The first music rivalry I ever cared about as it unfolded in real time was Nirvana vs. Pearl Jam. Oasis vs. Blur was a mid-’90s thing, whereas Nirvana vs. Pearl Jam was strictly early ’90s. This might seem like a minor difference, but two or three years is a lifetime when you’re a kid, especially if we’re talking about the time between ages fourteen and seventeen, the “Vietnam” era of adolescence.
Considering that I was a painfully serious middle schooler when Nirvana vs. Pearl Jam was at its height, my position was entirely predictable: I loved Nirvana, and I hated Pearl Jam. Nirvana’s 1991 major-label debut, Nevermind, was, in my mind, the pinnacle of “honest” and “authentic” music, while Pearl Jam’s Epic Records–distributed first LP, also released in ’91, Ten, was the epitome of what people who loved Nevermind—people like me—were supposed to be against. Ten was corporate. Ten was stadium rock. Ten was for jocks and frat boys.
In retrospect I’m not sure why exactly I was against those things. I don’t think I even knew what those things really were. For instance, I still played sports on a daily basis—in eighth grade, I was the Paul Mokeski-esque backup center for my junior high basketball team. After reading my yearbooks from this period, I discovered that I also ran cross-country, though for the life of me I don’t remember this or comprehend how it happened. Even in junior high, I was blessed with the pure athleticism of Jeffrey Tambor. (Back then, I was Mr. Mom–era Tambor. Today I’m solidly third-season-of-Arrested Development–era Tambor.) But technically, I was still a jock. As for frat boys, my experience with fraternities consisted solely of viewings of the edited version of Animal House on basic cable. I was aware that frat boys were big fat party animals. But my knowledge was otherwise very limited in this regard. If I had seen the unedited Animal House, at least I would’ve known that frat boys said “fuck” and not “freak” or “fudge.”
Basically, I understood what “jocks” and “frat boys” meant as signifiers, and in spite of the evidence, I believed that I belonged to a different species. After all, jocks were not as sensitive, smart, or soulful as I was—therefore, how could I be a jock? My argument was circular but convincing: jocks would never “get” alternative music on a deep level because they were not sufficiently alienated to grasp the nuances. They only heard distorted guitars and bellowing vocals, whereas I discerned the meaning of those distorted guitars and bellowing vocals. For everybody else in my grade, the video for “In Bloom” was merely a grainy black-and-white clip starring the host of The People’s Court that accompanied the fourth-best single off Nevermind. They couldn’t possibly understand that this video was actually an incisive satire of mindless mainstream media, which individuals like Kurt Cobain and myself could totally see as the soul-deadening circus it truly was. No way: those people were sheep, and they lapped up whatever was served to them.
This was why, I reasoned, Pearl Jam was so much more popular than Nirvana at my school. There were no deep layers of ironic subtext in the video for Pearl Jam’s “Even Flow.” The “Even Flow” video, if you’ll recall, is a straightforward performance clip culled from a concert filmed in early 1992. The video opens with Eddie Vedder screaming at director Josh Taft to turn down the lights for his cameras. “This is not a TV studio, Josh,” Vedder yells, sounding somewhat petulant but nevertheless making an accurate observation. (It wasn’t a TV studio; it was Seattle’s Moore Theatre.)
In spite of Eddie’s public hectoring, Taft wound up doing wonders for Pearl Jam’s career, spotlighting the band (particularly Vedder) at its energetic, sweat-stained best. The clip culminates ingeniously with Vedder climbing the theater’s balcony and falling back into the crowd. For those who weren’t into rock music at the time, let me explain: audiences in the ’90s paid good money for musical artists to jump on top of them. It was considered the pinnacle of a live rock experience for some reason. So the “Even Flow” video only made Pearl Jam’s music seem more attractive.
If memory serves, “Even Flow” played approximately 379 times per day on MTV in the summer of ’92. Few at the network would’ve acknowledged it at the time, but “Even Flow” was essentially the same clip as another video that dominated the channel’s playlist just four years earlier—Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” In that video, Def Leppard singer Joe Elliott and his exquisitely ripped jeans are prominently featured in a live performance filmed at Denver’s McNichols Sports Arena in front of an audience composed exclusively of pretty, blond, nymphomaniac Coloradoans. The idea with both the “Even Flow” and “Pour Some Sugar on Me” clips was to make attending a concert by the band in question seem massively appealing to music consumers between the ages of fourteen and twenty-three. And it worked: Pearl Jam went from a second-tier act on that summer’s Lollapalooza tour to the biggest band in the world by the fall.
This development gave me all the more reason to despise Pearl Jam.
I should point out that I don’t feel this way about Pearl Jam anymore. In fact, I got over my anti–Pearl Jam stance pretty early. By 1993, it just seemed stupid to dislike Pearl Jam for supposedly being a sellout band, particularly in light of my discovery that Pearl Jam’s music was fucking awesome. The turning point occurred when Pearl Jam appeared on the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards and played an incredible new song (“Animal,” which came out soon thereafter on Pearl Jam’s second record, Vs.). Then Neil Young came out and joined Pearl Jam for an even more incredible rendition of “Rockin’ in the Free World.” A rock band inviting a rock legend to play guitar-based music for more than ten minutes at the VMAs seems like something that might’ve occurred in the 1890s, not the 1990s. But YouTube confirms that my timeline is accurate.
At this point I was actively pretending to not like Pearl Jam while secretly watching the VMA performance over and over again on my VCR. Which is clearly insane, not only because nobody in my life cared about my opinion regarding Pearl Jam’s legitimacy but also because my reason for pretending to dislike a band that I actually liked was based on my belief that another band better represented the “real” me. In the parlance of the time, Nirvana was the “legitimate” band, while the members of Pearl Jam were just a bunch of poseurs. I was so invested in my contrived relationship with Nirvana’s music that it forced me to obfuscate a genuine connection I had to Pearl Jam.
This sort of thinking seems silly now, but it certainly existed in the minds of other grunge-era rock fans. Nirvana and Pearl Jam were far more similar than they were dissimilar—their songs were played on the same radio stations, their videos were played on the same Alternative Nation shows on MTV, and the same people generally liked both bands. And yet many impressionable listeners felt compelled to pick a side. Regardless of how illogical the reasoning was, Nirvana vs. Pearl Jam was a real rivalry. It’s important to remember this, because there’s been a concerted effort to revise history in the years since the rivalry cooled.
To pick one example: I just read a 2013 Esquire interview with Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready in which he refers to the Nirvana–Pearl Jam rivalry as a “press-created thing.” He then says:
I think [Cobain] and Ed had talked. I remember we were at the MTV VMAs, and I just jumped over the seats, and I said [to Cobain], “Hey, I heard you and Ed might be doing a record someday. I’d love to play a lead on it.” And he goes, “Oh, we’ll talk about it some other time.” I just felt like I had to reach out, because there was this weird wall between us, us versus them or them versus us.
McCready’s comments are typical of how the members of Pearl Jam have talked about Cobain in the years since his untimely death. First McCready frames the Nirvana–Pearl Jam rivalry as a media-driven creation. Then he relates an anecdote that suggests that Nirvana and Pearl Jam were friendly (if not friends) and that Cobain saw Eddie Vedder as an artistic equal and possible collaborator.
I’m sure McCready wasn’t lying in that interview, but I suspect that what he said isn’t exactly true. Let me concede at the start that I don’t know any of these people personally. What I do know intimately are Cobain’s public statements about Pearl Jam. I have studied the written record closely—first as an amateur rock obsessive, then as a paid rock obsessive—for more than twenty years. I can’t play “Serve the Servants” on guitar, but I could perform decent covers of Cobain’s Rolling Stone interviews. If Kurt and Eddie really were pals in their private lives, I know this directly contradicts what’s in the public record.
For starters, the Nirvana–Pearl Jam rivalry was press-driven only in the sense that Cobain relished trashing Pearl Jam publicly right up until the end of his life. It commenced after Nirvana topped the charts with Nevermind and Pearl Jam swiftly appeared in Cobain’s rearview. “I find it offensive to be lumped in with bands like Pearl Jam,” Cobain told the Chicago Tribune in 1992. Soon after, in Musician, Cobain dismissed Pearl Jam as a “corporate, alternative, and cock-rock fusion.” Then, in Rolling Stone, he accused Pearl Jam of “jumping on the alternative bandwagon.” Cobain even dissed Pearl Jam in his private journals (which were later posthumously published), wishing he could “be erased from [Nirvana’s] association” with the band.
This is all familiar territory for grunge fans, and it’s been rehashed many times in magazine articles and books about ’90s rock. But what’s often forgotten (or straight-up whitewashed) is that even after Cobain met Vedder and came to like Vedder personally, he never warmed to Pearl Jam’s melodramatic, fist-pumping anthems. This inconvenient fact was carefully massaged by Cameron Crowe in his otherwise entertaining 2011 documentary, Pearl Jam Twenty.
When Crowe and the members of Pearl Jam promoted the film, the most frequently used clip was of Vedder slow-dancing with Cobain to Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” backstage at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards. (This is the first of many references to the 1992 VMAs in this book.) It was a tacit acknowledgment of Cobain’s importance to Pearl Jam’s story: while Vedder and Pearl Jam warrant only a handful of mentions in major Nirvana books, including Michael Azerrad’s Come as You Are and Charles R. Cross’s Heavier Than Heaven, Cobain is always a significant character in retellings of Pearl Jam’s early years. Nirvana’s career arc would likely remain unchanged with or without Pearl Jam’s presence. But Pearl Jam’s early years were greatly informed by Nirvana, who represented the greatest hurdle Pearl Jam had to overcome in terms of establishing long-term credibility.
While Vedder has declined to divulge specifics about his VMA conversation with Cobain—in Pearl Jam Twenty, he claims he doesn’t remember what Cobain said—Cobain repeated verbatim what he told Vedder to Azerrad:
I stared into his eyes and told him that I thought he was a respectable human. And I did tell him straight out that I still think his band sucks. I said, “After watching you perform, I realized that you are a person that does have some passion.” It’s not a fully contrived thing. There are plenty of other more evil people out in the world than him and he doesn’t deserve to be scapegoated like that.
It’s reasonable to conclude after reading this quote that Kurt Cobain might’ve liked Eddie Vedder as a guy but was also unapologetic about sticking to his low opinion of Vedder’s music. Even Cobain’s apparent capitulations to Vedder are carefully qualified—Pearl Jam has some passion; it isn’t fully contrived; there are more evil people out there. However, in Pearl Jam Twenty, the part where Cobain thinks Pearl Jam sucks is gently set aside, so that the “respectable human” part can be emphasized.
While Cobain did eventually express remorse about slagging Pearl Jam in the press, he never actually stopped doing it, even as he acknowledged that smack-talking Nirvana’s increasingly more successful rival was bad PR. “One of the things I’ve learned is that slagging off people just doesn’t do me any good,” Cobain told David Fricke in a Rolling Stone cover story that ran three months before his suicide. “I hadn’t met Eddie at the time. It was my fault; I should have been slagging off the record company instead of them. They were marketed—not probably against their will—but without them realizing they were being pushed into the grunge bandwagon.”
When Fricke asked a follow-up question about whether Cobain “felt any empathy” for Pearl Jam, Cobain couldn’t resist getting one last jab in. “Yeah, I do,” he said, answering Fricke’s initial question but deciding to keep talking anyway. “Except I’m pretty sure that they didn’t go out of their way to challenge their audience as much as we did with this record. They’re a safe rock band. They’re a pleasant rock band that everyone likes. God, I’ve had much better quotes in my head about this.”
It was only after Cobain was no longer able to speak for himself that his feelings about Pearl Jam magically improved. And a lot of that had to do with Vedder, who never lashed back at Cobain when Cobain was alive and in fact seemed to hold his most vocal critic in high regard. Cobain might’ve despised Pearl Jam’s records, but Vedder remained a Nirvana fan who felt indebted to Cobain. Perhaps it was this fandom that provoked Vedder to imagine how his relationship with Cobain might’ve been different had his erstwhile adversary not killed himself.
“Sometimes—I don’t sit around and think about it all the time by any means—I wish that Kurt and I had been able to, like, sit in the basement a few nights and just play stupid songs together, and relate to some of this,” Vedder told Spin’s Craig Marks in 1994, several months after Cobain’s death. “That might’ve helped us to understand each other, that he wasn’t the only one, or that I wasn’t the only one. We kind of knew that in the back of our heads, but we certainly never…I mean, we had a conversation on the phone, but we didn’t really address that.”
Many years later, in a 2009 interview, Vedder once again speculated on what Cobain’s opinion would be of him had Cobain lived. “I don’t talk too much about him in respect to Krist [Novoselic] and Dave [Grohl] and I know he said that early stuff about not liking us,” he told Britain’s Sun newspaper. “But if Kurt were around today, I know he’d say to me, ‘Well, you turned out OK.’” Then, in Pearl Jam Twenty, Vedder talks again about theoretically hanging out with Cobain: “It always comes up around a campfire or playing music with a few guys in a garage for no particular reason. I always think, ‘He would’ve liked this.’”
Am I saying that Eddie Vedder is wrong to imagine a post-death friendship with Cobain? No, it’s not wrong. But it feels inaccurate. Again, based on the public record, Kurt Cobain never chose to hang out with Eddie Vedder when such a thing was physically possible. Aside from the occasional phone conversation or an impromptu backstage dance, they didn’t appear to have much of a personal relationship. While I can imagine an undead Kurt Cobain accepting an invitation to enjoy a campfire with Eddie Vedder, I can just as easily envision Kurt sneaking away and calling Kurt Loder in order to complain about how Lightning Bolt sucks.
It’s a real bummer when your hero doesn’t love you back.
I dream about Bruce Springsteen sometimes.
By “sometimes,” I mean maybe once or twice per year. But whenever it happens, I remember it, and I’m not a person who normally remembers his dreams. My Bruce Springsteen dreams unfold the same way each time: usually Bruce and I are sitting in close proximity to a concert stage, maybe in a tour bus or a backstage lounge area. The particulars of our conversations are never all that important—we might talk about records, we might talk about our kids, we might talk about the contents of our refrigerators. The point is that I’m sitting with the Boss, and we’re sharing a moment the way two old friends would. What I’m left with when I wake up is that glow you feel after spending several hours with a pal you haven’t seen in years but are still able to instantly connect with. It’s a vividly real sensation about a patently fake encounter.
I feel embarrassed admitting this, because I can already sense the massive eye rolls that a sentence like “I dream about Bruce Springsteen sometimes” will prompt. I’m sure dreaming about Bruce Springsteen is an utterly common occurrence among white men between the ages of thirty-five and fifty-five who sneak away once the wife goes to bed to drink bourbon in the dark and play side 2 of Darkness on the Edge of Town. The character played by John Cusack in High Fidelity daydreams about confiding in Springsteen, so not only is “I dream about Bruce Springsteen sometimes” banal, it’s also a cliché. I understand if you’ve already fucking heard fucking enough about Bruce fucking Springsteen dreams. The only reason I brought it up is because “I dream about Bruce Springsteen sometimes” is a manifestation of a prevalent form of delusion experienced by millions of individuals—including me, possibly Eddie Vedder, and (I’m willing to bet) you.
If you’re reading this book, there is probably an artist or band whose music you have an intense personal relationship with. (This band may very well be one of the bands covered in this chapter, in which case I apologize if I have already inadvertently pissed you off.) I would also guess that this artist or band came into your life during a time when you were highly vulnerable. If this is the case, this artist or band might’ve been the closest thing you had to a confidant. In fact, he, she, or it was better than a confidant, because his/her/its music articulated your own thoughts and feelings better than you ever could. This music elevated the raw materials of your life to the heights of art and poetry. It made you feel as if your personal experience was grander and more meaningful than it might otherwise have been. And, naturally, you attributed whatever that music was doing to your heart and brain to the people who made the music, and you came to believe that the qualities of the music were also true of the music’s creators. “If this music understands me, then the people behind the music must also understand me,” goes this line of thought.
The reality of music fandom is that it’s a one-way street. Music can’t love you back; getting overly wrapped up in an album is basically a socially acceptable version of having an imaginary friend. Listeners project meaning onto records and come to believe that meaning is universal when in fact it might exist only inside their own heads. If you’re lucky, this will only lead to bawling your eyes out whenever you put on Blood on the Tracks or Sea Change because that record is “about” the worst heartbreak of your life. If you’re Charles Manson or Mark David Chapman, the consequences are a little direr.
And yet here we are. I can offer a diagnosis of music fandom but no cure. Even after working as a music journalist for more than fifteen years and interviewing hundreds of musicians, I still have romantic notions of what my heroes are “really” like and steadfastly believe that if we ever had a chance to meet, they would like me. If I step outside myself, I can see how arrogant this is. Given the right social situation and correct number of drinks, I can be adequately charming. But my charm is not transcendent. (I am not Barbra Streisand in What’s Up, Doc?) Getting genuinely magnetic people to like me is hardly a lock. But I also understand that wanting to be liked by my favorite artists has nothing to do with the artists. It’s not that I believe that I would be good for them, it’s that for some weird reason I’m looking for them to validate all the thoughts and feelings I’ve put into my version of them.
My saving grace is that I’m probably never going to meet Springsteen or Bob Dylan or Axl Rose or Kanye West in the flesh. It’s possible that these guys might like me if we were to meet. They might also hate me. Most likely, they wouldn’t care about me enough to have an opinion either way. But I’ll never know what they think of me, and for that I’m glad. I can’t imagine what it would be like to put someone on a pedestal only to have that person look down on me in disgust.
Actually, I don’t have to imagine it, because I just have to look at New Jersey governor Chris Christie and his one-way love affair with the Boss.
As Christie went from being a prominent figure in Jersey politics to a nationally known fixture of the Republican Party, his love of Springsteen became an oft-referenced item from his personal history. The New York Times and The Atlantic were among the media outlets that ran lengthy profiles (in 2009 and 2012 respectively) focused exclusively on Christie’s passionate appreciation of Springsteen’s music. In 2014, when Christie was facing the worst political crisis of his career, his love for Springsteen was once again national news. Springsteen appeared on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and satirized Christie’s “Bridgegate” scandal with a “Born to Run” parody called “Governor Christie Traffic Jam.”
If you were on Facebook or Twitter at the time, somebody likely shared this clip with you. It’s fairly amusing for a late-night talk-show bit—Fallon’s Springsteen impression is pretty great, and Springsteen does a decent job of approximating his younger, less haggard self. But I couldn’t help feeling a smidge of sympathy for Christie when I watched it. Yes, Christie is a public figure. And his beliefs exist on the opposite end of the political spectrum from my beliefs. But he was mocked by his idol in front of millions on national television. On the scale of publicly humiliating experiences, where an extramarital sex scandal is a 10 and being photographed while napping in a non-nap-friendly setting is a 1, this ranks at least a 6.5.
When Christie was asked about the sketch during a public forum not long afterward, he resorted to his only available move—retreating to the comfort of imagining a better relationship with Springsteen at some point in the future. “I still live in hope that someday, even as he gets older and older, he’s going to wake up and go, ‘Yeah, maybe he’s a good guy. He’s alright, you know,’” Christie was quoted as saying by the Newark Star-Ledger.
According to various media reports that I’ve read, Christie has met Springsteen at least three times—once during a flight to Minneapolis in 1999, once during a ceremony inducting Danny DeVito into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2010, and once during a telethon for Hurricane Sandy victims in 2012. Meanwhile, by his own count, Christie has attended more than 130 Springsteen shows dating back to the 1970s. Given his position of authority in New Jersey, you’d think Christie would have more opportunities to get some Springsteen face time. But Springsteen has brushed him off consistently. The Atlantic described one snubbing in such pathetic terms that even Rachel Maddow might weep for Christie:
At concerts, even concerts in club-size venues—the Stone Pony, in Asbury Park, most recently—Springsteen won’t acknowledge the governor. When Christie leaves a Springsteen concert in a large arena, his state troopers move him to his motorcade through loading docks. He walks within feet of the stage, and of the dressing rooms. He’s never been invited to say hello. On occasion, he’ll make a public plea to Springsteen, as he did earlier this spring, when Christie asked him to play at a new casino in Atlantic City. “He says he’s for the revitalization of the Jersey Shore, so this seems obvious,” Christie told me. I asked him if he’s received a response to his request. “No, we got nothing back from them,” he said unhappily, “not even a ‘Fuck you.’”
The reason for Springsteen giving Christie the cold shoulder is pretty obvious: Springsteen is classic rock’s most celebrated populist and old-school liberal. In 1984, the year Springsteen’s bestselling album Born in the U.S.A. made him the biggest bar-band rocker on the planet, Ronald Reagan appropriated the album’s title track and deliberately misconstrued its strident protest sentiment as a simplistic celebration of American might. Nearly thirty years later, Springsteen still suffered from the consequences of this. When Springsteen made “We Take Care of Our Own,” an outraged call to arms partly inspired by the Bush administration’s apathetic response to Hurricane Katrina, the lead single from his 2012 album, Wrecking Ball, New York Times music critic Jon Caramanica took the chorus (“We take care of our own / Wherever this flag’s flown”) at face value and accused Springsteen of jingoism. So if Springsteen is sensitive about political associations with his art and how they affect the way that art is perceived, it’s not without cause.
“There is some of his work that is dour and down,” Christie acknowledged in The Atlantic, “but the thing that attracted me to his music is how aspirational it is—aspirational to success, to fun, to being a better person, to figuring out how to make your life better—and you can’t say that about most people’s music.…What’s funny is that his progression is what Republicans believe can happen. That’s what Republicans believe—hard work, talent, ambition. We all know he’s the hardest-working man in show business. It’s a meritocracy.”
Now, this might seem like as gross a perversion of Springsteen’s life and art as what Reagan did in order to wallop Walter Mondale. But if you disregard the politics for a moment, what Christie is doing here is what all fans do with their favorite music. We take whichever portion seems to apply most directly to our own lives, and we make the whole thing about that. It’s why married couples swoon over R.E.M.’s misanthropic anthem “The One I Love” and sports fans pretend that Gary Glitter wasn’t thinking about molesting eight-year-olds when he wrote the deathless jock jam “Rock and Roll Part 2.” I suspect Christie’s belief that Springsteen represents the supposed Republican ideals of hard work and self-sufficiency is pretty common; at this point, given the demographic makeup of Springsteen’s audience, it might even be the predominant view. But Christie isn’t totally deluded. He knows that his politics will probably always alienate him from Springsteen—though that doesn’t mean a guy can’t wish for a different outcome.
“My view on it is that I’m not a priority of his right now,” Christie said to The Atlantic. “At some point maybe I will be. If Bruce and I sat down and talked, he would reluctantly come to the conclusion that we disagree on a lot less than he thinks.”
The sad part for Christie (or maybe it’s just inconvenient) is that Springsteen will almost certainly outlive him, even though Springsteen is thirteen years older. Springsteen is in incredible physical shape, while the relative fitness of Chris Christie has been a constant source of humor for hack comedians. As long as Bruce Springsteen can speak for himself, no fantasy will be able to overshadow the reality of his true feelings for Chris Christie.
One of my favorite movies about ’90s pop culture is Nick Broomfield’s 1998 documentary, Kurt & Courtney. People who haven’t seen Kurt & Courtney (and even many of those who have seen it) refer to it as the “Courtney Love had Kurt Cobain killed conspiracy movie.” But that’s really just another instance of misinterpreting a given piece of art as endorsing what it’s about. I think it’s clear from Broomfield’s authorial voice that, at best, he’s suspicious of the assorted freaks and sycophants who orbited Cobain in his final years and later agreed to look ridiculous in his film. At times, Broomfield is downright contemptuous of those people.
When Broomfield (who appears on camera as the film’s narrator and de facto protagonist) encounters individuals outright accusing Love of murder—most notably a crazy-ass punk singer named El Duce and Love’s estranged crazy-ass father, Hank Harrison—he edits the interviews in such a way as to encourage the audience’s incredulity. At no point does Kurt & Courtney make the conspiracy charges seem credible, and unless Broomfield is a completely inept filmmaker (which, judging by his other films, I don’t think he is), this must be intentional.
What Broomfield does instead is depict the ways in which marginal figures in the life of an icon use that association, no matter how tangential, to make themselves appear more significant. If Cobain hadn’t died, none of the people Broomfield interviews in Kurt & Courtney would be considered the least bit noteworthy. But because Cobain did die, being a person who once copped heroin with the lead singer of Nirvana is almost enviable in the minds of celebrity rubberneckers and the least intelligent Nirvana fans. Cobain supposedly hated stardom so much that he killed himself to escape it. But for dozens, if not hundreds, of people Cobain barely knew but casually associated with, his celebrity facilitated their own micro-size slice of fame after his death.
Art is frequently dismissed by those who might be threatened by what it suggests about them. Love, unsurprisingly, attempted to bury Kurt & Courtney. Even if Broomfield didn’t convincingly implicate Love as her husband’s killer, the film’s suggestion that she was the primary exploiter of Cobain’s tragic death must’ve been infuriating (though it rings true). But taking a broader view of Kurt & Courtney, I think Broomfield makes a profound point: anyone faintly connected to an iconic figure’s demise (even casual fans) in some way takes advantage of that event for his or her own ends. This might seem like a cynical observation, but this process doesn’t have to always produce a cynical outcome.
Pearl Jam can hardly be equated with the cast of bottom-feeders whom Broomfield rounds up in Kurt & Courtney. But Pearl Jam nonetheless has integrated Cobain’s death into its mythos and subsequently held itself up against what Cobain’s suicide represents in the culture. This has been largely implicit, but occasionally the members of Pearl Jam have stated it outright. In Pearl Jam Twenty, Stone Gossard observes that Cobain “made us think about everything we did.…If we’re good today it’s partly because of him.”
One way to interpret this is to say that Pearl Jam’s music was superficially “less safe” in the immediate aftermath of Cobain’s death. In the late fall of 1994, Pearl Jam released its third record, Vitalogy, regarded by many as Pearl Jam’s best LP in part because it’s considerably less consistent than the band’s first two, “straighter” albums. Vitalogy includes several tracks that seem like they were intended to alienate the same sort of hypothetical milquetoast listener that Nirvana wanted to shoo away with In Utero. In fact, Vitalogy is more abrasive than In Utero—Cobain didn’t attempt anything as singularly weird or off-putting as the accordion-based doodle “Bugs” or the seven-minute sound collage “Hey, Foxymophandlemama, That’s Me.”
Pearl Jam’s next record, 1996’s muted No Code, is a fan favorite, but it effectively ended Pearl Jam’s tenure as a platinum-selling band. By the early aughts Pearl Jam was actively subsuming the operatic emotionalism of their more popular early records in order to cater to hard-core loyalists who had the time and interest to get something out of the murk of Binaural and Riot Act. In less than a decade, Pearl Jam went from selling one million albums per week to barely going gold during an entire record cycle (back when a band of Pearl Jam’s stature could still be expected to sell a lot of units).
The way Vedder purposely piloted Pearl Jam toward a significantly smaller audience is still remarkable. Other than Radiohead, no rock band has ever been more deliberate about ferreting out precisely the people it wanted to care about its music. This can probably be attributed to Cobain’s influence. That seems like the narrative that Pearl Jam would prefer, anyway. But I think this characterization overlooks an important truth about Pearl Jam’s relationship with Nirvana, which can be viewed more clearly if you are conversant with Pearl Jam’s voluminous concert bootlegs.
Eddie Vedder’s favorite band is the Who, and the most vital (though no doubt accidental) similarity between the Who and Pearl Jam is that neither band has ever been as good on record as they are onstage. Nearly every Who and Pearl Jam song is better when heard on a live album or bootleg. Therefore, Pearl Jam’s official discography leaves out a crucial part of the band’s story. (I realize that music geeks have mounted similar arguments for every significant rock group ever, but in the case of Pearl Jam it happens to be true.)
Some of my favorite Pearl Jam bootlegs originate from shows the band played in early April of 1994, right before and immediately after Cobain’s death. Pearl Jam performed two concerts in Atlanta a few days before authorities discovered Cobain’s body at his Seattle-area home, on April 8. At that point Cobain had already been reported missing, which naturally caused alarm in the Seattle music community, given that it was not long after his unsuccessful suicide attempt in Rome and an aborted stint at an LA-area rehab facility. At the April 3 concert, Vedder dedicated “Go” to Cobain—no doubt he directed the chorus (“Please / Don’t go on me”) to his troubled peer.
Pearl Jam played a concert in Fairfax, Virginia, the night Cobain’s death was confirmed. Vedder later told a Los Angeles Times reporter that he trashed his hotel room after he heard the news. He added, “Then I just kind of sat in the rubble, which somehow felt right.…[It felt] like my world at the moment.” But Pearl Jam’s performance is remarkably controlled given the circumstances—Vedder occasionally makes oblique references to the tragedy during the first half of the show, but otherwise the band carries on in a professional (if emotionally exhausted) manner. If you didn’t know the context of the concert, the bootleg wouldn’t seem all that different from other live recordings of this period.
Later in the set, Vedder launches into a brief monologue—sometimes referred to by Pearl Jam fans as “the elevation speech”—that pays heartfelt (if also surprisingly restrained) tribute to Cobain.
There’s a lot of space between us tonight.…We’re not only kind of far, you know, we’re kind of elevated, I noticed, a little more than usual. Either that or I’ve gotten taller. But I don’t think it’s very good to elevate yourself. That can be very dangerous. Sometimes whether you like it or not people elevate you, you know, whether you like it or not. It’s real easy to fall…but I don’t think any of us would be in this room tonight if it weren’t for Kurt Cobain.
Nirvana vs. Pearl Jam became a rivalry initially because Kurt Cobain sought to set Nirvana apart as a “not-safe” rock band. But when Cobain died, the rivalry didn’t die so much as evolve into a benign contrast between two ways of navigating success. Cobain will always be a romantic figure because he was cut down in his prime. But Vedder found a way to survive. Pearl Jam’s story of long-term endurance is more poignant precisely because Nirvana exists as an alternative path to early destruction. The rivalry doesn’t diminish Pearl Jam; rather, it helps to explain why living can be just as meaningful as dying. In this way, I suppose Vedder is right to invoke Cobain as an important character in his own story, no matter the particulars of their personal relationship. Cobain and Vedder will always be connected—not as friends but as signifiers of diverging paths that split at a fork in the road.