With Mother Love Bone, you had some success,
and there was a tragedy there.
And what made you decide
not to continue with Mother Love Bone
and to form something totally different?
Because it was old at that time,
and we wanted to do something new.
So this is what we're doing now, new and fresh.
And then they saw me in a bra, and that was it.
And they said, "We've got to have him".
That was before his front tooth got knocked out.
And I have a weather report
for you people, and it's not a good one.
KCMU. Seattle's rockin' report.
What is it that drives
thousands of young angelic-faced boys
in our calm, tree-lined suburbs
to spend their allowances on Marshall Amplifiers?
Why is this happening?
Truth be told, there's always been a great scene in Seattle.
If you want some crisp, aggressive,
and emotional rock-and-roll, then get on down to The Off Ramp
on Friday, July 5th.
Wowwee!
You haven't seen anything yet.
My name is Cameron Crowe, and I was a rock journalist
when I first moved to Seattle in the mid-'80s.
I became aware of a whole scene of musicians
that really worked together to create
their own world of influences
and bands and community.
I immediately realized
how much this was different from the places I grew up in
and the music I listened to in Southern California.
This was music that came from guys
that stayed indoors a lot.
They had a lot of time to play and a lot of time to listen.
And they listened to everything,
hard rock, hair metal, glam, R&B, soul, disco, blues,
all of it cuisinarted together into this majestic mix
of great, melodic, hard rock.
We'd go and see the shows that got put on by The U-Men,
and we'd go see these guys,
and these guys would come see us.
Sometimes we would open for these guys.
So it was like us, we play.
Two guys who I met early on
were Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament.
They'd been in a well-known local band, Green River,
and had an obvious bond that drew a lot of people to them.
On any given night in Seattle,
it wasn't hard to run into Stone and Jeff
going out to listen to some live music.
Let's do a little more of an intimate thing.
Sit with me. Sit with me, my child.
Those people over there,
police officers. Wave at them.
How you doing?
This is not MTV, but it very well
could be at any time.
Sarcastic police officers. Excellent.
We're supposed to get in to see The Cult tonight,
but so far, nobody's showed up.
We finally got into the show.
We were outside for a long time and they wouldn't let us in
but we got these things, backstage passes.
How come you didn't come out and give me my pass earlier?
I was outside for so long.
We were outside for a long time,
and here is my witnesses right here.
Because you never believe me.
You never believe me, Stone. You never fucking believe me.
I knew when I met Stone,
I couldn't imagine hanging out with the guy.
Mark Arm introduced me to him,
and within five to 30 seconds, I think he wanted to punch me.
I had recently been introduced
into the exciting world of sarcasm,
and so that, to me, was the greatest joy
anyone could ever have.
Out here...
Rock people of all sorts,
Susan Silver, Chris Cornell, Jeff Ament.
We had a bit of a chip on our shoulder.
We always felt, I think, like, if it came from New York
or Chicago or Minneapolis or Athens,
it was probably better, but there also was
this attitude of somehow we will persevere.
It was very different
from Los Angeles' or New York's band scenes.
There were tens of groups in Seattle,
but they all knew each other, and everybody was talking about
Jeff and Stone's new band, Mother Love Bone,
and their amazing charismatic front man.
His name was Andy Wood.
I want the world to know that Mother Love Bone is coming
to take over the world, a plethora of delights,
a fruit salad compote of delights.
He was a fantastic entertainer. People loved him.
I mean, people loved to see him do his thing.
He was very funny. He would do something
like go to The Central Tavern when there was 25 people there.
He'd play it like it was a coliseum.
"To all you people in the back!"
And there's, like, two... There's the guy at the door.
He was a rock star. He knew it.
And something about that... I'll speak for everyone...
Made us believe that we were, too.
I want to get on an arena tour with some band.
Who cares? Warrant, for that matter.
What the hell? Go on tour with Warrant.
Just so we can play arenas.
That's the kind of crowd I like.
There's an easy crowd.
You can say anything.
You can say, "Your mother smells bad, people!"
And they'll just go, "Yeah! Yeah!".
There are certain people you just know that you love,
and you'll do anything for them.
You just wanted him to be a rock star.
You just saw it and were like, "I'm on your team.
I want to be anywhere near you".
We're going down to L.A. on Monday to record an album.
Do you think you're the band of the '90s?
Do you think you're gonna be one of the forerunners?
I think so. I hope so.
I mean, I thought I always would be involved
in the band of the '90s.
So if we're not the band of the '90s,
I'm gonna fire my band and get a new one,
and then they'll be the band of the '90s.
'Cause you know what was weird?
Like, I was listening to the bottom end of all the songs,
'cause I was kind of worried about Stardog, you know,
and the bottom end of it...
The first guy that I called
to see if he wanted to be my roommate was Stone Gossard.
He was living at home, I think, and he answered the phone,
and he's like,
"Yeah, no, I'm good. I don't really want to...
I don't really want to change my living situation right now".
And he was at home, so I thought that was a little weird.
But I thought, "Whatever. That's great".
And he said, "But Andy just got out of rehab,
and he might need a place".
And I thought, "Well, that would be cool".
You know, I didn't really know him,
but I thought, that would be interesting.
He seems like an interesting guy. It would be cool.
I called Andy up, and he's like, "Sure. I'm coming over".
Chris and Andy had a very deep relationship.
I know that both of them had 4-tracks
set up in their bedrooms,
and they would each try to record a song a day
and play it for the other guy.
He just had a freedom.
He didn't edit anything that he did, anything that he wrote.
He didn't care. He just charged through the creative process
without a care in the world, and I was the opposite,
overanalyzing, and...
It was just a really exciting creative time.
Thank you so much.
As long as I've known the guy,
there's always been different times
where he wasn't comfortable with himself,
and his using drugs was a product of that, too.
If you know any addicts, you know that, you know,
just because they quit for three months doesn't mean shit,
and he was someone who definitely had
a certain tragic flaw.
That's where his greatness came from.
We knew that he was trying to be sober,
and we knew that he was really...
That he couldn't just sustain...
You know, you can't just...
You can't...
You can't really be a junkie
and be super-productive and, like...
I mean, maybe somebody can,
but he wasn't going to be able to do it.
That morning, like, March 19th, 1990,
there was, like, five messages from Xana,
Andy's girlfriend at the time,
saying... You know, just hysterical.
We all got in a taxi
and went up to Harborview,
and he was on life support at that point,
and it was a fucking trip.
I mean, it was, like, the worst, most horrible...
It was confusing, you know.
It was, like, "Andy O.D.'ed and he's not dead,
but he's not gonna live, but he's not dead,
and you've got to come now."
Whenever people would start to get into drugs after that,
I'd always... I always thought, like,
I wish I had a picture of Andy when he was in the hospital,
because it was... It was so horrible.
He was... They kept him alive for a couple of days.
I think mostly just so family and friends
could say good-bye or whatever, but...
It was... It was horrible.
It's difficult to articulate it,
but, it's...
You know, up to that point,
I think life was really good for us
as a... Just a group of musicians in a scene,
making music.
It just... You know, the world was sort of our oyster,
and we had support, we supported each other.
And he was kind of like this beam of light
sort of above it all,
and to see him hooked up to machines,
that was the... I think the death of the innocence
of the scene.
It wasn't later when peopIe surmised that...
that Kurt bIowing his head off was the end of the innocence.
It didn't... It was that.
It was walking into that room.
So at this point, I think everyone
really wants to take a break, for one,
and just kind of let things happen naturally to a certain extent
to see where we want to go with it, you know.
We're not in any huge rush
to be rock stars at this point.
And Andy's attitudes and personality
were such an integral part of Mother Love Bone
that, you know, there's just...
You wouldn't be able to replace him.
It's just not, in our minds at least, it just...
Fiddle with it.
What? You just lost all sound?
Check.
Hello. Hello. Hello.
In some ways, I was just thinking
about this in the last couple of days,
that I can relate to the Clippers and the Nets
because... I've kind of...
I feel like my musical career has kind of been that way,
in that every time that it seems like it's starting to take off,
somebody goes down with an injury
or the coach gets fired or something happens.
I remember Jeff saying,
"Maybe I'm not supposed to be doing this.
You know, that was my shot, and it's gone."
I think if my dad and I hadn't had
such a contentious relationship at that point,
I probably would have left Seattle.
I never felt like giving up.
You know, I think I was writing songs days later probably,
you know, playing my guitar and still just going,
"I love playing my guitar".
I ended up playing
with a really good friend of mine in town named Mike McCready.
We got together, and we started playing
in his parents' attic.
That's when I had the conversation,
"We've got to get Jeff Ament in the band".
Jeff was playing with some other folks
and I think having a good time doing that,
and my first instinct was like, "I don't know".
I remember him just saying, "Fuck Jeff Ament",
or something like that, and I was kind of shocked.
Like, "Dude, that's your guy.
You've been with this guy forever".
But Mike was like, "No, you've got to".
And I was like, "Okay".
And then Jeff was there, and I was like, "Yes".
We went in and did a demo
pretty quickly after that with Matt Cameron.
And I was like, "What are you guys gonna do with it"?
And they were like, "We're just trying to get a singer".
I was working a security job in San Diego.
I was just, like, writing music in my living room
for the longest time, you know.
This instrumental tape, it migrated to me,
then it really started bringing out some emotions
that I hadn't touched on in a while.
It just... this natural thing came out,
and all I did was record it.
I surfed in P.B. one morning after work
and went and recorded it, like, literally
with the sand still on my feet and stuff
and just sent it up that day.
This is where Jeff Ament... His apartment was.
This is the place where I came over after he called me
and said, "I got this demo from... Back from Ed,
back from Eddie,
and you should come over and check it out.
It's good".
It was a voice on a tape that blew my mind.
It was kind of, "Who is this? Is this real"?
I really remember thinking that,
like, "Is this a real guy"?
"Who is this guy"?
Here, in fact, is the Momma Son tape.
This is it, huh?
That is the tape.
Crazy.
I remember listening to music.
I remember thinking about his voice.
I heard a person in there, like a real person.
I didn't hear a person trying to sound like another person.
I heard a guy. I hadn't met him,
but he's in there.
And lookit. It has...
There's my phone number on it.
I'll call the number later
and see if I can find a younger you.
Tell him to be careful.
Hold on. Hold on, my friend.
Hi. I'm Eddie Vedder.
In Seattle, I feel like I'm kind of the new kid, and...
I'll be a new kid for a while.
We flew Ed up, and we hung out for about a week
and worked on these songs
in the basement of Galleria Potatohead.
It's just nice to walk in that room,
and you smell raw materials, you smell paint.
There's this whole feeling of, like, creativity.
You hear the pound of your footsteps
as you go down this basement,
and you just go in and light it up.
I remember right before he got on the plane to come down,
he said, "When I get there, I want you to pick me up,
and I want to go straight to the practice studio
and I don't want to fuck around.
I just want to plug in the instruments and get at it".
The music that sprouted right off the bat
was pretty heartfelt and deep, and before we knew it,
we all spent five days rehearsing.
The sixth day, we played a fucking show.
We thought it was just insane that we were playing a show
after being together for five or six days, yeah. Totally.
Let's talk about the show at The Moore.
The hidden Eddie Vedder. Where was he?
He was frightened. He was terrified.
It was a bit hard for me at the beginning,
coming up and being part
of a different place and a different scene,
and it wasn't just a neutral zone.
It was their zone.
He was really coming from a different place
that I didn't... I didn't fully understand.
And I felt like he's good,
and then once I met him and saw how personable he was
and, like, excited and not fucked-up
and you know, just like a guy that
we sent him music,
and literally, like, two weeks later, we had music back.
And that it wasn't Mother Love Bone.
That was big.
You know, we had gotten a few tapes,
and they were all, like, Andy kind of tribute things,
and it was all like whoa...
I think it took me years to understand Eddie.
My dad... He passed away
before I knew he was my dad, right?
So I grew up with this dad I thought was my dad,
and then I found out later that he wasn't
and that the guy who was my dad
had already passed, like, a few years earlier, man.
There's only two chords to this song.
It'll probably be really boring on an acoustic.
You know, looking back, I realize, like,
we all got together in that room at that time,
and you know, I was still thinking about stuff
with, like, my dad and loss and all that,
and then what they were thinking about,
having been through the situation with Andy and everything, so...
In ways we were strangers,
but we were coming from a similar place.
And all that kind of came out in the first batch of songs.
Release was kind of a drone jam
that we were messing around with in the basement
the first week that Ed came up,
and it was one of those songs
that he just started singing over the top of it,
and these words came out of him.
I remember the first time that we played that song,
right at the end of it, I remember
he sort of ran away and ran around the corner.
I was thinking about my dad,
and then afterwards, it got me all tore up,
and I went in the little hallway,
and then Jeff came out and said, you know, "You okay"?
So this one here,
this is, I don't know if you've ever seen this.
This is my dad.
I met him a few times,
but he was just, like, a friend of the family or something.
Edward Louis Severson III.
When I was born, that was my name.
So he kind of... He's up there for me.
Like, he's up in the ether somewhere.
I feel him sometimes.
The camaraderie and the healthy competition part
I found later was unusual,
and it was Johnny Ramone that actually
pointed that out to me later,
talking about, I think, you know, the friendship
you saw between Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, for example,
and saying, "I've never seen that before.
New York wasn't like that. We hate each other.
We would screw each other up at every turn.
If you could, you would mess the other band up".
The best thing about it is, I think, that...
You learn from each other, you know, and you...
You're inspired by each other.
For me, Temple of the Dog grew out of that.
After Andy passed, Chris just wrote these songs.
We were going to record it with, you know,
the surviving members of Mother Love Bone.
It was a fun record that no one had any expectations for,
so nobody worried about it, and that made it
feel very fresh from beginning to end.
For him to write songs
and then have the idea of sharing those songs
with Jeff and I was just, like, another generous gesture
that said, "I'm not only gonna help you guys with this record,
but I'm gonna even ask your new singer,
who he just is kind of a shy, quiet guy,
because I haven't really heard his voice yet.
I kind of saw you guys live,
and you know, maybe he can sing. I'm not sure".
And then you hear it, and you go,
"Our guy sings really fucking good, too".
Eddie was very shy at the beginning.
He was very kind of self-conscious.
He's wasn't fully comfortable, I think...
Until him and Cornell went out one night.
He really embraced Eddie when he first moved up here,
and sometimes I wonder if that was a void that he felt
from Andy's passing,
having another equally talented singer
that he could sort of bounce ideas off of
or just basically relate to.
I know Eddie felt a real mentorship,
and I think that gave him a lot of confidence.
It was the first time
I ever heard myself on a real record.
So it could be one of my favorite songs that...
that I've ever been on, or the most meaningful.
Where's Stone Gossard when we need him?
Where is Stone? My God.
We went up to Vancouver to open for Alice in Chains.
Played at this place called The Town Pump.
During the song Breath,
security was taking out some kid, some drunk guy.
They were being overly aggressive.
They were really taking this guy out,
and Ed noticed that, was watching it.
And you could just see this change come over him.
This guy that had been shy, that people didn't really know,
he didn't know us, all of a sudden
his voice changes, his attitude changes.
It just got really intense.
You got a problem.
Here we are in the studio.
They're known as Mookie Blaylock, but...
Not anymore. We had some legal problems.
Yeah, the name was taken
by this guy named Mookie Blaylock.
Mookie Blaylock and Michael Jordan.
Look at that. They played yesterday.
The Bulls won, victorious.
So the new name is Pearl Jam.
We're not gonna cultivate anything today.
Okay. So Pearl Jam, the new name.
And you guys have a lot of other stuff going on,
almost as we speak.
Yeah. We're going in the studio tomorrow
to make our first album.
I was selling merchandise at that time,
and you know, you can only take so much stuff into Canada.
Everything we brought, you know, I brought
based on kind of what we'd been selling up to that point.
That night, before the opening band was even done playing,
I had sold out of everything, stickers, T-shirts.
Anything that we brought across was gone.
I had nothing to do for the rest of the night.
So I grabbed my camera and filmed the whole show.
They were breaking. Things were taking off.
That's our CD.
See, I hate holding up a CD.
I want to hold up an album.
You can barely see this.
Our band is doing 10 times as well
as I ever thought we would.
We're getting to play shows almost every day.
You know, we're happy.
So the band's chemistry seems really good right now.
Yeah. Yeah. Very much a family.
What is, you know, being on the road, being touring,
what is the strangest thing that has happened to you?
Right here.
I'd like to thank D'arcy from the Smashing Pumpkins
for letting me borrow her wardrobe.
I think she looks a little better
in it than you do, though.
We showed up in Zurich, Switzerland,
and the venue was almost like a kind of an art house.
The stage is, like, about as big as our drum riser.
We're like, "What are we gonna do"?
We'd been playing enough at that point
that we were kind of ready to change something up.
And we asked the local guys, "Is there a chance
that you could get us some acoustic instruments?
Maybe we could just do kind of an acoustic show".
And we'd never done that before.
And then it was the next day, somebody called
and asked about "MTV Unplugged".
So we said, "Yeah, we could do that".
Yeah. We just did it. Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a true story, something that I really felt
and I still feel every time I sing it.
A lot of your songs are sort of on the dark side.
Is there any reason for that,
or is that just mostly what you see, or...
My emotions.
It seems like I should be even really happy right now.
You know, I get to, like, play shows.
It's been amazing, but the fact is,
it's like my emotions are like a quarter flipped in the air.
It's just like black and white, you know, good and bad,
constantly, and you know, maybe by talking
about things that may be a little darker
or more, you know, on the negative side of our existence,
by dealing with them,
maybe that's where I find my happiness.
The folks at MTV said
they thought that was one of the best "Unpluggeds".
Is it nice to get that kind of response,
especially when it's a stripped-down...
I don't trust nobody,
especially when they say something good.
If I even see you having fun,
you will be promptly arrested
and led away.
Fuck security.
Yeah!
That was when Ten was completely blowing up.
They played at 3:00 in the afternoon.
They were, like, the second group.
But the frenzy during their set got more and more extreme
as the tour went on.
And it was all a whirlwind,
because we went from vans to playing little clubs
to a little bit bigger clubs,
and then we get in "Lollapalooza",
and then you have everything blow up.
I remember not being able to sleep
for entire nights after the show
because you'd be so buzzed.
I finally figured out years later
that if I took a bath, that sometimes put me to sleep.
Is it like you can...
Like you're just walking down the street one day
and all of a sudden you feel like
you're getting a lot more exposure
by a lot more people coming up to you?
Like, I'm just wondering, like, when would you start noticing
that all of a sudden, you know, your millions,
millions of people are, like... Yeah, exactly.
That would be weird. That would be weird.
We try not to think about that as much as we can.
Think about that sentence for a while, America.
Think about it.
Back on the "Headbangers Ball"
with Eddie and Mike of the band Pearl Jam.
The album is called Ten. Why is it called Ten?
Actually, that's back to Mookie Blaylock.
That's his number. It's total dedication to Mookie.
Now, we're about to play your video for Alive.
Did you like making the video, or...
That was the thing. We didn't make a video.
We said we just wanted to play live.
There's no way, with a song like that,
which talks about living for the moment,
that we're going to, like, lip-synch something
that we had recorded a few months ago.
I wonder what they're going to do for another video
if we ever have to do one,
because all we ever want to do is live.
Really? You can't see yourself
ever making some sort of conceptual video or anything like that?
Roll sound. Background.
I personally have no problem
with the theory of doing a concept video at all.
To me, it's more of a question
of what you have more control over,
and we're going to give some control up this time
and, you know, see how it works.
That song was part of the second wave
of songs that we wrote with Ed.
I still didn't really understand songwriting at that point,
and pretty much that whole song is in A.
There's not really, like, a real major chord change in that song.
It sort of goes against the rules of, like,
how to write a pop song.
Ed had been reading a newspaper
when we were starting to jam on the song
and basically wrote the entire lyrics
off of a newspaper article.
Visually making that video with Mark Pellington,
he did such a great job at making you see
kind of how heavy that lyric was.
You seem kind of embarrassed about it.
This seems to me to be quite a valid
sort of artistic thing to be doing up there.
It was just... It's a different...
You know, it's a different kind of focus.
You know, and that's the key to it,
is just focusing, you know,
but kind of like, with a camera,
that's just... You know, I'm just not into it really.
Yeah!
We've never played for this many people before.
We never thought we'd ever play for this many people.
So you ready for one more? 1, 2, 3, 4.
Yeah, lots of times,
especially when our singer starts climbing up on the ceiling,
like, 50 feet above the stage, and, like, is on a truss.
You know, it's like, "Don't do that".
Were you worried he'd fall down?
All the time.
I thought, "This guy's gonna fall and kill himself,
and our career is over".
I was worried every time he did it.
Over the gigs, it got higher and higher.
You'd do one, and then you'd notch it up,
because you survived the last one, so...
We're gonna take this to some level
that people aren't gonna forget,
and if that means risking your life,
we're gonna do it.
You know, we'd get to the hotel after the shows or whatever
and feel pretty good physically,
and then I'd take a shower and realize that I had, like,
a thousand deep scratches on my back.
I didn't want him to hurt himself.
But at the same time, it's like there was no talking to him.
He was going to do what he was going to do.
He could have killed himself a couple of times probably
for sure, which would have been...
more than I could have taken.
Tell me. You look quite mixed up.
Look at these pictures. I'll show you these pictures.
I'll show you why I feel the way I do.
It's a little bit overwhelming
to see this many people.
I mean, I'm sure you've been looking at this all day.
It's a lot of people.
We're used to playing small clubs, you know,
and we want to go back to playing small clubs.
He wanted Pearl Jam to be a band
that goes out and tours in the van
and pays its dues and plays clubs
and makes albums and has a slow, natural life.
He was not the guy that wanted to come out
and have overnight success.
I think he was critical about the mixes of Ten.
He felt like maybe they were leaning too commercial.
He was really reluctant.
You are also not going to be
doing videos right away at least.
We just don't know.
You know, our mind is on music right now,
which is probably a really good thing for everybody.
I think I got that theory to make that part work.
I come in one earlier than I normally do.
So I still do four. So it almost felt like it didn't...
It almost kind of always felt like I did
one too many or something,
but it didn't, like, play itself.
Let's just do it one more time.
A lot of my job is taking what they bring
and turning it into something.
Okay, this is a chord change. This is this. This is a melody.
Okay, but what does that mean?
Where am I? If I close my eyes, where am I?
What does this music mean?
Let's just figure out where we want to go on that verse.
I was at this, like, small, little coffee shop,
and someone came up and stopped me,
and the waitress, this older lady,
kind of witnessed it and said, "You're...''
I said, "Yeah, yeah", you know.
She says, "What? You don't like it?"
I said, "It's just...
It's no big deal, you know. I'm just this guy".
And she says, "If you don't like it, you know,
you certainly picked the wrong business to be in".
And she had a really good point.
The fact is, when you sit in your room playing guitar,
you don't have to worry about being successful.
It's not gonna happen. It's just not gonna happen.
The point of doing an encore
just doesn't make any sense to me.
When you're playing in front of 30 people...
I had done the movie "Say Anything"...
and was anxious to do the next movie here in Seattle,
and it was going to have that mix of music that I love.
The studio looked at the movie and said,
"We don't know how to sell this movie.
We don't even want to put it out".
But as Nirvana got bigger and Pearl Jam got bigger,
they came to me and said, "Well, you know, there is one way".
When we looked at the schedule,
it was like there was one day off that week,
and that was the day that he wanted us to play,
and we're just going like, "Shit".
Any memories of the "Singles" party in Los Angeles,
which we have very vivid footage from.
God. Do you have some footage of that?
We do. The unaired, of course, footage.
Yeah. I won't watch that.
Fuck MTV! Fuck all TV!
It was pretty bad.
We're all just warming up, you know.
It's not like one of these fucking movie things.
You've got to warm up, right?
It was a disaster,
a total disaster.
Everybody loves us.
Everybody loves our town!
There were some long soundchecks that day or something.
So I drank, like, one bottle of wine,
and then there was, like, another that I opened
to give to friends, and they weren't drinking.
And so we're downstairs,
and there's a bottle of tequila sitting down there,
which we hardly ever drank before the show,
but by that point, we were already, like, fucking wasted.
I actually have more memories
than you'd think I would have.
The monitors weren't working that well,
or my ears weren't working, one or the other.
I kept looking over and asking them to turn the monitors up.
I can't hear anything. And it just wouldn't turn up.
At some point after a while, I just got really upset,
and I went over. They had this pipe and drape thing,
and I pulled it off and threw it down or something.
I don't know. Is this documented?
I looked over, and that wasn't our soundwoman.
It was the lighting person. I kept wondering, like,
"Why is it getting brighter in here?"
I began to see studio executives and their families
starting to stream for the exits.
Some fights were breaking out.
Don't be violent! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!
Because we had waited so long
for anyone to ask us to do something
that we were saying yes, yes, yes.
That was a moment where it was really evident
that there was always gonna be
one more thing they were gonna want you to do.
At some point, you had to say no.
That was the birth of no.
Let's keep things rolling here, Tab.
"Grunge rockers Pearl Jam".
We don't have time to explain the puzzle to you,
but we'll be back.
Shit got fucking crazy.
- Who are Pearl Jam? - Right.
This is MTV's "Smells Like Grunge" countdown.
I was just screaming for anything.
I wanted something of Eddie's.
And they gave me the wine bottle.
What did you think of the show?
It was fucking so awesome.
Could you do a Week in Rock open for us?
What is that?
We're just about to launch MTV in Latin America.
I don't know if you feel comfortable
doing a couple of I.D.'s for us...
- Sure. - Sure.
In Spanish. So if you could just hang on. Josh.
Pearl Jam.
MTV.
What do you think grunge means?
I don't even say that word.
Really?
All your friends are talking about is Pearl Jam.
Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam.
I've always hated their band.
The first Pearl Jam record came out two months
before the Nevermind record, so it turned into
a Pearl Jam versus Nirvana thing.
Nirvana's Kurt Cobain made
some rather disparaging remarks about Pearl Jam's music,
which he thought was too commercial
to be truly alternative.
I was so naive and fresh when we first came out,
singing and opening up, and then everyone
just looked at it from a cynical point of view
or started copying it.
Eddie Vedder joins Creed front man Scott Stapp.
Eddie Vedder is attempting
to rip out Scott Stapp's larynx with his bare hands.
The group is called Pearl Jam.
I'm talking about Pearl Jam.
Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam.
Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam.
Pearl Jam...
Hi. I'm Tabitha Soren with "MTV News".
Pearl Jam will become the second Seattle band within a month
to enter the Billboard pop albums chart
at number one next week.
Since its release a week ago,
Vs. has sold 950,000 copies.
A million. You know, what's a million?
I'm having a hard enough time with one right now.
We played "Saturday Night Live" the second time,
and I remember talking to Stone the next day,
and he said, "What did you think of Daughter"?
And I thought in my mind, we played Daughter?
So I essentially blacked out on TV.
And that's how I dealt with how big we got,
kind of checking out and partying a lot.
I bought into the myth,
and it was killing me.
The last time I talked to Kurt,
we both agreed together that we were not
going to participate in the Time Magazine.
Neither band was going to participate
in the Time Magazine interview, and we didn't,
and then they put me on the fucking cover anyway.
I mean, sure, I could read it,
you know, and I read it. I read it on the airplanes.
But I don't take it seriously.
If I want to find out anything,
I'm not gonna read Time Magazine.
Time Magazine was just, you know,
your parents' magazine
or the magazine that's in a doctor's office,
and I just thought,
"We've been swallowed up by the mainstream,
and no one's gonna want to listen to us".
I'm not gonna read Newsweek.
I'm not gonna read any of these magazines.
I mean, 'cause they've just got too much to lose
by printing the truth.
You know that.
How were you going to survive and not do something wrong,
not piss someone off?
You know, now you've sold too many records,
but these people are so happy to hear your music,
but these people hate you now.
And... And these people love you so much
they want to kill you.
So how do you relate to any of these people
from where you are?
Yeah, I think the one that I wanted to get impersonal with
was No Code because of stalker problems
and built a wall in front of the house
because... Because why?
Because I had been open and honest and intimate in lyrics,
that seemed really strange.
Now I'm having to build a wall in front of the house.
I mean, that wall... It saved my life.
Not because of privacy or anything, but literally,
because someone drove, trying to drive into the house
at 50 miles an hour.
So, you wonder what happened
or how did it mutate into this kind of situation?
You'll have to edit this part.
The young musician who made grunge music popular
had become an overnight spokesman
for many disaffected young Americans,
as his fans tried to sort out what it was
that caused him to take his life.
I was trying to, like, with my eyes
trying to tell them, "Don't hurt me".
And what's all this nonsense
about how terrible life is?
A young girl who stood outside his home in Seattle
with tears streaming down her face said,
"It's hard to be a young person nowadays.
He helped open people's eyes to our struggles".
Please wipe the tears from your eyes, dear.
You're breaking my heart.
I'd love to relieve the pain you're going through
by switching my age for yours.
I was trying to call him
because I'd read something he said,
that he couldn't keep it real,
and I just wanted to tell him, "Listen,
you don't have to do anything
anybody fucking tells you to do.
Just stop fucking playing, cancel all your shit,
and don't do anything."
I had a whole thing I was going to tell him,
but I never got a chance.