Pearl Jam took a step back from fame and broadened their sound for this loose and emotional mix of agit folk, funk grooves, soulful meditative mood pieces, and defiant punk. The monster success of their debut 'Ten' had left the band with a bad taste in their mouths. They fought with each other, their label, and Ticketmaster over how to proceed with the direction of their sound, making music videos, and how their tickets should be sold.
Mike McCready recalls: "The idea of pulling back at the height of our popularity was not exciting to me at the time. I wanted to continue to ride it and play the game, to do videos and go on tour, not throw away this great opportunity. In hindsight it was the right idea. It happened so fast for all of us out of the blue. It was kind of mind shattering. It was affecting us all in certain different ways and we weren't talking to each other, we were partying too much, Ed was on the cover of Time magazine everything blew up and had we not done that at the time certainly the record label wanted us to not do that. The record company wanted us to do a video for Black, they wanted us to play all the game shows, get on everything they could possibly get on and they fought us for a long time about that and were very pissed about it."
Stone Gossard considers: "If somebody wants to say, 'You guys used to be my favorite band, but you got too big' -- to me, the problem with getting too big is not, innately, you get too big and all of a sudden you stop playing good music. The problem is, when you get too big, you stop doing the things you used to do. Just being big doesn't mean you can't go in your basement and write a good song. I think people are capable of being a lot bigger on that rad big scale. A lot more people are capable of being big out there that just don't give themselves a chance."
The band co-produced 'Vs.' with Brendan O'Brien at at The Site in Nicasio, California and Potatohead Studio in Seattle, Washington. The sessions featured Dave Abbruzzese on drums; Jeff Ament on bass guitar; Stone Gossard on rhythm guitar; Mike McCready on lead guitar; and Eddie Vedder on vocals and rhythm guitar on Rearviewmirror and Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town. The recording process started well with a number of the fast-paced rock songs coming quickly; but Vedder left the Site to wander San Francisco and find his muse. He ended up sleeping in his van for awhile. Ament says: "He needed to get in the space of his songs. Soon we were back on track...The push and pull is what makes our band ... There's going to be a point where it'll revert back to the way that it was. We'll get through this whole period right now. We'll get back out there playing. We'll get back to actually being five guys who want to work it out together."
Vedder expressed his disapproval of the rural setting of the Site at the time: "I fucking hate it here. I've had a hard time. How do you make a rock record here? Maybe the old rockers, maybe they love this. Maybe they need the comfort and the relaxation. Maybe they need it to make dinner music...I had a hard time getting away."
The working title of the album was 'Five Against One'. Gossard explains: "For me, that title represented a lot of struggles that you go through trying to make a record. Your own independence -- your own soul -- versus everybody else's. In this band, and I think in rock in general the art of compromise is almost as important as the art of individual expression. You might have five great artists in the band, but if they can't compromise and work together, you don't have a great band. It might mean something completely different to Eddie. But when I heard that lyric, it made a lot of sense to me ... I knew everything had gelled on the road where we had transcendent shows. The next record was probably where it felt better recording wise. I saw how it could change and evolve which gave me a lot of inspiration to go ‘we can do ballads, we can do fast stuff, we can do slow stuff, we can do punk stuff.' That was where I realized there were gonna be a lot of places to go with Ed. To have Ed sing on anything, the way he writes lyrics and the way he approaches your material is fantastic. He really loves getting into it, the challenges of all of our songs and the different ways they’re brought into ‘em. He hears things and once he’s onto it he’ll give you such incredible variety in terms of vocal approaches and rhythm and story. He’s so great with different points of view that it’s like going to Disneyland."
Vedder says of the raw sound on the album: "It was all one take actually. We did many days where we'd play the whole album all the way through. Just every day we'd play the whole record all the way through and then about 12 days we'd pick the best days."
'Vs.' was an instant hit, setting a record for first week sales with almost a million copies in the first five days and making its debut at the top of the US album chart. It went to number eight in Germany; seven in Austria; two in the UK; and numbe one in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, and the US.
http://pearljam.com/
'Daughter' only went to number ninety-seven on the US pop chart; but was a number one hit on the US mainstream rock tracks and modern rock charts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O81XzrMv7KI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DwYZKjXxEE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7fmnM1CdFI
Dissident
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-NEC-kM6KM
Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHCE5sw1mTs
Rearviewmirror
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFkICEBi8Uw
Indifference
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cvGoTWK9WY
'Vs.'
full album:
1. "Go" (Dave Abbruzzese) 3:12
2. "Animal" (Stone Gossard) 2:49
3. "Daughter" (Gossard) 3:55
4. "Glorified G" (Gossard, Mike McCready) 3:26
5. "Dissident" (Gossard, McCready, Jeff Ament) 3:35
6. "W.M.A." (Abbruzzese, Ament) 5:59
7. "Blood" (Gossard, McCready) 2:50
8. "Rearviewmirror" (Vedder) 4:44
9. "Rats" Ament 4:15
10. "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town" (Vedder) 3:15
11. "Leash" (Gossard, McCready) 3:09
12. "Indifference" (Ament, Gossard) 5:02
(all lyrics by Vedder)
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