"Welcome to the R.E.M. album release party," Eddie Vedder deadpans from the stage of Seattle's Showbox theater -- "and the Pearl Jam reunion tour."

It's Sept. 14, 1996 and Pearl Jam are preparing to launch the world tour for their new album, No Code. This warm-up club gig should be Vedder's ideal venue. Having long professed disdain for his arena-rock superstardom, he faces a crowd of just 800 or so locals in his adoptive hometown -- an audience from which journalists, low-level PR flacks, photographers and other industry hangers-on have been barred. It's a hand-picked crowd of the faithful who have waited a long time for this moment. Apart from scattered dates on their abortive 1995 tour, Pearl Jam have not sustained a tour in more than two years. The scene is set, then, for a legendary show -- the band's triumphant return. You'd never guess it from Vedder's scowl.

"Have you heard the new album?" he asks in his husky baritone. The applause is scattered. "Well," Vedder mumbles, "you're about to hear it again." With that, Pearl Jam edge into "Sometimes," the fragile ballad that opens No Code. "Seek my part," Vedder sings, pushing out the lyrics in a pained rasp. "Devote myself/My small self/Like a book amongst the many on a shelf."

The muted start seems to confuse the audience of mosh-minded twentysomethings, who are pumped for some of Vedder's girder-climbing theatrics. The fans are out of luck. Even when the band members kick into "Hail, Hail" -- the closest song to a classic Pearl Jam arena anthem on No Code -- they seem determined to thwart the song's urgent, driving momenturm. Bassist Jeff Ament, famous for his flying leaps, stands rooted to his spot on the stage. Lead guitarist Mike McCready tries a few flailing guitar-hero moves, but when his band mates fail to respond, he, too, sinks into a sullen torpor. Stone Gossard, who hasn't bothered to remove his glasses for this gig, works away at his guitar with all the passion of a man digging a ditch. And drummer Jack Irons keeps a steady, if downbeat, pace.

Then there's Vedder himself. Planted at the mike, he delivers the songs with a throwaway offhandedness that borders on contempt. "This is the part of the show we call the human jukebox," he announces before Pearl Jam dip into the sure-fire crowd pleasers from Ten, Vs and Vitalogy. The versions of "Even Flow," "Alive" and "Whipping" sound like the leaden workings of a cover band. And Vedder seems to know it. "Well," he says, before quitting the stage, "this was almost worth leaving the house for."

Lately, it seems, Eddie Vedder is searching harder and harder for reasons to leave the house. While the four other members of Pearl Jam are regularly spotted in Seattle's nightclubs and restaurants, Vedder sightings are few and far between. And not just on the streets of Seattle. Shunning interviews, refusing to make videos and playing truncated tours because of his unwinnable war with Ticketmaster, he now keeps a low profile in the city, living in his large house in West Seattle, in an enclave of upper-middleclass homes on a tree-lined slope that overlooks Puget Sound. The house is patrolled by two bodyguards who check out even the Domino's Pizza boy who delivers Vedder's weekly small pepperoni and sausage pie. Fearful of reported death threats, hounded by fans who have gleaned his other address (in the city's Capitol Hill district), the singer has surrounded himself with a handful of fellow rock celebrities who are unwilling to speak of him to journalists, even off the record. On the rare occasions when Vedder does talk to reporters, he uses the opportunity merely to bemoan, endlessly, the burdens of his fame and success.

Publicly, Pearl Jam have always described themselves as a democracy where all five members form a consensus on decision making. But sources close to the band say that Vedder is the group's unquestioned leader and that while artistically, all five band mates contribute, the singer sets the agenda for the band's extracurricular, anti-rock-industry crusades. "Other members of the band look to him to make decisions," confirms a confidential source at the band's label, Epic. "Everybody gets input, but Eddie leads the way." Another source states the case still more strongly, calling Vedder a "control freak" around whom Pearl Jam personnel "walk on eggshells." It's an intraband dynamic that has resulted not only from Vedder's special status as one of rock's most charismatic figures but also because of the temperament of his fellow band mates.

Unpretentious journeymen musicians grateful for their success after years of laboring in pre-Pearl Jam obscurity, Vedder's band mates are affable types who are unlikely to rock the boat with their volatile singer. Jeff Ament, a barber's son raised in small-town Montana, still lives in the same apartment in Seattle where he lived before the band's breakthrough. Stone Gossard, a Seattle native and son of a local lawyer, has co-founded a small record label, Loosegroove, which his sister Shelly helps run. Mike McCready, a local boy who began playing in bands in junior high school, has come the closest to falling prey to the occupational hazards of rock stardom: He did a stint at a Minneapolis clinic for booze problems, in 1994, but is by all accounts now clean and sober. He's also part owner of a popular Seattle pool hall, the Garage. New drummer Jack Irons is an old ally of Vedder's, the man responsible for hooking the singer up with Pearl Jam in the first place, and is thus unlikely to challenge the singer's authority over the band.

Vedder's authority was clear to all in 1994, when drummer Dave Abbruzzese was abruptly fired from the band. "Dave was too much the rock star," says a source close to the band. "He was giving cover-story interviews to drumming magazines. He was happy, he was achieving his dream. That bugged the fuck out of Eddie. I witnessed Eddie drawing mustaches on Dave's face on the cover of Modern Drummer." Some sources say that Abbruzzese's ouster sent a message to the other band members. "I think that once again, it goes back to Eddie and his very volatile personality," says the source. "I think all the band members would feel like they're on the way out, too." Asked how seriously they take such a threat, this source says, "Put it this way: Stone has his own label; Mike's working on another record; Jeff has his band Three Fish."

From his earliest days in Pearl Jam, Vedder claimed that his goal was to be a different kind of rock star. He would resist the temptations of power, wealth and ego. The emphasis, he said, must be on the music -- a sentiment entirely in keeping with Seattle's punk-inspired, anti-commercial ethos.

Vedder seemed to be a ready-made poster boy for the disaffected grunge generation: a disgruntled rebel whose agonized lyrics and raw-throated, rageful singing sprang from an unhappy childhood and an alienated and lonely adolescence. In a wide-ranging series of interviews that he granted to Rolling Stone, in 1993, he shaped his myth as a reluctant star -- a high-school dropout turned surf-slacker whose ascent from humble beginnings occurred almost despite himself. This, too, fit perfectly with the grunge doctrine, which rejected the careerism and grasping ambition of the pandering 1980s hair-metal bands.

But according to those who knew Vedder before his fame, the singer's rise was hardly the result of happenstance. "He knows what this whole biz is all about," says a friend from Vedder's days before he joined Pearl Jam. "He's not some kind of little, lost soul who writes great songs." By many accounts, Vedder's rise was a concerted effort that was propelled by his flair for self-invention and self-dramatization, his relentless drive to be heard and a steely determination to control his public image. "He is a master manipulator of the people and situations around him," says a source at Epic. "And he's a master manipulator of his own image."

It's an image -- and identity -- that is often obscured by the vagaries of Vedder's parentage. He was born Edward Louis Severson III, in 1964, in Evanston, Illinois, the son of a musician father who divorced his wife before Vedder was two years old. Raised believing that his stepfather was his natural father and that his mother's three other sons by her new husband were his full brothers, Vedder was, for about the first two decades of his life, known as Eddie Mueller.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times eight days after Kurt Cobain's suicide was discovered, Vedder talked about his own depressive nature, describing how as a teenager, thoughts of suicide visited him "as often as mealtime . . . I was all alone -- except for music." Declining even to name his high school or to discuss his fellow students, he said, "They didn't treat me well."

But classmates from San Dieguito High School, which Vedder attended after his family's migration to San Diego in the mid-70s, paint a picture that stands in stark contrast to the singer's recollections.

"He was very popular," recalls Annette Szymanski-Gomez, a friend who was a grade ahead of Vedder. "He was outgoing. He'd go out of his way to be nice to everyone." Another schoolmate concurs: "He was so nice to everyone and took the time to chat. That's why I don't understand this stuff about him being miserable. He didn't seem miserable to me! He was also doggone cute." "All the girls had a major crush on him," says another friend who fondly recalls engaging in wholesome teenage fun with "Little Eddie Mueller," as he'd been affectionately dubbed because of his diminutive stature. "We'd play football, climb around in this abandoned building. I remember going to his house and hearing him play guitar with his best friend."

The Muellers lived in a solid middle-class neighborhood in the San Diego suburb of Encinitas, California. "It was a nice house," says one friend. "It had two floors. They had a piano. It was not at all a deprived childhood. I remember that there was a darling picture of Eddie as a kid. He was about 3 years old. His mother said he'd been in some TV commercial."

This early brush with show business was only the beginning of Eddie Mueller's youthful training as an actor. Though he was known to be musical, Mueller's primary identity at San Dieguito High was as the school's star thespian. He got his start as a high-school actor in the chorus of Little Mary Sunshine. He soon graduated to leading roles and appeared in Bye Bye Birdie, Butterflies Are Free, Outward Bound, and The World of Carl Sandburg. In his final year, Mueller was voted Most Talented for his acting skills.

"He was just a wonderful actor, really exceptional," says a former drama classmate. "His idol was Dustin Hoffman." In Mueller's junior year, he was cast in a school play with Liz Gumble, a student one grade behind him. The two began dating, in March 1981, and became, by all accounts, inseparable. When Gumble went away for a brief vacation with her family, Mueller expressed his grief with typical theatricality. "He wore her scarf wrapped around his neck every day till she came back," says a classmate.

Mueller also found a close friend in his theater teacher, the late Clayton Liggett. The drama coach became something of a mentor and surrogate father to Mueller, who, friends say, did not get along with his stepfather. "I remember when Eddie was in school, he would come over to our house quite often and talk to Clayton about personal things," Liggett's widow told the San Diego Union Tribune in 1995. "I don't know if Eddie was looking for a father figure, but I do know he needed someone to talk to, and Clayton was always there for him."

One former schoolmate surmises that Vedder is "embellishing" his past as part of a "persona" he's developed as spokesman for the alienated and dysfunctional X Generation. "I don't think it means he's being untruthful," she says in Vedder's defense. "I just think people don't understand that you don't have to be this miserable character in real life. I feel it's an art, an ability to be the character who sings these tortured songs."