(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 18 January 2026 17:04, UK
The art of being a rock and roll star and living out the fantasy that people only dream of meant something a lot different to Eddie Vedder.
Other people would have grasped the opportunity to live out their dreams with both hands when they first got in the charts, but when Pearl Jam started to gain steam as one of the biggest acts to come out of Seattle, Vedder wasn’t exactly looking to become the fashion of the day. He had control over what he wanted to do, after all, so if the world was lifting him up to rock star status, he was going to make sure that everything he made was done on his terms.
For instance, Pearl Jam might have been one of the few bands able to thrive without the help of any videos back in the day. Ten got their foot in the door and featured one conceptual video with ‘Jeremy’, but aside from a few live shows of the band performing ‘Alive’ and ‘Even Flow’, Vedder wanted them to earn their stripes by playing live. He was willing to risk his safety every single time he got up onstage, and while the media could spin it into anything they wanted to, he was more than willing to close off any interviews if it meant hanging onto his privacy.
And given the problems that he was having at home, it’s not like he was right to be a little bit paranoid. There were tons of fans that could become more than a little bit parasocial with the band, so once Vedder heard about a fan trying to ram the gate of his house, he knew that he wanted to step away from being one of the biggest names in music. Pink Floyd had proven that rock stars could be faceless, so why not him as well?
That might have been easier said than done after he became one of the leading figures of the grunge movement, but he could at least control what they were making, and Vitalogy seemed like one of the few Pearl Jam albums that seemed like it was actively trying to lose fans. Half of the songs on the record were wild experiments, and while it did still have the fun rockers, people were bound to have a few questions when listening to ‘Bugs’ or ‘Stupid Mop’.
Then again, the hits are still there for a reason. When the album isn’t taking you through a fever dream, tunes like ‘Nothingman’ and ‘Spin the Black Circle’ show off both sides of them perfectly, but nothing could have prepared anyone for ‘Better Man’. This was the kind of musical wrecking ball that every band waits for when they are trying to find a hit, so naturally Vedder felt that the song should be completely scrubbed from the record when he first started to record the tune.
They had been kicking it around since working on Vs., and yet Vedder said that it would have been too commercial for them to put out a song like that, saying, “We were trying to control our situation to the point where it felt sustainable. I think we were trying to protect more than ourselves. We were trying to protect the music. That’s the one thing we were conscious of when we working and I remember that day. [Producer Brendan O’Brien] said something about [the song] and I saw everybody’s heads go down.”
But even if they were trying to minimize their celebrity, ‘Better Man’ is the kind of song that’s almost too good to waste. The initial plan to give the tune to Chrissie Hynde could have been brilliant on its own, but the magic is hearing Vedder singing about this woman in a dead-end relationship that hits about as hard as Bruce Springsteen telling his own tales of the burnt-out lovers he came across back in New Jersey.
If they wanted to be a bit more contradictory, though, the best thing that they could have done was put the song on the record at that point. For any other band, this would have been the warped version of a rock and roll album that tanked their career, so the fact that it had one of the greatest pop songs of the decade hidden underneath everything became strange by default.
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