The one film that "planted a lot of seeds" for Eddie Vedder (2024)

Although Eddie Vedder andPearl Jamare considered among the four big grunge bands that played a key role in the sounds of Seattle taking over the world, they were always fairly unique in their approach. The entire discussion of grunge is funny because apart from general heaviness and long hair, all the bands—Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Vedder’s outfit—had little in common musically.

Famously, the leading light of the ostensible grunge movement, Kurt Cobain openly hated Pearl Jam, and once said on MTV: “We’ve never had a fight ever, I’ve just always hated his band”. Despite thinking Vedder was one of the nicest men around and having a good relationship with him, the Nirvana leader hated the ‘Even Flow’ band’s music because of its connection to what he dubbed “cockrock”.

While the choice of wordcockrockwas pretty cutting, Cobain had a point.Looking past his disdainful view of Pearl Jam, he was right in characterising the band as old-school sounding. The Nirvana man might have been at the forefront of the alternative insurrection during this era, with him explicitly hating classic rock bands such as Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin due to their music and themes. Like everyone his age who loved rock music, he liked them as a kid.

It wasn’tuntil he discovered punk and hardcorethat his view changed, and even then, Nirvana still covered Zeppelin’s ‘Immigrant Song’. This meant that despite distancing himself from wailing frontmen, heavy bluesy riffing, and enormous bridges, he instantly recognised what he was listening to when he first came across Pearl Jam.

There can be no doubt about Pearl Jam’s connection to rock’s past, and in the years since, this has been bolstered by the member’s comments on the sounds of the 1960s and 1970s being their greatest influences.

When interviewed by Tim Robbins, of all people, for Hobo in 2007, Vedder once again demonstrated why he and his band have more in common with classic rock than they do punk or alternative rock as we know it. With the Hollywood icon casting his mind back to the mid-1970s, he asked the Pearl Jam powerhouse what music he was listening to then.

Skipping a few years ahead, Vedder said he remembered 1978 particularly fondly, as that was the year of The Band’s fittingly titled swansong, The Last Waltz. During that era, he also listened to Motown, such as Sly and the Family Stone and James Brown, and even liked the Jackson 5, but the star-studded farewell of Robbie Roberston’s band opened his eyes to the world of classic rock. The Last Waltz wasn’t any ordinary studio album; it was a live record that not only featured The Band saying goodbye but an array of legends helping them bring the curtains down, including Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison, at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom two years prior.

It wasn’t just the album that made an impact on the young Vedder. The Martin Scorsese-directed film of the same name, which captured that historic moment in 1976, literally opened his eyes to the power of classic rock and live music. He told Robbins that the movie was so affecting that “it planted a lot of seeds”, which would then blossom into lifelong love affairs with classic artists, then informed his musical approach.

He recalled: “I remember my uncle took me to see The Last Waltz, and there was so much within that two-hour film, people like Dylan, Neil Young, Ron Wood, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison and Muddy Waters, so it planteda lot ofseeds. There were all kinds of little detours into bluesandit was packed and emotional. You could feel the emotion because it was their last concert and, you know, Scorsese did it so it looked great. I saw it in a kind of empty theatre in Chicago. I was 13 or 12.”

Pearl Jam have always been a band from another time, a culmination of musical totems from the past. While they are technically a contemporary band, their greatest success has been flying the flag of an era that moves further away with each passing day, and that no matter what Kurt Cobain said, the classics never truly go out of style.

Related Topics