- Before Alive, Once and Footsteps "I asked what
language they speak here in Zurich-and I guess there's many of them. Do
you understand English when I talk to you? [yes] cause I was gonna tell
you a little story. The next three songs - we've never really played them
together but they go together. It's all one story and umm - you wanta hear
about? I haven't told anybody about this before and I don't want to ruin
any interpretations of the songs that you have, you know, but it's about
- it's about incest, and it's about murder and you know all those good
things - and...ahh if you can picture it in your mind, the third song takes
place in a jail cell - so this is our own little mini-opera here."
HOST
Eddie, you brought up the thing about putting the three songs together,
of which, I believe, Footsteps was the final part of that story.
Eddie
"Yeah. Yeah. We played it actually on this radio program and we
played it and expected someone to put it all together and make a B-Movie
about it. Cause it had all the good B-movie things. Incest and murder.
Its
all right there for you."
I've copied 2 Chapters from 2 different 1994 PJ Biographies that deal
with Eddie's life and the creation of Pearl Jam's first played song: "Alive".
1) Melody Maker's PJ Bio Excerpt
Here's the story as it was written in the "Melody
Maker" bio of Pearl Jam by Allen Jones 1994. This is actually
a biographical story of Eddie's life, but after reading it "Alive" seems
kinda obvious.
This is one of the most interesting stories i've heard and i think
it's a basic start to understand Eddie and his art.
Also, while readin what Eddie says about it, you start to understand
that behind every word and phrase he uses in the songs- there's a meaning.
Behind every song he wrote there's a story. And he's aware of it.
Actually at some point you'll see that Eddie explains or interprates
the song for us, to make the story clear after it has been misunderstood.
Notice!
(All Eddie Quotes are underlined,
Important
quotes regarding the song are bold.)
A Block Quote From the book:
"In the name of the father
"Music saved me", he told the interviewers,
years later. 'I mean,' he would continue, 'my upbringing was
like a hurricane, and music was the tree I held onto. That's how important
it was, and is.
'That's why I fully vow
to help people out with whatever comes my way... Because I went through
the ice myself once or twice, you know.'
Eddie was born on December
23, 1966, in Evanston, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago. He was known
as Eddie Mueller then, and he was the eldest of four boys. For a while,
childhood was idyllic, a season of uncomplicated hapiness. When he was
five, however, his parents took charge of a group home for parentless children.
The orphaned kids were a mix of Afro-Americans and Irish and could be a
pretty wild company.
'I went from being the
oldest kid in my family, to being this little punk among all these bigger
punks,' he would recall. 'All of a sudden, most of my brothers were older,
and black and Irish. All these intense diverse cultures.'
Interviewers would want to
know how he coped in this new environment.
'I leanred how to box,'
he would answer.
Being a lot older than Eddie,
most of these kids were alread into music, listening mostly to soul, R&B
and Motown. 'Thier musical tastes rubbed off on me,' Eddie would remember.
'That's when i got into Smokey Robinson, james Brown, Otis Redding, the
Jacksons Five. I started singing to Michael Jackson records, and to this
day when I pull out a record with the blue Motown logo of the map of Detroit
on it, I get chills.'
In 1974, when Eddie was eight,
the family moved to San Diego. It was a time of increasing tensions, including
rows with his parents, unhapiness at school, trauma and resentment. Music
was again a comfort and inspiration, a bandage for weeping wounds.
He was 13, and of all the
music he listened to it was 'Quadrophenia', The Who's 1973 song cycle about
England's lost and derelict young, tha offered him the most solace, that
sustained him and reminded him that he wasn't alone in his adolescent agony.
'I was going through a
really rough time, and the "Quadrophenia" album saved my life,' he
confessed to Rock Power magazine in 1992. 'I thought it was so
amazing that Pete Townshend, this guy who lived thousands of miles away
in another country, could totally explain my life. It was really intense,
and obviously I wasn't the only one who felt that way.'
Bitterness
Talking to Melody Maker's Andrew Mueller
in Oslo in February 1992, Eddie was even more explicit aout the debt he
owed Pete Townshend and The Who.
'I just kind of came to
this realisation today that Pete Townshend was probably more of a father
to me than anybody,' he said. 'And yet I never sent him a
Father's Day card. I feel pretty guilty about that.'
For a long time after he became
famouse with Pearl Jam, Eddie was purposely vague about the circumstances
of his upbringing that caused him such unhapiness, pain and anger at his
family.
It wasn't until an interview
in Rolling Stone in October 1993 that he elaborated upon this part
of the past that was still a source of bitterness and regret.
'I never knew my real dad,'
he told the writer and film maker Cameron Crowe. 'I had another father
that I didn't get along with, a guy I thought was my father. There were
fights and bad bad scenes. I was kind of on my own at a pretty young age.'
His parents decided
to move back to Chicago when he was 15. He'd started to play in local bands
and was determined to pursue a career in music. He announced that he was
staying in San Diego. There was an acriminous farewell to the man who Eddie
would soon learn was his stepfather, and they haven't spoken since. Eddie
had never got on well with him and they had never been close. It wasn't
until a year later, however, when his mother flew out from Chicago to see
him in san Diego that he came close to understanding what lay at
the grim heart of his problems.
'She came out with the
specific purpose to tell me that this guy wasn't my father,' Vedder
told Cameron Crowe. ' I remember at the time I was like " I know
he's not my real father, he's a fucking asshole." And she said, "Oh, Eddie,
he's really not your father."
'At first I was pretty happy about it,
then she told me who my real dad was. I had met the guy three or four times,
he was a friend of the family, kind of a distant friend. He later died
of multiple sclerosis.
So when i met him, he was in the hospital.
He had crutches, or maybe he was in a wheelchair.'
Years later, his mother's
visit and the specific circumstances of her confession were vividly inscribed
on his memory. He had forgotton nothing.
'There was a piano in the room, and I remember
really wishing I knew how to play a happy song. i was happy for about a
minute, then I came down. I had to deal with the fact that he was dead.
My real father was not on this earth. I had to deal with the anger of not
being told sooner, not being told while he was alive. I was a big secret.
Secrets are bad news. Secrets about adoptions, any of that stuff. It's
got to come out, don't keep it. It just gets bigger and darker and deeper
and uglier and messy.'
What went down that day between
Eddie and his mother would eventually be agonisngly recalled on Pearl Jam's
'Alive', which is credited on the lyric sheet insert of 'Ten' to Edward
Louis Severson III. Eddie's real father was Edward Louis Severson II, who
is among the Pearl Jam family members to whom 'Ten' was dedicated. Edward
Louis Severson II was a musician himself, it tuned out, a singer and organist
who sang in restaurants and hotle lounges.
Retrospective
As soon as what had been kept secret from him
for so long was out in the open, Eddie found himself surrounded by well-meaning,
but often unwelcome relatives.
'There were all tese things
they wanted to say,' he told Rolling Stone, 'like,
That's where you got your musical talent,' and I was like "Fuck
you". at the time I was 14 or 15, I didn't even know what the fuck was
going on. I learned how to play guitar, saved all my money for equiptment,
and you're telling me that's where it came from? Some fucking broken-down
old lounge act? Fuck you.'
Eddie, who adopted his mother's
maiden name when he discovered the truth of his parentage, was not quick
to reconcile himself with the way he tought he'd been hurt and decieved
and prevented from ever really knowing his father. He blamed everyone,
including himself, and wraped hmself in a retrospective pain. There
is much at the heart of his music that still reflects his unsettled realationship
with his family.
'They've given me a lifetime's worth of
material to write about,'he noted with grim irony in his interview
with Crowe.
With the passing of time,
however, the turbulence of his upbringing and his realationship with his
father was put in a more reasoned perspective. He learned to live with
even the most uncomfortable memories.
'The strange thing is that there are so
many similarities between my father and I,' he eventually admitted.
' He had an impact on my life, but here I am. I look just like him. People
in my family -they can't help it- they look at me like I'm a replacement.
That's where "Alive" comes in. But I'm
not proud of tha guy now. I appriciate my heritage. I have a very deep
feeling for him i my heart.
Surf's Up
Perhaps in a spirit of reconciliation or maybe
in bealted recognition of his musical aspirations, which she only now began
to take seriously, his mother's final gesture before flying back to Chicago
was to buy him a guitar, a black 1980 Fender Telecaster. Eddie knew his
limitations, however.
'I wasn't Jimi Hendrix
and didnt know if I ever could be,' he later said, explaining why he
soon dedicated that his most effective role would be as a singer. 'It
just seemed like it was easier and more direct to just scream in somebody's
face.'
Eddie played in a lot of bands
during the next few years as the Eighties rolled into the Ninties. There
were The Butts, for instance, and Surf & Destroy, and they played mostly
punk and hardcore and never really seemed to get anywhere.
Eddie refused to be discouraged, however, and
never lost faith. If only he could hang on, something would happen. He
would hear the call, and the things he dreamed about, longed for and wanted
so desperately it hurt like a bruise, would actually become a reality.
Eddie was always a true believer.
By the begining of the Nineties,
however, he was at a low ebb. Bad Radio, his most recent band, had just
split up. He was working nights, from midnight until eight in the morning,
pumping gas in a San Diego petrol station. The shifts were long, but buisness
at nights was usually slow, which gave him plenty of time to concetrte
on his songwriting. When he got off work, he'd go down to the beach near
Encinitas and surf. For Eddie, surfing was an expirience of almost as mysticl
as roc'n'roll.
'People think of th sun and sand and
girls, but surfing's not really lik that,' he later explained. 'At
eight in the morning, it's foggy and cold; you drag yourself into the ocean
and you can't even see the waves through the fog. It's not very glamourouse,
but those are the best waves. The still water's like glass- you feel like
you'r breaking he plain for he first time as you're paddling out.
'It's a good time to think.
Time alone is when you really connect to others, that's how thier philosophies
work, but I'm still trying to get in touch with myself. I've held my breath
and swum as deep as I could down into myself, and then had to come up for
air,or the pressure got too intese, my head felt like it was imploding.
'But I know I can go deeper,
it's just a matter of holding my breath longer. I wanna hit the bottom
of myself before I go hang out with a million people.'
When the pounding surf had
cleared his head, Eddie would go home and play guitar all day and work
some more on his songs. In the early evening, he'd go down to one of his
local clubs, sometmes Winter's on El Cajon boulevard, where his long time
girlfreind (now his wife J.W) Beth Leibling
put on some shows, but more often the Bacchanal, where he had a part-time
and usually unpaid job humping gear for bands. He's hang out at sound-checks,
stay on for the show, and at midnight go back to work for anoher eight
hours. In San Diego he was known as 'the guy who never slept'.
'I was kind of a mad scientist
characer,' Vedder told Andrew Mueller. 'People thought I'd either
do really big things some day... or just die.'
One night at the Bacchanal
club, Eddie worked as a casual roadie for Joe Strummer, the former Clash
singer and guitar player who'd be recording a solo album called 'Earthquake
Weather' in Los Angeles and was then doing a series of club dates to help
knock the matirerial for the new record into shape.
'I forwent my twent-dollar
paycheck tha night just to hang out at soundcheck,' Eddie told Gina Arnold
some time later, ' because to me, just to look at Joe Strummer's guitar
was cool. I'd get chills just looking at it.And that night the power went
off and sat in a tiny room with Joe Strummer for, like, an hour with just
this big mag of light on his face. It was a totally surreal expirience.
I remember he gave me a hit off his cigarette and it was half pot and half
tobacco, and I nearly puked... but off course you can't puke in front of
your hero.'
Playing that night with Joe
Strummer was Jack Irons, the drummer of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Jack
and Eddie met and became best freinds. They sarted to meet every Friday
to play basketball and talk about music and just hang out together.
One Friday in October 1990, Irons turned up for
his weekly session with Eddie and after shooting a few baskets he gave
him a tape of some songs that had been recorded by some people he knew
in Seattle. These musicians were looking for a singer, Jack told Eddie.
Perhaps Eddie would like to give it a listen, see what he thought, maybe
even get in touch with these people up there in Seattle.
Mini-Opera
Eddie took the tape home. It was labelled simple,
"STONE GOSSARD DEMOS". There were five instrumental tracks on the tape
and one of them especially caught Eddie's attention. It had a working title
of "Dollar Short", and it featured this great guitar bridge that after
a while Eddie just couldn't get it out of his mind. It just kept running
and running through his head, and somehow it brought to the surface a lot
of the emotions that Eddie had kept suppressed for a long time.
One morning after wrk at the
gas station, he was out surfing as usual in the early morning Encinitas
mist with those riffs from 'Dollar Short' still playing in his head when
the lyric for what would eventually become 'Alive' seemed to just come
to him, almost unbidden.
He was soon back at Beth Liebling's
apartment in Mission Beach where he taped himself singing over three of
the instrumental tracks on Stone Gossard's demo tape. The trio of the songs
included 'Alive' and 'Once', both of which would appear on Pearl Jam's
debut album, 'Ten', and an early verson of 'Footsteps', which would eventually
appear as one of the B-sides of the British singel pressing of 'Jeremy'.
Together, these three songs
consituted what Eddie would laer describe as a kind of 'mini-opera' (again,
shades of the Who's Pete Tonshends and both 'Quadrophenia and 'Tommy').
the told a story, the full details of which would only emerge later. By
then, 'Alive' had been adopted bythousands of America's disenfranchised
young as a clairon call, a kinda of life-affiriming anthem, which is certainly
something Eddie had never intended it to be.
'The story of the song
is that a mother is with a father, and the father dies,' he told Cameron
Crowe, obviously eager to clear this up. 'It's an intense thing because
the son looks just like the father. The son grows up to be the father,
the person that she lost. His father is dead, and now this confusion, his
mother, his love, how does he love her, how does she love him? In fact,
the mother, even though she marries somebody else, there's no one she's
ever loved more than the father. You know how it is, first love and stuff.
And the guy dies. How could you ever get him back? But the son.
He looks exactly like him. It's uncanny. So she wants him. The son
is oblivious to it all. He doesn't know what the fuck is going on.He's
still dealing, he's still growing up. He's still dealing with love, he's
still dealing with the death of his father. All he knows is "I'm still
alive"- those three words, that's totally out of burden.
Killer
"Now the second verse is "Oh, she walks
slowly into a young man's room...I can remember to this very day...the
look...the look." And I don't say anything else. And because I'm saying
"the look...the look", everyone thinks it goes with "on her face". It's
not on her face. The look is between her legs. Where do you go with
that? That's where you come from. 'But "i'm still alive". I'm the
lover that's still alive. And the whole conversation about "You're still
alive, she said." And he doubts: "Do I deserve to be? Is that the question?"
Because he's fucked up forever! So now he doesn't know how to deal with
it, so what does he do, he goes out killing people- that was "Once".
He becomes a serial
killer. And "Footsteps", the final song in the triology, that's what happens
when he gets executed. That's what happens. The Green River killer...and
in San Diego, there was another prostitute killer down there. Somehow I
related to that. I think that happens more than we know. It's a modern
way of dealing with bad life.
'I'm just glad,' Eddie
told Cameron Crowe, 'that I became a songwriter.'
For the moment, though, Eddie
didn't think the songs needed explaining. He just wanted someone to hear
them, and as soon as possible.
That night, he worked patiently
on the art work for the cassette sleeve. he titled the package 'Mamasan',
and the next morning he mailed it to the contact address in Seattle that
Jack Irons had given him and waited for a phone call."
Notice!
I did not cut anything from this quote. this
is how it appears in the book as a chapter called "Like A Hurricane". (I
cut the intro of the writer before what I've started to copy.)
There's a continue for this story off course,,,,but
I guess you'll have to buy the book for that coz I'm not about to sit down
and copy 80 pages! :-p
2) Mick Wall's PJ Bio Excerpt
Here I've copied chapter 4 from the chapter titled "Alive" from Mick
Wall's 1994 Pearl Jam Biography :dealing with the same
subject as above; Eddie's past and the begining of Pearl Jam through 'Alive'.
These two pieces are very similar but the above (Melody Maker) is richer.(I
personally prefer the Melody Maker Bio because it's full of vivid descriptions,
houmour, serious subjects, song meaning and stories quotes and large colorful
pics--> very much recomended! )
Chapter Three- Alive
4
Edward Louis Severson Junior was born in Evanston,
a northern suburb of Chicago, two days before Christmas Day, 1966. The
eldest of four stepbrothers, he only discovered his real name years later;
his mother had seperated from his biological father when Eddie was still
a baby and he was grown up as plain Eddie Mueller, believing his stepfather's
surname was his own.
An autodidact who dropped
out of high school, Eddie has allways kept the cards of his childhood close
to his chest. He has spoken privately of waiting tables in Chicago, of
moving to San Diego and buying his first cheap stero... of briefly studing
music in Boston ('all those guys getting really proficient with thier musical
knowledge...having to study so intensly that thier inspiration was lost').
But always with the details kept vague, as though
he was never too sure of the real story himself, which in a sense, of course,
he never was. Eddie never knew his real father. And he didn't get along
with his stepfather. They were always fighting and bickering. Eddie has
been on his own as long as he can remember.
When Eddie was five years
old, his parents took charge of a group-home for parentless children for
a year. 'I went from being the oldest kid
in my family, to being this little punk among all these bigger punks,'
he would recall. 'All of a sudden, most of my brothers were older, and
black and Irish. All these intense diverse cultures.We were like foster
brothers, 'Eddie recalled. 'A totally mixed bag of youths... thier musical
tastes rubbed off on me,' Eddie would remember. 'That's when i got
into Smokey Robinson, james Brown, Otis Redding, the Jacksons Five. I started
singing to Michael Jackson records, and to this day when I pull out a record
with the blue Motown logo of the map of Detroit on it, I get chills.'
The first record Eddie remembers
owning is "Puff, The Magic Dragon", which his folks purchased for him when
he was three. 'But "Puff" didn't make me want to singe and dance like
"ABC" by the Jackson Five did.' Always a quick learner, when the Mueller
family moved to San Diego in 1974 the city kid instantly metamorphosed
into a perfect-wave obsessed surf punk. Inspired in his teenage years by
the Sex Pistols, early Talking Heads and most especially The Who, Eddie
would later claim that the father-figure he turned to for comfort and advice
most as he was journeying through the rough seas of adolescence was Pete
Townshend. 'The Who's Quadrophenia album basically saved my life.
I thought it was so amazing that Pete Townshend, this guy who lived thousands
of miles away in another country, could totally explain my life. It was
really intense, and obviously I wasn't the only one who felt that way.'
When his family moved to Chicago
in the early Eighties, Eddie, stayed behind in San Diego with his new live-in
girlfriend, Beth Liebling. He immidiately swapped the 'Mueller' in his
name for 'Vedder', his mother's maiden name, and contrived from that moment
on never to speak with his stepfather again. Eddie was still living in
San Diego when his mother arrived unexpectadly one day with some earth-shattering
news for him. His father-his real father, sge now revealed- has died of
multiple sclerosis. Eddie was appalled. More a distat friend than a close
relative, his real father was someone he had met only a few times and remembered
only vauguely.
Edward Louis severson Senior
had been an organist-vocalist of the type who sang in restaurants and weddings.
He would doubtless have been proud of the successful career his estranges
son made for himself in music. Dealing with the anger of not being told
the truth about his father while he was still alive, though, was to scar
the already troubled son deeply. He was a big secert and Eddie had come
to learn that secrets were bad news.
Eddie became known around
the San Diego scene as 'the guy who never sleeps'. For four years, eddie
pumped gas at an all-night garage from midnight till eight in the morning,
then went surfing. ' People think of sun and sand and girls, but surfing's
not really like that. At eight in the morning, it's foggy and cold; you
drag yourself into the ocean and you can't even see the waves through the
fg... the still water's like glass. It's a good time to think.' He
usually sent his days writing and demoing material on his own portable
4-track, which he had saved up for, working ocasionally in between stinnts
at the garage, often for no more than a T-shirt and free admission to the
gig, as a roadie at the nearby Bacchanal Club, humping gear. 'I was
a mad scientist character. People thought I'd either do really big things
some day or just...die.'
For a time, he fronted a band
called Bad Radio, who played intermittently and even recorded a half-decent
demo (Echo and he Bunnymen meets Bruce Springsteen) but broke up, as Eddie
put it, 'mostly because of the lack of ambition on the other members' parts'.
At the time of being given the cassette marked 'Stone Gossard Demos 1990',
Eddie Vedder had been considarting shopping for a solo deal. But then his
buddy Jack, whose taste he respected, had handed him this tape one Frida
night and told him to play it. Eddie had been aware of Green River but
not so much of Mother Love Bone. 'I think that was good because when
I got the tape I really didn't know where they were coming from and so
I did my own thing, and the next thing I knew I was part of thier thing.'
He took the cassette with
him to work that night and spent the long hours before dawn when business
was slowest listening to it, wondering.The next
morning, as usual, he went surfing. 'It was a great feeling. A combinations
of sleep deprivation and being very excited by the coldness of the water
with the music floating around in my head. I got out of the water, walked
into this little run-down shack on the beach I was living in and laid down
three songs... My feet were still wet and sandy. It was such an honest
thing.' The demo from Seattle contained five instrumentals... one in
particular kept repeating itself in Eddie's mind as he waded out into the
fog. When he got home, he immidately recorded himself singing the words
that had come to him in the surf in the morning, the morning 'Dollar Short'
beame 'Alive'... Eventually he had enough words, just like that, to fill
three of the five instrumentals, which he now retitiled 'Alive', 'Once'
and 'Footsteps'. The resulting 'mini-opera', as he labelled it, eddie quickly
put down on a cassette, which he packaged up with some homemade graphics
and a swank new obscuranist title: Mamasan.