Pearl Jam: The Making of Vitalogy

#pearljam #eddievedder #vitalogy

Today we take a look at the Pearl Jam album that almost broke up the band in 1994. Increasing tensions and a hostile takeover of the creative process by Eddie Vedder left his bandmates especially founding member Stone Gossard feeling isolated. It was a trend that would follow Pearl jam on their next record "No Code" as well.

Did you like this video? Get even more exclusive content on my Patreon page:
https://www.patreon.com/RNRTrueStories

LOVE ROCK N’ ROLL TRUE STORIES? NEVER MISS A BEAT
FACEBOOK: @RNRTrueStories
TWITTER: @rocktruestories
BLOG: www.gnrcentral.com

#pearljam #eddievedder #vitalogy

The band Pearl Jam was without a doubt one of the biggest rock bands of the early to mid 90s and following the huge success of their first two albums, 1991 10, and 1993 Vs. They didn't take a second to breathe as they immediately started work on their third record Vitalogy. While on the road to promote Vs with bassist Jeff Ament remembering, “It's kind of amazing when you look back, we really didn't have more than a couple weeks off for the first four or five years of the band.” But success aside the band nearly collapsed during the recording of their third album, Pearl Jam from Eddie Vedder became disillusioned with the appropriation of so called grunge with one of the best examples being fashion brands selling grunge wear for exorbitant prices as shown here.

Clip Plays:
“We're seeing like some catalogs and I was like the grunge look, like check this out. It's like 80 bucks for like a flannel shirt that you get it like Chevy and Cubbies for like five bucks.” “I think after Nirvana broke, most people obviously try to avoid wearing flannel, which is kind of unnatural, like consciously trying not to wear pants.”

On top of that, even Vedder tried to inspire pop culture with the TV show General Hospital loosely basing a character on him, that'd be played by pop icon Ricky Martin, add to the mix of the members, each handle fame differently. It was no wonder that the band almost collapsed.

On one hand Vedder seemed to struggle with his newfound fame while guitarist Mike McCready was struggling with substance abuse issues and drummer Dave Abbruzzese seemed to love the rockstar life. Thrown into this powder keg was the fact that the band was feuding with mega giant Ticketmaster over the box office giants price gouging fans on the band's tickets, eventually Ticketmaster would win the battle with Pearl Jam, and as Pearl Jam stock started to rise they started to scale back. They weren't shooting music videos anymore and they were not giving as many press interviews as well. And this is just a brief overview of what happened during this time in the band's history. So now I want to take a deeper look into some of these topics I briefly mentioned.

So first let's take a deeper look at the drama surrounding the band. So regarding the banned substance abuse issues, guitarist Mike McCready looked back at this point of the band's existence saying, “I was drunk making a jerk out of myself. I didn't know how to relate to Eddie and after the band really took off I went off in my own world.” McCready would enter treatment to save his future in the band with guitar Stone Gossard claiming, “Mike's a pretty awful drunk, not that he gets malicious or mean openly to people, but he will get out of control consistently. It was a difficult situation where you could find yourself blaming Mike for a lot of your own frustrations within the band, when he was really fuded up or couldn't come to practice, and we're used to loving Mike and knowing how much fun and how talented he is. I got upset that he might throw away a great opportunity to be in a cool band and work it out, you decided to go into treatment and everyone was thrilled. How could you not be, here was Mike taking responsibility for himself and his own happiness, going to a new level.” And while one band member was ensuring his place in the band, another was soon on his way out. The drummer Dave Abbruzzese feuding with the group. During the recording of Vitalogy the drummer had to have his tonsils removed and the band managed to record the song Satan's Bed with his drum tech Jimmy Shoaf. Months later personality differences between Dave and the band led him to leave the group.

Gossard remembered, “It was the nature of how the politics worked in our band, it was up to me to say hey, we tried to start working time move on, on a superficial level, it was a political struggle, and for whatever reason his ability to communicate with Ed and Jeff was very stifled, I certainly don't think it was all Dave's fault that it was stifled.”

Ironically the band would enlist the help of drummer Jack Irons, who had initially recommended Eddie Vedder to Pearl Jam, to help complete the album with Gossard remembering, “If we didn't find a drummer that everyone felt good about it would have been diffic

Видео Pearl Jam: The Making of Vitalogy канала Rock N' Roll True Stories