"He Didn't Ask for All This"
by Robert Hilburn
Article excerpt taken from The Los Angeles Times, 5/1/94.
Vedder still drives the same 1990 Toyota truck around Seattle that he
bought when he was working at a service station in San Diego. When he's
asked if he keeps the same clothes and truck to remind him of his
roots--as a way to keep in touch with himself amid the glitter of the
rock world--he stares at his cup of tea.
"I don't need to do things like that to remind me of who I am," he says
firmly. "But maybe it's good that other people see those things and maybe
it sends a message, that I still am the same person."
Vedder was born Edward Louis Seversen III in Evanston, Ill., a suburb of
Chicago. His parents were divorced before his second birthday and the
youngster grew up thinking his stepfather was his real father. Until he
adopted his mother's maiden name, Vedder, after dropping out of high
school, he was known as Eddie Mueller, using his stepfather's last name.
It wasn't a happy childhood, he says, but he found a comfort and excitement
in music. Though The Who would eventually be his greatest inspiration, the
first record that caught Vedder's ear was the Jackson 5's "ABC."
Vedder didn't hear The Who until the family--which included three younger
brothers--moved to San Diego County in the mid-70s. A baby-sitter brought
the "Who's Next" album over one night and he listened to it on his stepfather's earphones.
As things grew tense in his family, he listened more and more to rock. He
talked his folks into giving him a guitar for his birthday when he was 12.
By the time he was 15, his mother and stepfather had separated and he was
paying his own rent rather than living at home, filled with the bitterness
and anger that is expressed in his songs. Those feelings flare up when he's asked what high school he attended.
"I'd like not to be associated with any of that," Vedder says abruptly.
"They didn't treat me well."
Later, Vedder softens his answer. "Well, maybe it was just that I wasn'y going to like anybody because I had
to work and I had to explain to my teachers why I wasn't keeping up. "I'd fall asleep and things in class and they'd lecture me about the
reality of their classroom. I said one day, 'You want to see my reality?'
I opened up my backpack to where you usually keep your pencils. That's where I kept my bills . . . electric bills, rent . . . That was my reality."
Vedder, who supported himself by working at a Long's Drug Store in Encinitas,
eventually dropped out of school. The anger returns when he's asked about that period.
"I resented everybody around me who drove up in a car that someone provided for them . . . [with] insurance that someone provided for them," he says. "I'd be underneath some shelf putting price tags on tomato soup and I'd
watch them come in . . . Obnoxious with their [expletive] prom outfits on, buying condoms and being loud about it."
"I'd think, 'Those [expletives].' Maybe I would have been doing that too,
if the circumstances were different. . . . Maybe that would have made me more forgiving, but I wasn't very forgiving at all. Everything was just such a [expletive] struggle for years."
With little money or goals, he had begun sinking into a shadowy world that
brought out his survival instincts. "There is a thing that happens when you are not as priviledged and you
start hanging out with a seedier crowd because you can afford to do the same things," he says. "And all of a sudden the big night out is sitting
in somebody's trailer, smoking something or getting hold of something to put up your nose."
"It is real easy to get into the lower depths and get intertwined. But I was always aware of that kind of thing. . . . I didn't want to be put on
a leash by any kind of conservative, constrictive parent." "I didn't want to be in that world, but I also didn't want to be in the
web of this other thing. I was getting swallowed up in it, but something
made me realize it was time to get away or I was going to be just another
loser."
His mother and brothers had already moved back to Chicago, and he decided
to join them. After a couple of years there, Vedder returned to San Diego in 1984, accompanied by his girlfriend Beth Liebling, a writer. By
this time, he had learned the identity of his real father and had picked up a high school equivalency diploma. He felt it would help him get a
better job. Music remained just a hobby, not a career choice for him. He worked nights as a hotel security guard and spent his days making demo
tapes on a home recorder. Gradually, he got involved in the San Diego music scene, spending a short
period in a band called Bad Radio. Though he had been in a couple of garage bands earlier in Encinitas, the transition to a real band was
difficult for the shy Vedder. For the first show, he wore a mask--actually, goggles with the lenses painted over--so that he wouldn't have
to look at the crowd. Eventually he quit the group, feeling that the members weren't serious about things. While he was looking for another band situation, Jack Irons,
a friend who was formerly in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, gave him a tape from a Seattle musician who was putting together a new group.
That musician, guitarist Stone Gossard, had been in Mother Love Bone, a highly regarded group whose promise ended when singer Andrew Wood died of
a heroin overdose in 1990. After listening to the tape, Vedder went surfing and the music played over
and over in his head. In the company of the waves, he began framing lyrics to go with the music.
He raced back home to his recorder, and with the sand still on his feet he sang the words to the song that eventually became "Alive," one of the
centerpieces on the first Pearl Jam album.
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