The Pearl Jam feud Eddie Vedder admitted was overhyped: “It wasn’t between us”
Was there ever a genre less fitting to feuds than grunge? Sure, every band out of Seattle may have had an axe to grind with the kind of glitzy hair metal coming out of California, but since everyone was so easygoing in the local scene, there was never any reason to get mad because one guy wasn’t playing the kind of music that you liked. That didn’t stop Nirvana and Pearl Jam from having a tiny spat, but when looking back, Eddie Vedder thought he could have handled things a lot better.
Because before the term “grunge” was coined, Vedder was already an outlier in the scene. He had been a humble gas station attendant living in San Diego, and then, after one chance day getting a tape from Stone Gossard, he suddenly became one of the biggest singers in Seattle alongside Chris Cornell and Kurt Cobain.
Even though the entire Seattle scene was forced under one umbrella, Cobain didn’t see anything in common between Nirvana and Pearl Jam. If anything, Vedder’s style, matched with Mike McCready’s ripping blues leads, stood for everything that Nirvana was against, being much more punk rock in their approach than Vedder’s classic rock pastiche.
Cobain may have just taken a few shots in passing, but the press ran with it, eventually pitting the bands against each other whenever they got the chance. Vedder insisted on not making a big deal out of it until the press insisted on putting his face on the cover of Time magazine when talking about the Seattle sound.
The feud probably helped both bands sell a few more records, but Vedder would have sooner done away with the whole thing, telling Howard Stern, “The only thing that bothered me about that [alleged rivalry] was because it was public, and people were reacting to it: it wasn’t like between us. There was a certain writer who pulled a quote of Jeff Ament’s out and pulled a quote of Kurt’s out, and that made for interesting press”.
By the time they got together to hash things out, Cobain admitted that they had patched up their differences, eventually recalling in footage from Pearl Jam’s Twenty, “I still consider [Vedder] someone that I really like. I’ve talked with him on the phone a few times, and I think he’s a really nice person.”
Then again, that feud ended up meaning something totally different after Cobain passed away. As much as he critiqued Pearl Jam for being too mainstream for his taste, that need to remain authentic stuck with Vedder throughout his career. If you look at where the band went later on Vitalogy or No Code, it was almost as if they were trying to shed their skin of any commercial material.
Gossard also admitted that Cobain probably left a greater mark on them than anyone else, saying, “If we’re still any good now, it’s partly because of him”. The press wanted a feud, but where most people saw cheap shots, Vedder saw someone willing to teach him a lesson about fame, and that was more important than any charting record.