The Second Coming of Pearl Jam

Eddie vedder is trying to get me drunk. We're in his hotel suite after the Cleveland show. He pops open a Bud with his lighter and hands it to me -- before I'm done with it, he'll try to hand me another one. Vedder has already chugged a bottle of red wine onstage, as usual, so he drinks more slowly now, nursing a Coors.

"I've actually tried to play a few shows without drinking," he says of his wine habit later that night. "But you know how bartenders sneak a drink in here and there, but the busboys can't? I felt more like the busboy -- that I was just working." Vedder used to smoke pot with some frequency, but he hasn't touched it since his daughter's birth. He also had "an Ecstasy phase" at some point and even tried recording some techno. "I was listening to all this stuff on Ecstasy. But I was wondering, 'Are they writing it on Ecstasy?' I decided that the pure way to do it is to actually take Ecstasy, and then write Ecstasy music," he says, laughing. "That didn't work out. But I enjoyed the Ecstasy."

Backstage before the show in Cleveland, he asks me, "Are you ready to stay up late?" I was ready. Vedder decides to put on mood music and disappears into his bedroom. After a pause, the sounds of the Strokes' new album fill the room. "Now obviously I have a lot more random stuff than the Strokes, but this is what's handy," he apologizes.

For someone who spent years ducking the media, Vedder is a hell of an interview -- engaging and verbose. When he gets deep into an anecdote, his low, resonant voice is nearly hypnotic. As we begin, he drafts a soap dish into service as an ashtray and lights the first of many American Spirits.

I ask him about "Life Wasted," on which he sings, "I have faced it, a life wasted/ I'm never going back again." He closes his eyes as he talks about how attending a friend's funeral can help you "realize what a gift this is, to be alive. When you leave that funeral, that drive is as important as any single stretch of road you'll travel on. You've got a renewed appreciation for life. And I think that feeling can last through the day, through the week, but then things start getting back to normal and you start taking this living and breathing and eating thing for granted. I think that song is there to remind you, 'This is that feeling.' "

Vedder had a specific friend in mind when he wrote the song: "The truth is -- I'm a little sensitive and this is a close, personal relationship. I'll just say it. Fuck it. Right up front. Half the record is based on the loss of the guy who turned out to be the best friend I ever had on the planet. And that was Johnny Ramone." Suddenly, the fast tempos and chunky power-chords that dominate Pearl Jam make a lot more sense.

It was an odd friendship: The Ramones guitarist, who died on September 15th, 2004 -- a month or so before Pearl Jam began recording sessions for the new album -- was a hard-core Republican and, by most accounts, not the warmest guy in the world. "We used to laugh that I made him a nicer human being and that he made me more of an asshole," Vedder says. Vedder, along with Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante, Vincent Gallo and Rob Zombie, spent hours at Ramone's house, where he would play them music (on a jukebox, not a guitar) and show film clips of acts from Gene Vincent to the Dead Boys. "We were the students of Johnny Ramone, and forever bonded," Vedder says. "Never have I experienced a loss of someone I talked to with such frequency, in such depth, with such intimacy."

But it was yet another of Vedder's famous friends who would help him resolve the central drama of his life. Vedder's mother was in the middle of a painful divorce from Mueller when she told Eddie, then seventeen, the truth about his parentage. Vedder and Mueller were already at odds -- at one point, he has alleged, his stepfather pushed him down a flight of stairs. (Mueller has denied it.) As a kid, Vedder tells me, he used to cope with his pain over that relationship by going to a park with his guitar and singing a song by one of his heroes, Bruce Springsteen -- "Independence Day," the tale of a father and son parting ways: "There was just no way this house could hold the two of us." On 2004's Vote for Change Tour, Vedder finally became close with Springsteen.

One night, Vedder and Springsteen -- who famously worked out his own father issues in his music -- stood on a Manhattan rooftop, drinking tequila. "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," Vedder says, haltingly. "He exposed me to some truths that he'd processed in a healthy way, that for me were still in a diseaselike state. He helped me cure some things I had been living with for a long time."

That night, Vedder told Springsteen how he used to play "Independence Day" and how his music had affected him. "You helped me as a voice coming from a piece of vinyl," he told him. "Now you helped to put it away by being a human being in front of me."

Not long after the conversation with Springsteen, Vedder attended the wedding of one of his brothers. There, he came face to face with his stepfather for the first time since the Eighties. "When I finally had to meet that guy again, Bruce was the one who got me in the right space to handle it," he says. "I have three younger brothers -- if it affected them that I didn't have a relationship with this guy, that was enough reason to forgive and resolve things. I didn't want them to be torn between the two of us."

We move on to another tough subject: the 2000 breakup of Vedder's marriage to Beth Liebling, whom he had dated since he was a teenager. He won't explain the split, but he does say that he was devastated. The divorce happened around the same time as the biggest tragedy of Pearl Jam's career: Nine young fans were crushed to death on June 30th that year during a set at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. "You can imagine what kind of fetal position I was in," he says. "I just remember thinking that there was no way out. I was listening to The Who by Numbers and there's a line in 'Slip Kid' -- 'There's no easy way to be free.' I was thinking, 'I couldn't agree with you more.' "

Then Vedder met Jill McCormick. She was a model, a profession that Vedder had savaged in the Vitalogy track "Satan's Bed": "Such fine examples, skinny little bitch/Model, role model, roll some models in blood/Get some flesh to stick, so they look like us." He laughs when I ask if he apologized for those lyrics. "Look, the person I fell in love with, that happened to be her job. There were a couple days where it was like, 'Wow, this seems contradictory.' It had to pass a harder test than falling in love with just anyone. And it did."

But before the new relationship, while Vedder was still despairing over Roskilde and his divorce, the band went on with a tour. Sonic Youth opened, and Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon's then-six-year-old child, Coco, came along. "Coco gave me drawings, we played pingpong. Coco reminded me to open up my world, kept me from being the bitter asshole I had every right to be. I thought after Roskilde, 'OK, this is my chance, I can be that asshole forever.' Coco led me to the light.

"And now I have one of my own." He shows me some adorable pictures of Olivia Vedder, born on June 11th, 2004. It's nearly five o'clock in the morning.Vedder shakes his head and looks me in the eyes. "Roger Daltrey has this thing he always says: 'Be lucky.' It took me a few years to reach it -- but I took his advice."

[From Issue 1003 — June 29, 2006]