(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Every artist goes through moments when inspiration stops coming. Whenever someone spends every waking hour trying to find a reason to write music, there comes a point when the thought of doing almost anything else is better than staying cooped up in the studio. And while Eddie Vedder had periods of being lost before Pearl Jam even made it big, he always knew he could go back to a few records to keep him company, even in his darkest times.
Then again, Vedder would have probably been fine if someone had only listed The Who as his inspiration. He worshipped the ground that Pete Townshend walked on through a majority of his career, and while the grunge icons ultimately went in a different direction, it’s hard to think of Vedder’s vocal delivery without thinking of the raw power that came out of Roger Daltrey in his prime.
But right as The Who were starting to fade from memory, punk had all of the same values that Vedder was looking for. They stood up for what they believed in, and the hardcore set like Fugazi were trying their best to make something that was a lot more grizzled than any other form of rock and roll, but that didn’t always leave room for melody when they were thrashing away on their instruments.
Sure, Vedder himself would have gladly done away with having any hooks in Pearl Jam’s material after they hit the big time, but all good rock and roll is built on something greater than making noise. It was about relating to someone on a deeper level than a bunch of notes have ever been able to do, and that was the kind of terrain that Bruce Springsteen had mastered ever since the mid-1970s.
Although ‘The Boss’ never claimed to be the best musician in the world, his greatest strength always came from being the best songwriter and performer he could be. Whereas most people see it as a party, Springsteen always treated his job as a civil duty whenever he got on that stage, and while Vedder was only peering in from the back of the show when he saw Springsteen for the first time, he knew he was a changed man the minute that he heard him face-to-face.
Neither of them had an easy childhood of the greatest relationship with their father, but Vedder felt that ‘The Boss’ helped him put away the anger that ha been festering all those years, saying, “We were talking politics, and then got into family politics, of which we’d experienced a great deal and had a lot in common. It was a pretty intense conversation. He exposed me to some truths that he’d processed in a healthy way, that for me were still in a disease-like state. He helped me cure some things I had been living with for a long time.”
Vedder was far from the first one to get that kind of advice from Springsteen. Even without talking to him, Brandon Flowers felt a kinship with ‘The Boss’ when listening to his music, eventually going in a completely different direction from The Killers by exploring their roots on albums like Sam’s Town.
And while it’s easy to listen to the damaged kid in the middle of ‘Alive’ and see a half-formed portrait of what Vedder was going through, he knew that music could only help him out of that state. It wouldn’t magically make the problems disappear, but at least he had something to show for rather than scars on the inside.
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