(Credits: Far Out / Eddie Vedder)
Wed 4 February 2026 4:00, UK
When grunge first hit the airwaves in the early 1990s, Eddie Vedder wasn’t exactly in love with hitting the big time.
Anyone else would have been jumping for joy at the prospect of seeing their name in lights, but even if they were called a more classic rock-ified version of alt-rock, Pearl Jam were always in the business to make the best music that they could rather than play to the charts. They wanted to do whatever they could to keep their integrity intact, and Vedder could sleep easy at night if it meant that his heroes were proud of what he accomplished rather than the number of number-one albums he had.
That’s a big reason why someone like Neil Young is so important to Pearl Jam’s story. Vedder could have easily made the first two Pearl Jam records and hidden away from the world for the rest of his life, but Young was the one teaching him to roll with the punches. Not everything had to be done the way that the record company thought it should be done, so Vedder spent his time going after Ticketmaster and making artsy music instead of worrying about how the band should look in their next video.
The rest of the group may have been a little bit confused, but that was all a part of the way that Vedder looked at the music world. His heroes were people like Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, but even if they had hits, they had them on their own terms. Petty was never going to make music because his record company made him, and both he and ‘The Boss’ were willing to tell stories about the underdogs of the world and practically dared their record company to try and stop them.
There’s something punk rock about that kind of mentality, but that wasn’t going to replace Vedder’s love for the true punks. He had become a close friend of Johnny Ramone from the minute they started talking in the late 1990s, and when looking at the grassroots way that he wanted Pearl Jam to promote their records, it was almost like he was trying to adopt the same mentality that a band like Fugazi had.
But the real lynchpin of his entire career was always going to be Joe Strummer. The Clash may have straddled the line between being heavy punk rock and pop-flavoured masterminds, but if Mick Jones was the one coming up with hook after hook, Strummer was making sure that they were still making music for the right reasons. Nothing was going to come out on his watch without some message behind it, and Vedder felt honoured just to talk to Strummer when he first got started.
He may have first met Strummer when he was working at clubs in his pre-Pearl Jam days, but he knew that there was no way he could have become a singer if not for the Clash guitarist, saying, “If not for Joe Strummer, I don’t think any of this happens. I don’t think I’m in Pearl Jam, I don’t think I meet my wife. I don’t think I have my kids. I don’t live in Seattle and would probably be an assistant manager at [a drug store]. Probably would still be happy, but thanks to Joe Strummer, I feel like I’ve been afforded the greatest life I have ever lived.”
Vedder didn’t necessarily need to show that by performing Clash covers at all of their shows, but it was more about the mentality behind what Strummer was saying. One of the greatest lines that he ever wrote was ‘Are you taking over or are you taking orders?/Are you going backwards or are you going forwards?’, and Vedder seemed to take that heart on whatever creative venture that he went down, whether he was making his soundtrack for Into the Wild or guiding the band through their more experimental records like Binaural.
That job as a drug store manager might have been fine for the time being, but the greatest gift that Strummer gave people like Vedder was the dream of what life could be beyond the ordinary nine-to-five. There was a way for people to break through to millions of people and still have their dignity intact, and Vedder wanted to make sure that he lived his life according to what bands like The Clash did.
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