• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Where do you stand on Pearl Jam now? There were rumors that you and Eddie Vedder were supposed to be on that ‘Time’ magazine cover together.

I don’t want to get into that. One of the things I’ve learned is that slagging off people just doesn’t do me any good. It’s too bad, because the whole problem with the feud between Pearl Jam and Nirvana had been going on for so long and has come so close to being fixed.

It’s never been entirely clear what this feud with Vedder was about.

There never was one. I slagged them off because I didn’t like their band. I hadn’t met Eddie at the time. It was my fault; I should have been slagging off the record company instead of them. They were marketed—not probably against their will—but without them realizing they were being pushed into the grunge bandwagon.

Don’t you feel any empathy with them? They’ve been under the same intense follow-up-album pressure as you have.

Yeah, I do. Except I’m pretty sure that they didn’t go out of their way to challenge their audience as much as we did with this record. They’re a safe rock band. They’re a pleasant rock band that everyone likes. [Laughs] God, I’ve had much better quotes in my head about this.

It just kind of pisses me off to know that we work really hard to make an entire album’s worth of songs that are as good as we can make them. I’m gonna stroke my ego by saying that we’re better than a lot of bands out there. What I’ve realized is that you only need a couple of catchy songs on an album, and the rest can be bullshit Bad Company rip-offs, and it doesn’t matter. If I was smart, I would have saved most of the songs off Nevermind and spread them out over a fifteen-year period. But I can’t do that. All the albums I ever liked were albums that delivered a great song, one after another: Aerosmith’s Rocks, the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks . . . , Led Zeppelin II, Back in Black, by AC/DC.

You’ve also gone on record as being a big Beatles fan.

Oh, yeah. John Lennon was definitely my favorite Beatle, hands down. I don’t know who wrote what parts of what Beatles songs, but Paul McCartney embarrasses me. Lennon was obviously disturbed [laughs]. So I could relate to that.

And from the books I’ve read—and I’m so skeptical of anything I read, especially in rock books—I just felt really sorry for him. To be locked up in that apartment. Although he was totally in love with Yoko and his child, his life was a prison. He was imprisoned. It’s not fair. That’s the crux of the problem that I’ve had with becoming a celebrity—the way people deal with celebrities. It needs to be changed; it really does.

No matter how hard you try, it only comes out like you’re bitching about it. I can understand how a person can feel that way and almost become obsessed with it. But it’s so hard to convince people to mellow out. Just take it easy, have a little bit of respect. We all shit [laughs].

Let’s talk about your songwriting. Your best songs—“Teen Spirit,” “Come As You Are,” “Rape Me,” “Penny Royal Tea”—all open with the verse in a low, moody style. Then the chorus comes in at full volume and nails you. So which comes first, the verse or the killer chorus?

[Long pause, then he smiles.] I don’t know. I really don’t know. I guess I start with the verse and then go into the chorus. But I’m getting so tired of that formula. And it is formula. And there’s not much you can do with it. We’ve mastered that—for our band. We’re all growing pretty tired of it.

It is a dynamic style. But I’m only using two of the dynamics. There are a lot more I could be using. Krist, Dave and I have been working on this formula—this thing of going from quiet to loud—for so long that it’s literally becoming boring for us. It’s like, “Okay, I have this riff. I’ll play it quiet, without a distortion box, while I’m singing the verse. And now let’s turn on the distortion box and hit the drums harder.”

I want to learn to go in between those things, go back and forth, almost become