Take What You Can’t Give: Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy Turns 30

Happy Thanksgiving from Eddie Vedder, 1994: “I don’t want to be held in your debt,” and oh, “I would rather starve than eat your bread.”

Other fun facts about “Corduroy,” oft-cited to be Pearl Jam’s greatest song and one of their five most-performed live favorites:

1. “Corduroy” is so-named for a shirt Vedder once discovered in a shop being sold for $500 because it resembled one he wore onstage, as amusing a catalyst for any anti-fame song I’ve ever known.

 

VIDEO: Pearl Jam “Corduroy” (from Let’s Play Two)

2. Like Kim Gordon’s preoccupation with “underwear,” “Corduroy,” along with “Jeremy” and “W.M.A.,” marked a three-album streak of Vedder using the word “breast” in a lyric.

3. Most importantly, it includes the word “varmint.”

It’s neither their biggest hit nor the most representative of their sound, but “Corduroy” is a fascinating crossroads for the peak of Pearl Jam’s fame in two ways. One, it doesn’t slot easy into a riff-rocker or soaring ballad category, a tendency of so many PJ songs that their best-of had a loud disc and a soft one. Meeting in the middle, it’s a sort of midtempo jangly R.E.M. thing with anthemic verses and a balmy chorus (they put it on the rocker disc). Two, it’s a chiming pop song at the center of Vitalogy, their most black-and-white hard-or-soft album to date, which in November 1994 became the second-fastest-selling album in American history. The fastest-selling? Their previous album, Vs.. By all accounts, Vitalogy was the band’s most unpleasant recording experience (“communication was at an all-time low,” lamented Jeff Ament) and their most explicit work about the deep discomfort of being famous. That is, in the finest grunge tradition, they penned their most enduring pop song about hating being popular. You’re more likely than not to hear the spectacle of hundreds bellowing “everything has chains,” along with Vedder if you ever see the band.

 

VIDEO: Pearl Jam “Better Man” (Live at Madison Square Garden)

“Better Man” is even poppier, and deals with the even darker subject of an abusive relationship, standard practice for the band except three albums in, they turned an old tune by Vedder’s 80s band Bad Radio into an expert singalong of concision and craft, shamelessly so after rejecting it from earlier records for being exactly that. The gorgeous “Nothingman” was perhaps too tender to follow in its footsteps on the radio, but it was the band’s most threadbare embarrassment of melodic riches to date.

I wanted to get these beloved highlights out of the way because they are not the sound of Vitalogy, even if they’re crucial to its artistic success. Vitalogy is defined by cinderblock-dry production and post-punk normally reserved for thrashing detours like “Blood.” Here, the shitfits are the album itself, which examines Pearl Jam as a commodity. This can be as euphoric as the vinyl-horny “Spin the Black Circle,” a Top 20 tantrum I’ve never personally heard on the radio, or as existentially pissed as the groovy psych-glam drone “Not for You,” where Vedder adopts a quasi-Jagger sneer. The Cobain-coded “Immortality” bookends the album with the death-entranced pounder “Last Exit,” giving a chilling reality to a particularly fame-hating Difficult Third Album that cannot be denied. And those are the official singles, lol.

It’s no surprise radio took more kindly to “Better Man” and “Corduroy.” But the caustic throb of “Tremor Christ” and freewheeling punk of “Whipping” and the literal whipping that occurs in “Satan’s Bed” are Vedder’s communication-breakdown control-freak opus really is. Those and the real turnoffs, of course, experiments like the Freud-snippet collage “Hey Foxymophandlemama, That’s Me” a/k/a “Stupid Mop” and the hilariously Waitsian “Bugs,” with its stumblebum accordion and Shel Silverstein humor. I respect and sometimes love them in the right mood, though admittedly one minute of Vedder spelling the word “privacy” on “Pry, To” is more like “Far, Too.”

Still, he didn’t want to be held in our debt, and they admirably tried to break the chains of fame as hard as they could, from boycotting videos and Ticketmaster to releasing No Code, a fantastic follow-up that hit number-one one more once, without a single song anyone who only knows Pearl Jam from the radio can recall. They’ll pack stadiums til the end of time, but Vitalogy was their imperial phase going out with a bang, and Vedder wore the dynamite vest himself.

Where I’m standing, their integrity and chaos was rewarded with their first great album.