th, 1991 when they performed at the wrap party at the end of the filming of Singles.
At first, Eddie was pretty reserved onstage. In the beginning, he looked pretty unsure of himself, but all that began to change when the band played a club called Harpo's in B.C. The crowd was pretty indifferent that night, which got Eddie mad. In frustration, he threw the base of his mic stand across the stage, nearly braining a few people.
From that point on, Eddie began to go wild whenever the band played live. He’d climb up the lighting rig, climb over the amps, dive into the crowd, whatever it took to get the audience going.
For example, on October 29th, 1991, Pearl Jam played in Toronto, with this other unknown band called "The Smashing Pumpkins," supporting the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Eddie appeared wearing nothing more than a pair of Chili Pepper boxer shorts, and at one point, he ripped off the shorts and dove into the crowd buck naked.
From about that point on, after that Chili Peppers tour, tickets for Pearl Jam shows began to sell out just minutes after they went on sale.
Speaking of live shows, next to The Grateful Dead, Pearl Jam is probably the most bootlegged band in the world. I know of at least 153 different Pearl Jam bootlegs. Some are live (from gigs from San Diego to Switzerland) some are from radio and TV broadcasts. Others feature unreleased mysterious studio outtakes, and some of the most interesting are demos.
For example, two of the most collectible boots are called Bad Radio and Hallucinogenic Recipe. "Bad Radio" was the San Diego band Eddie was in before he flew up to Seattle to join Pearl Jam. It's especially interesting to hear Eddie sing a song called "Stand By," which, years later, eventually evolved into "Betterman" for the Vitalogy album.
There's even a Bad Radio video bootleg floating around somewhere, it was shot sometime in April, 1989 and runs about 35 minutes.
Hallucinogenic Recipe is a huge, very comprehensive 5 CD bootleg boxed set that features bad radio home demos plus Mother Love Bone stuff plus Green River demos plus outtakes from Ten and Vs plus the fanclub Christmas singles plus some live material from shows in Las Vegas, San Francisco, New Orleans plus a jam from a rock and roll hall of fame induction dinner.
So what does Pearl Jam think about their status as "the most bootlegged band in the world?" Well, their record company obviously isn't crazy about it, but the band really doesn't seem to mind. Hell, Eddie admits to sneaking a tape recorder into a Pete Townsend show once.
Basically, Pearl Jam's attitude towards bootlegs is the same as the one held by REM: "bootlegs are for the fans, just make sure that if you are gonna bootleg our stuff, make it good. Make sure the sound quality is worth the money, don't sell crap"
This would be a good time to segue into the whole the whole Ticketmaster fiasco...
Lemme see if I can give you a simple explanation of this ongoing battle between Pearl Jam and Ticketmaster.
The big fight is over the service charge Ticketmaster tacks on the price of each concert ticket. The band contends these extra charges make tickets too expensive for the average fan to afford.
If you've ever bought a concert ticket, you know what I'm talking about. Service charges add up quickly, sometimes increasing the cost of a ticket by as much as a third.
In the beginning, they tried to work out their differences, Pearl Jam proposed that tickets for their shows go for $18 plus a 10% service charge. Ticketmaster said "no"
Pearl jam said "fine, we'll tour without you" and with that, they cancelled their 1994 summer tour until they could make arrangements to distribute tickets without Ticketmaster.
In May 1994, the band filed a complaint with the U.S. Justice department, accusing Ticketmaster of threatening to sue promoters who work with the group to set up an alternative tour featuring lower ticket prices and lower service charges.
At first, it looked bleak for Ticketmaster, the justice department subpoenaed all the company's financial records and in late June, congress began investigating anti-trust charges against Ticketmaster. Stone Gossard appeared and gave three hours of testimony, alleging that it's almost impossible for any band to launch a large-scale tour of America without using Ticketmaster, saying there are all these exclusive contracts between the company and big concert promoters.
On July 30th, 1994, Pearl Jam filed another complaint with the justice department, saying that Ticketmaster's testimony in their own defense was misleading.
Nothing much happened for months, sure, a lot of artists came out in support of Pearl Jam's stance (REM, Neil Young, Aerosmith, Garth Brooks), but did any of them take up the fight?.....no.
On January 12th, 1995, there was an interesting faux pas at the rock and rock hall of fame induction dinner in New York.
In the spring of 1995, pearl jam announced with much fanfare that they will tour using a new computerized ticket distribution company called "ETM" But it doesn't go well, on June 14th, manager Kelly Curtis hints that Pearl Jam may drop its fight with Ticketmaster. Two days later (on June 16th, when the tour starts in Casper, Wyoming), Eddie tells the crowd the battle will continue.
The ETM plan was really ambitious involving special phone numbers and intricate screening procedures for fans wanting to buy tickets. But by the time the tour pulled into San Francisco on June 24th, people were starting to have some major complaints.
To make matters worse, the show did not go well that day. Eddie had the flu and had to pull out after seven songs, leaving Neil Young to carry the rest of the gig. That didn't sit well with everyone who went through the hassle of getting tickets.
Finally, on June 25th, Pearl Jam announced they were cancelling the rest of their tour. They cite "continued controversies associated with attempting to schedule and perform at alternative venues" in other words, the fight to stage a tour without using Ticketmaster is more trouble than it's worth.
And what about that justice department investigation?, on July 5th, they issued a terse, two-line statement saying they could find no evidence to support Pearl Jam's claims of anti-trust activities.
Bottom line: we don't know if Pearl Jam will ever tour North America again.
Pearl jam has never been afraid to take up causes. Aside from the Ticketmaster controversy, there's the band's stand on gun control and censorship. And of course, we've heard a lot about Eddie's position on reproductive choice.
And Pearl Jam has some interesting platforms from which they make their views known, and one of those platforms is radio.
On January 8th, 1995, Eddie took to the airwaves in a special satellite-delivered broadcast he called "self-pollution radio"
The show went on for almost five hours, and the highlights were definitely when some of Eddie's friends dropped in to play live, including the rest of Pearl Jam.
But it wasn't Eddie's only foray into radio. When the band did managed to get out on the road, one of the things they liked to do was set up a low-powered fm transmitter and as people were leaving the parking lot, they could tune in to this character called "Eddie the janitor" It wasn't very professional, but I think that was the point.
There's one more thing I wanna cover quickly, and that's Pearl Jam side projects.
Everyone knows about the collaboration with Neil Young on the Mirrorball album, but do you know about all the other Pearl Jam satellite projects and guest appearances?
There really aren't that many, Eddie sings on a couple of songs on Bad Religion's 1993 album, Recipe For Hate. Dave Abbruzzese shows up on a 1991 album by a group called "Course Of Empire" There's a duet with Cypress Hill on the Judgement Night soundtrack along with a couple of other assorted quick appearances.
The one side project everyone knows about is the band "Mad Season" (which features guitarist Mike McCready and Alice In Chains singer Layne Stanley) but Stone Gossard also recorded an album on the side, anyone remember the name of the band? They were called "Brad", and in the spring of 1993, they released an album entitled "Shame"
That just about does it for our two part special on Pearl Jam. 'Course, there's enough material left over we could continue this for a couple more parts, and I know that there's a lot of things we missed out.
But I'll tell you what, I'm gonna at least give you an idea of where you can learn all you need about Pearl Jam, get a pen and paper.
The best book on the subject of Pearl Jam right now is simply entitled Pearl Jam by Mick Wall. It's a little outdated right now, but it's still a good place the start. The publisher is Sidgwick And Jackson out of England.
Another book that's worth a look is Pearl Jam by Mark Bloke, it's a little thing about the size of a CD jewel box, it's put out by Carlton Books.
If you really want to get into Pearl Jam, you'll need a computer. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of pages available on the internet. Everything from a complete list of bootlegs, to the set lists for virtually every show the band ever played.
Here's the address of the best place to start, it's the "Garden Of Stone" home page, along with some really solid information, it provides links to everywhere a Pearl Jam fan might wanna go.
Here it is: http://www.skypoint.com/members/caleb/gos.html
Grunge was one of the biggest deals in rock’n’roll over the last twenty-five years. Not only was the music pretty cool but grunge bands led a regime change in the world of rock. It was out with the old and in with the new – the alternative nation of the 90s.
It was a pretty seismic time. Hell, we are still talking about it and listening to the CDs: Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam.
Wait – let’s go through that list again: Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam. It is like Sesame Street: one of the things is not like the other; one of these things does not belong.
Out of all the major grunge bands of the early 90s, there is precisely one survivor: Pearl Jam.
Somehow, Eddie and the guys have outlived all their peers. They continue to make records and they continue to tour. And no clubs, either. They can still pack arenas and stadiums.
So what is their secret? Something in the water? A healthy diet? Botox? To be honest, I don’t have a clue.
I do, however, have a bunch of other Pearl Jam secrets. Want to hear some of those? Ok.
You heard me. Between 1990 and mid-2006, the band released 98 albums. If you have all those CDs then you are hardcore. And if you have al the unofficial releases – and there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bootlegs – well, I’m in awe. Seriously.
Few bands in the history of rock have inspired the kind of devotion that we see from Pearl Jam fans. They are the successors to the obsessive crown formerly owned by fans of The Grateful Dead.
Not that there is anything wrong with this. Every band should be so lucky to have a fan base so devoted to the cause. They document, archive and study the group with scientific precision. There are facts, theories, myths and areas of speculation. And thanks to all this work by all these people, there are vast Pearl Jam resources from which we can all draw. This show will include some of the secrets the diehards have dug up.
Let’s warm up with the controversy surrounding one of Pearl Jam’s big concert favorites. “Yellow Ledbetter” was an unlikely hit. It was originally only available as a bonus track on the UK import version of the “Jeremy” CD single. It was also found on a Japanese issue of the CD single of “Daughter”. Its obscure availability did not stop it from becoming a major hit in the Pearl Jam world.
But what is the song all about? This has been the subject of intense debate for more than a decade.
First of all, Eddie does not exactly enunciate his words in the original “Jeremy” EP version. That Japanese CD does include a lyric sheet, but they do not seem to be very accurate. There is some debate over whether those lyrics are the “official” ones.
To complicate things even further, when Pearl Jam performs the song live, Eddie tends to improvise, changing the words here and there.
If you had been recording every single version of “Yellow Ledbetter” since it was written – and there is no doubt there is someone who has – you will have a collection of the countless different lyrics.
And even if you can decipher what he is saying at any given time, what the hell is the taking about? There is a porch and a bunch of people who refuse to wave and a box or a bag of something. And despite thousands of letters and emails to various areas of the Pearl Jam organization pleading for a copy of the “real” lyrics, they have never been released.
This has led to a series of theories. Let’s recount the major ones:
1. The song is a tribute to Leadbelly, the legendary American blues singer from the early 20th century. His real name is “Huddie Ledbetter”.
2. The song is non-sensically based on a tongue-twister that is a favorite of Eddie’s. It is a warm-up that involves saying the phrase “Yellow Better, Red Better” as fast as you can.
3. It is an anti-war song inspired by the fact that Eddie’s brother is allegedly a soldier. This could explain the “box or bag” reference. A coffin? A body bag? And is it a “Yellow Letter” the official notification of a soldier being killed in action?
4. There is a “Ledbetter Park” and a “Ledbetter” beach in Santa Monica, which is a decent surfing area. Eddie is a surfer. And the signs for the beach and the park are yellow.
Or 5. It is just a joke, something that got out of hand. Eddie just improvised the song in the studio, using whatever words or phrases that popped into his head at the time during this one-take vocal session. The title is nothing more than an inside joke poking fun at Tim Ledbetter, one of Eddie’s old friends from Chicago.
So take your pick. You will be as correct as anyone else. Bottom line is that if you think you know the real story behind the song, you are pretty much 100% wrong. There is no right answer. Even Eddie does not seem to have a handle on things.
“Yellow Ledbetter” is not the only case where there seems to be a disconnect between what we hear and what is written down. If you sort through any number of Pearl Jam song books, you will find that things often do not sync up.
Maybe it is the wine. One of the perks of being a rock star is that you get to do and have things that regular people don’t - like wine.
These days, before Pearl Jam goes on tour, Eddie has someone pack him up some cases of some custom-bottled vino from the “Flowers” vineyard and winery in California’s Sonoma Valley. He is apparently partial to their Van der Kamp Pinot Noir with its fruity aroma and a finish that reminds one of cloves.
The bottles have no label. They are simply inscribed in bold with the name of the wine, the bottle number and the words “Eddie with Aloha”. Like I said, it is good to be a rock star.
This wine that Eddie takes on tour is certainly better than what he ingested during the 1992 Lollapalooza tour. If you were able to attend one of the gigs that year, you will know that one of the acts was something called the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow. This consisted of a bunch of freaky people who could do really freaky things – like Mr. Lifto whose specialty was hefting things with his nether region.
There was also Matt “The Tube” Crowley, a guy who could eat and then regurgitate just about anything. Well, that is not the whole story. He would swallow part of a seven foot hose. At the other end was a hand pump. Matt would pump all manner of things into his stomach and them pump it back out again, offering this new cocktail to anyone willing to drink it. Hey, it was the 90s and the drugs were bad.
On one particular stop on the ’92 Lollapalloza tour – which featured both Pearl Jam and Soundgarden – Eddie and Chris Cornell decided that they would have a drinking contest. But instead of using, say, beer, they went for bile – the stuff pumped out of Matt “The Tube” Crowley’s stomach. For the record, Eddie outlasted Chris. He “won” this particular contest. I hope it was worth it.
Eddie and the band have had their share of stalkers, especially back in the middle 90s when Pearl Jam was at the peak of their fame.
One particular nasty dude was messed up mentally. He had this idea that every Pearl Jam song was about him – which made sense because to this guy, Eddie was actually Jesus. And not just any Jesus but the one who raped this guy’s wife and produced two children that way.
But this was not the only weirdo. One woman found out where Eddie lived and then drove her car into the wall of the house.
So if you have ever wondered why Eddie feels the need to have big fences around his house in Seattle and full-time 24/7 security, now you know. It is also part of the reason he turned into something of a hermit, a recluse. He does not live in Seattle anymore, either. He will not say where he lives. Do you blame him?
By the way, the song “Lukin” on the No Code album in 1996 has its roots in these stalker situations.
We should address the issue of Pearl Jam drummers. There have been a lot of them. In fact, you can make the argument that it is easier to be a drummer in Spinal Tap than it is in Pearl Jam.
The first guy was Matt Cameron, the Soundgarden drummer. He played on the very first demos for the band that would eventually be known as “Pearl Jam”.
Dave Krusen was the first permanent drummer. He was hired away from a band called “The Boibs” to play on Pearl Jam’s Ten album and to tour with the band for the first part of 1991. But then his girlfriend had a baby – and Dave’s drinking problem got completely out of hand. There are stories of him beating up his girlfriend and putting her in hospital. When that happened, he was fired. That whole situation is still extremely murky and few people want to talk about it.
Krusen was replaced by a guy from Texas named Mat Chamberlain, who had just come off a gig with a band called “Eddie Brickell and New Bohemians”. Remember them? They had that song “What I am”.
Matt stayed with Pearl Jam through a couple of tours and through the filming of the “Alive” video. But then he received an offer to join the house band on Saturday Night Live. That was permanent, stable work with a regular paycheque, so he took it.
But before he left for New York, Matt recommended a guy - a really heavy-hitter - named Dave Abbruzzese. He had a very distinctive style which includes excellent bass drum technique. He stayed with Pearl Jam until August 1994 when he was mysteriously fired by Stone Gossard. Again, the circumstances behind his departure are pretty murky.
Next up was Jack Irons, the first guy ever asked to play drums for Pearl Jam back in 1990. He was unavailable, which is how Matt Cameron and Dave Krusen ended up with the band in those early days. But he still played a crucial role. It was Jack that gave his San Diego basketball buddy, Eddie Vedder, a cassette copy of that very early Pearl Jam demo. If it weren’t for Jack, Eddie would have never joined the band and we would not be talking about Pearl Jam now.
After that basketball game with Eddie, Jack took a number of career detours, one of which included a stint in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He finally got his chance to be a member between 1994 and 1998. After that, he retired from playing in bands and began to concentrate on teaching and consulting.
Jack’s departure just happened to sync up with the break-up of Soundgarden, which meant that Matt Cameron – who, like I said, played on that very first demo – was now available. He has been with the group ever since.
To recap, it was Matt, Dave, another Matt, another Dave, Jack and then back to the original Matt. Glad we could clear that up.
This next piece of information also involves a Soundgarden connection. In fact, you can make a very strong argument that Pearl Jam was directly responsible for Soundgarden emerging as a superstar act in the middle 90s. This is one of those “butterfly effect” stories. You know, a butterfly flaps its wings in your backyard and through the wonders of chaos theory creates a typhoon in the west coast of Australia.
It begins with this premise: the big breakthrough song for Soundgarden was “Spoonman” from the Superunknown album. That one track blew things wide open for the group when it came to mainstream success.
We must now go back to the movie Singles which came out in 1992. Remember that Cameron Crowe movie about single people living in Seattle just as the grunge thing was taking off? That, by the way, was an accident. Crowe had been working on the movie since 1984, but it was delayed and delayed until the early 90s – and it just happened to catch the grunge wave. It was a happy coincidence.
Anyway, if you have seen the movie you will know that Matt Dillon stars as a singer of a struggling rock band called “Citizen Dick”. The other guys in his band consist of a pre-Pearl Jam Eddie Vedder, Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard. There are identified by their real names in the movie and even have some short speaking parts.
But that is not where I am going with this. To add authenticity to “Citizen Dick”, Jeff created a Citizen Dick demo tape as a prop, complete with a tracklisting. Jeff just made up a bunch of titles.
Chris Cornell – who is now in Audioslave and then in Soundgarden – is a friend of Jeff’s. He also makes a cameo in Singles, so he was obviously on the set during shooting. At some point, he saw Jeff’s list of fictional song titles. As an artistic exercise, Chris decided to try and write actual songs to match those fake titles.
One title Jeff made up was “Spoonman”. He took that from the nickname of a real-life Seattle street performer named “Artis” who was famous for playing the spoons. And if you are listening, a rough clip of Chris’ new song based on that title shows up in the movie very briefly. It also shows up in a finished form on Soundgarden’s Superunknown album. The song was a hit, the video was a hit, the album was a hit – and Soundgarden became one of the giants of grunge.
If you read the credits carefully, you will see that Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam is acknowledged for his contribution to a Soundgarden track.
Here is another song not by Pearl Jam but is related to the topic of the show.
Who is “Sadie 7”? She is a bass player for a group called “Hovercraft”. Her real name is Beth Liebling. So what? She is the former Mrs. Eddie Vedder.
Eddie met Beth in 1984 when he was working as a waiter at a place called “Don’s Fishmarket” in Chicago. She worked at the place next door. They decided to move to San Diego, so Eddie took a second job as a bass player in a wedding band to earn some extra cash. He apparently played about ten gigs and had to learn a bunch of songs by Styx and Journey. But hey, it was a job, right?
When they both moved to Sand Diego later that year, Beth became the booker of a Goth nightclub band called “Red Tape” at a local club called “Bacchanal”. During the day, she went to school at San Diego State. Later, when Eddie moved up to Seattle, she followed him. Hovercraft came together shortly after Beth met a dude name Ryan in her surgical studies class. They were very atmospheric and instrumental. Eddie even lent a hand by playing some drums occasionally.
Eddie and Beth were married on June 3, 1994 but were eventually divorced in 2000. They had dated since they were teenagers. The last straw in the relationship might have been that horrible tragedy at the 2000 Roskilde festival in Denmark where nine fans were crushed to death during Pearl Jam’s set. Eddie was in a pretty dark place after that.
Since then Eddie hooked up with a model named Jill McCormick and they have a daughter named Olivia born on June 11, 2004.
Back to Hovercraft for a moment: they have at least four albums, the best of which is probably a record entitled Akathisia from 1997
One thing we have not tackled is the whole controversy surrounding the name “Pearl Jam”.
First of all, this is not the band’s original name. If you want to go right to the beginning, the group that would become Pearl Jam was originally known as “Luv Company”. This was the name on the demo of the instrumentals by Jeff and Stone that Jack Irons gave to his basketball buddy, Eddie Vedder.
After Eddie and drummer Dave Krusen joined, the group recorded without a name. Then, according to the legend, a basketball card mysteriously fell out of one of the tape boxes. The card was for a point guard from the New Jersey Nets: #10, Mookie Blaylock.
Taking this as some kind of sign, the new group became known as “Mookie Blaylock” and the title for their debut album became Ten.
They played exactly 14 gigs under that name. But in early February 1991, the real Mookie Blaylock heard about this and was not terribly flattered. His lawyers started calling to demand that they get this freaky, long-haired Seattle band stop using his name without his permission. And he was not interested in giving permission because it messed up his revenue stream with endorsements. This is the REAL reason behind the name change.
For example, what was Mookie (the basketball player) to do if he was offered a shoe deal with Nike? If Mookie Blaylock (the band) trademarked the name first for material goods like, let’s say, clothing and shows, it would mean that Mookie (the basketball player), would have to pay the Mookie Blaylock (the band) a royalty for just the privilege of using his own name.
Of course, the same thing could happen in reverse. Say that Mookie (the band) got an endorsement deal from say, Gibson guitars. If Mookie (the basketball player) had smart lawyers arrange a blanket trademark deal that covered all manner of consumer goods, then Mookie (the band) would have to pay a royalty for the opportunity to get all the guitars for free.
In other words, it was just too much hassle for Mookie (the band) to continue to use that name. I was easier to just change things. But to what?
As everyone who has ever played in a band knows, finding a name is a torturous thing. And it was no different for Eddie and the boys. The first suggestion was “Reenik Roink”. I don’t know why but it is not important. And besides, who would take a group named “Reenik Roink” seriously?
This is where great-grandma Pearl comes in. The mythology evolved this way: Eddie says he had a great-grandmother named Pearl. It is said that she was married to a very spiritual Native-American man who liked to get high in a natural and traditional way.
His favorite high was from peyote, which comes from a particular species of cactus.
A part of the peyote plant – the button – contains mescaline. If you chew or make tea from the buttons, you get a potion that produces a very introspective (some say spiritual) high that can last for up to twelve hours.
Grandma Pearl was apparently into peyote, too. Not only that, but she was resourceful. Taking some of her husband’s stuff, she made it into this weird hallucinogenic fruit spread. Adding a little sugar and creating a jam started the day off nice. Everyone called it “Pearl Jam”.
What a great story. Too bad that it is completely untrue.
Sure, he talks about having heard about the jam, but he also admits to never seeing the recipe, let alone tasting it. It is just something he says was passed down through the family.
But the truth is that Eddie made the whole thing up. His great-grandmother was named Pearl – Pearl Hazel Howard. She was a Scottish-Irish woman. But she was not married to some Native-American shaman. She was married to a circus contortionist from Denmark.
There was no peyote spread, no shaman – and Eddie does not have a drop of Native-American blood in his body. And trust me: many genealogists have checked on this.
And just to put the final nail in the coffin, Eddie admitted that the whole story was crap in a 2006 interview in Rolling Stone. He did have a grandma Pearl, but the rest is just made up.
The truth is that they were sitting around in a restaurant, trying to come up with an alternative to “Mookie Blaylock” when Jeff – Jeff! Not Eddie! – suggested the word “pearl”. But then they got stuck.
A little later, the band flew to New York to sign their big record deal and while they were there, they saw a Neil Young concert out at the Nassau Coliseum. Apparently, Neil played nine songs in three hours. In other words, the show was an entire big jam. And that is how this band became know as “Pearl Jam”.
One final thing about Pearl Jam before we wrap up. The diehards know that Pearl Jam has no trouble with fans recording and trading live bootlegs of their shows. This is one of the things that have helped create such a close-knit community among fans. It drives their record label nuts but the faithful loves it.
But do you know why Pearl Jam is into bootlegging? Because when Eddie was a kid growing up he used to sneak a walkman with a recording function into shows. He got pretty good at it, too. He had this small unit connected to a tiny mic on his lapel.
He would try to record every show he went to: The Who, The Pretenders, a variety of punk bands. He had hundreds of tapes. And he never sold them. If someone was into a particular band as much as he was, Eddie would make them a copy.
And, yes, he was caught many times and occasionally roughed up by security – but that only strengthened his resolve. And it also explains why Eddie believes that it is the Pearl Jam’s right to make personal recordings of Pearl Jam shows.
It also explains why there are dozens and dozens of official Pearl Jam bootlegs on CD – and why the band makes performances available in the digital era.
A couple final things about Pearl Jam before we leave everything alone:
Pearl Jam has famously hated doing videos for their entire career. Up until 2006, they had gone 14 years without making a proper video. The last proper one was the clip for “Jeremy” in 1992. That embargo was broken with a clip for “Life Wasted” in 2006.
Jeff Ament loves to skateboard. He always has.
One more: Eddie has been singing since he was six. He used to be able to hit all the high notes in all his favorite Michael Jackson songs.
It is one thing to be in a band. It is another thing to be in a band that writes a lot of music that lots of people want to hear and own. But only few bands get to have their own proper mythology. Sure, you can try and invent one – you know, fake it. But that will only get you so far. To truly transcend the ordinary, your mythology (those wonderful mysteries that surround everything about your existence) needs to be invented, nurtured, augmented and perpetuated by the fans. It’s got to have that organic aspect to it. Otherwise, it is just some kind of marketing thing.
Pearl Jam has had this going for them since they began. The music, the charisma, the causes, the community of fans – it is all gone into making up something pretty special.
Cheers!