GN'R mention in new Eddie Vedder interview

[DownUnderScott]

On 2/2/2022 at 10:30 AM, estrangedtwat said:

I was a huge band of both bands in the early 90s, and Eddie did indeed trash GNR publicly, specifically making fun of Axl's teleprompters saying if you can't remember the words to your own songs you shouldn't be singing them.  They were an easy target around the time of those MTV awards when all the new "cool kids" showed up in flannel and Axl was there dressed like Liberace and had an orchestra playing with him.

 

And yes, I absolutely stand by his hypocrisy regarding his divorce.  Not because of the fact that he got divorced.  People do it all the time.  But the fact that he went and did every stereotypical cliche thing that a "rock star" does after publicly denying he'd ever do that:  he replaced his longtime wife with a younger woman to have kids with, and after making fun of the vapidness of beautiful women he married a fashion model.  He's not the first.  Thurston Moore left Kim Gordon for a younger woman.  Wayne Coyne of Flaming Lips dumped his wife of like 15 years for a much younger woman and had kids.  These guys were always saying how "different" they were and in Eddie's case has always been an outspoken "male feminist."  But at the end of the day, he's not that different from the guys in Crue, is he?  Just wanted a little piece of that Girls Girls Girls.

I think you make a good point, whether or not you were trying to, but Axl did what the fuck he wanted to do. He was like Freddie Mercury. Do what you want and be yourself. He certainly was doing that!  The Seatlle fuckos all dressed the same, oh look at me in my flannel shirt and boots, I look so cool like all the other grunge sheep. Fuck em"

Can you tell that I'm drunk 

[GNROSAS]

The differences for me is the way the bands portrayed and characterised their lifestyles of addictions on drugs, alcohol, porn/sex/girls:

- The hair metal bands overall displayed it mainly as fancy, cool, rosy, fun, party time, bright time.
- GNR displayed it as a raw, darker, harsh, agonising reality, the addictive side & the darker impact on relationships
- The Seatle grunge / metal bands portrayed it even darker, suicidal, depressive.

So GNR started the transitional change in the culture which then the Seatle, grunge, metal bands ( eg Nirvana, Metallica, Pearl Jam, Faith No More etc) carried on, so as the popular culture of the rock/metal scene shifted to a new era.

Edited February 8, 2022 by GNROSAS

[GnR Chris]

13 hours ago, MaskingApathy said:

I'm with Nikki on this one. I would rather listen to MC than PJ.

I'd rather listen to Motley Crue as well. I don't listen to Pearl Jam 'cause I don't like Eddie Vedder's voice. 

But objectively speaking, Pearl Jam is the superior band. Yes, they're boring. There was never an "it" factor with Eddie or a "danger" surrounding the band. They've always been dad rock. But Motley Crue has always been pop metal, right? Pearl Jam have written and recorded better songs.

[izzyjim]

On 2/2/2022 at 3:53 AM, Blackstar said:

Eddie: I remembered a point I wanted to make you know in the magazine Rolling Stone, it's this little magazine some of you might have picked up. There is a picture of me, you can see the front mikes, and the monitors, there is a TV, like a prompter, right there. Umm, a lot of bands use prompters now and I think that's a bunch of crap and if you don't feel the song, if you don't know it by heart, then I think you don't have any right singing it in front of like 20,000, 15,000, 5,000 even 100 people. So, anyway, I just wanted to point out that that was an old TV I found in the back of the alley of the Moore Theater here in Seattle that I put together in order to smash it that night on stage. I just wanna say to all the young budding musicians out there, don't invest in teleprompters like I just wanted that to be clear.

Jeff: Didn't that TV when you found it have the lyrics to 'Paradise City' on it?

Eddie: It did. It did. No, really!

https://pearljamstudy.webs.com/101893rocklineinterview.htm

*

Yeah, many people criticized or made fun of the teleprompters and the whole UYI tour extravaganza, but it doesn't mean they didn't like the music or the band, especially the AFD era band.

Alice Cooper, talked about whether Dylan use one or not, and said "as a singer I would be lost without my teleprompter" 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebaltin/2020/04/05/qa-alice-cooper-on-his-new-podcast-guns-n-roses-jimmy-page-and-hanging-with-pink-floyd-in-1968/?sh=672543f0789a

[Nintari]

On 2/1/2022 at 11:59 AM, estrangedtwat said:

What a hypocrite.

From his song "Satan's Bed" from 1994:  "Such fine examples, skinny little bitch; Model, role model, roll some models in blood; get some flesh to stick so they look like us.....I'd stop and talk but I'm already in love"

 

Some pretty big talk from arguably the biggest rock star on the planet at the time, at the very height of his popularity, influence, fame, and sex appeal.  And he wasn't interested....he married his pretty average looking girlfriend that he'd been with for about a decade before he got famous.  (She had a really nice rack, but very average face.)

 

Good for him, I thought.  Putting his money where his mouth is.  Talking the talk and walking the walk. 

 

Just a few years later he left her, and married a chick ten years younger.   You guessed it!   A fashion model!   And since his new wife was still fertile, he had kids with her.  So much for his first wife that stood with him all those years he worked at a gas station.

 

But Eddie's cool...he's a good guy...he's a male feminist, after all.   No "Girls Girls Girls!!" for him.

Nothing you said negates the point he made. That music was vacuous. It was pop music disguised as rock. Bubble-gum bullshit, for the most part.

[SoulMonster]

It is definitely not history revisionism to say that Guns N' Roses' music stood out from their peers' back in the day. Although they couldn't rid themselves of their origins in glam, hard rock, punk, etc, the music they created was quite different to the other contemporary music back then, both lyrically and sonically. This was noted primarily in the string sales numbers but also in other musicians and journalists talking about the band back then and discussing what made their music different to theirs. I am not arguing that they came up with a new genre or something like that, just that their brand of rock, which combined their individual interests, was much darker (in lyrics but also in melodies) and complex (with codas and song structure) than most of their poppier peers and that this made GN'R quite different. It was a fairly abrupt break with the contemporary glam scene which was a bit vapid and more about having fun. GN'R brought some dirty realism into it and seemed to be more ambitions when it came to song-writing. Basically, it was a return to hard rock, but a fairly complex hard rock and a hard rock that leaned towards describing the the seedier and angrier and worse parts of humanity.

Edited February 7, 2022 by SoulMonster

[EvanG]

18 hours ago, GnR Chris said:

But objectively speaking, Pearl Jam is the superior band. Yes, they're boring. There was never an "it" factor with Eddie or a "danger" surrounding the band. They've always been dad rock. But Motley Crue has always been pop metal, right? Pearl Jam have written and recorded better songs.

What is ''dad rock''? What is ''it factor'' or ''danger''? Sincere questions, because I really don't know what you mean.

[Beto 22]

Pearl Jam was a very good band until Yeld! After that is everything that destroyed Rock N' Roll in the future. You can say whatever you want about hair metal, how mainstream, empty, sexist it was. But with hair metal and bands like The Cult, GNR, Tesla rock n' roll was ruling the world musically with pop acts like Madonna and Michael Jackson using elements from it.

When grunge and all the "anti rockstar" depressed, politically correct bullshit started it was the begginin of the for Rock on the mainstream and the uprise of hip hop and rap. That coincidentally had and still has the same mentality that old rockstars had.

So as good as Pearl Jam once were they became everything rock n' roll was always against ... A daddy telling you what you should do and behave

 

[EvanG]

I think ''Yield'' is one of their best records. I didn't really care about the more experimental records in the mid 90's, but with ''Yield'' they got back on track in my opinion. But there you go, to each their own and all.

Edited February 7, 2022 by EvanG

[GoBucky]

On 2/6/2022 at 9:26 AM, GNROSAS said:

The differences for me is the way the bands portrayed and characterised their lifestyles of addictions on drugs, alcohol, porn/sex/girls:

- The hair metal bands overall displayed it mainly as fancy, cool, rosy, fun, party time, bright time.
- GNR displayed it as a raw, darker, harsh, agonising reality, the addictive side & the darker impact on relationships
- The Seatle grudge metal bands portaid it even darker, suicidal, depressive.

So GNR started the transitional change in the culture which then the Seatle, grunge, metal bands ( eg Nirvana, Metallica, Pearl Jam, Faith No More etc) carried on, so as the popular culture of the rock/metal scene shifted to a new era.

Jane's Addiction had a lot to do with that shift. 

[GnR Chris]

3 hours ago, EvanG said:

What is ''dad rock''? What is ''it factor'' or ''danger''? Sincere questions, because I really don't know what you mean.

Hard to describe what an "it" factor is. There are just some people who have a natural charisma or presence about them. Think: Axl Rose. Kurt Cobain. Michael Jackson. GNR definitely had an aura about them in their prime.

In regard to "dad rock." It's sort of come to mean songs that your parents listen to now that they listened to when they were kids. But in the context in which  I used it, I just meant non-offensive music that even in its heyday your parents would have bobbed their heads to and enjoyed. Generic, almost. But not inherently bad.

 

[WhazUp]

3 hours ago, Beto 22 said:

So as good as Pearl Jam once were they became everything rock n' roll was always against ... A daddy telling you what you should do and behave

 

How so? I don't think they are speaking their minds any more than they did back in the day when Eddie would write "pro-choice" on his arm in '92 during the Unplugged performance of Porch - or write songs like Glorified G about gun owners.  They have always been a left-leaning band and not afraid to speak up about what they thought was right

Edited February 7, 2022 by WhazUp

[CubanSkies Dummy]

None of the Pearl Jam members can wrote "Sorry" in like thousand years... That sucks, you know?!

 

Rose and his band are better than that.

[EvanG]

3 hours ago, GnR Chris said:

Hard to describe what an "it" factor is. There are just some people who have a natural charisma or presence about them. Think: Axl Rose. Kurt Cobain. Michael Jackson. GNR definitely had an aura about them in their prime.

In regard to "dad rock." It's sort of come to mean songs that your parents listen to now that they listened to when they were kids. But in the context in which  I used it, I just meant non-offensive music that even in its heyday your parents would have bobbed their heads to and enjoyed. Generic, almost. But not inherently bad.

 

Ok, thanks for explaining. Regarding charisma, I guess that is subjective. I know he was the poster boy for a while and even had a stalker (who tried to drive her car through his house and ended up almost killing herself), so I am sure that for some people he did have that ''it'' factor. As for dad rock, I guess that's subjective too. I don't really look at them that way.

 

[CubanSkies Dummy]

Yes, my schoolar opinion is the same.

You say GNR anywhere in the world and the imagineria of a redhead guy with a bandana and rock and roll is coming to your mind, almost inmediatly.

I don't know even how Eddie Vedder looks.

So, Axl Rose wins this battle now.

[Blackstar]

[Beto 22]

3 hours ago, WhazUp said:

How so? I don't think they are speaking their minds any more than they did back in the day when Eddie would write "pro-choice" on his arm in '92 during the Unplugged performance of Porch - or write songs like Glorified G about gun owners.  They have always been a left-leaning band and not afraid to speak up about what they thought was right

I really dont care if eddie is left leaning or Joe Perry is right leaning or whatever...

My point is Pearl Jam was until yeld a great band with great songs and boring way of telling things to young audiences what they think is right or wrong... 

And to be honest nore Jeff Ament and A Eddie Vedder than the whole band...

 After that they just become a boring band with an even more boring atitude...

 

[k12]

On 2/1/2022 at 12:34 PM, RussTCB said:

This revisionist history cracks me up. Now that GN'R has made itself into a brand institution, you have people like Vedder claiming they were down with GN'R all along? 

I have to laugh at the notion that GN'R came along and changed everything about "hair metal". The biggest difference between Grils, Girls, Girls and AFD is that AFD is just a better album. When they launched, GN'R had the same big hair, makeup and overwll image as Crue. 

I love Pearl Jam and I really like Eddie as a front man, but his retroactive statements about how GN'R were some wildly different thing from Crue are laughable at best 

 

I am sure he means musically, Motley Crue is just garbage, they got where they are on their image and the bad boy thing, Guns N Roses put out good music 

[Ratam]

3 hours ago, Blackstar said:

Go on the War.

[WhazUp]

3 hours ago, Beto 22 said:

I really dont care if eddie is left leaning or Joe Perry is right leaning or whatever...

My point is Pearl Jam was until yeld a great band with great songs and boring way of telling things to young audiences what they think is right or wrong... 

And to be honest nore Jeff Ament and A Eddie Vedder than the whole band...

 After that they just become a boring band with an even more boring atitude...

 

I can see not digging the artistic choices from post-Yield PJ, personally speaking Binaural, the s/t and Gigaton are three of my favs.  But just am not quite seeing what about their attitude is different than before except for not climbing rafters and knowing that you can't win against Ticketmaster ha

I don't think they are more or less preachy than they ever were to begin with and I never felt as if they were telling me what I should think, just what they think

In other words I just still am not quite getting the "they are like daddy telling you what to believe" wordage in the original critique lol.  I never really felt that way, as much as I never felt that Axl was subliminally suggesting to watch more Mickey Mouse cartoons since 2011

Edited February 8, 2022 by WhazUp

[nycgunner]

On 2/5/2022 at 7:06 PM, WhazUp said:

I think many people are not getting that Eddie was actually complimenting GNR and that we don't need to pit one against the other to make a point lol

 

Agree with this.  I am surprised to read this Pearl Jam and Eddie hate after he paid GNR a compliment. 🤔 The Times article was a thoughtful piece.  I always put GNR in a different class to Motley Crue and every other 80s glam.

I don’t buy the hypocrisy criticism, comparing 25-30 year old comments to present day.  Eddie is 57 now and has the benefit of hindsight to insightfully comment on his musical history.

As for Eddie/PJ, they are one of the last great rock n roll bands. They are still creating new music, playing it live to audiences, make sure their most loyal fans get a shot at great tickets, and check their egos at the door. The live sets change every night. It’s good to be a Pearl Jam fan (although I always loved GNR more)

I saw Eddie 2 nights last week in NYC for his short tour. He was fantastic - sounded great, incredibly gracious with his audience, conversed with them. I’d take that any night over the current GNR dynamic. 

[perypheral]

On 2/2/2022 at 9:03 PM, mystery said:

Kurt Cobain was just an ornery guy in general back then. I believe his real problem was mainly with Axl who was everything he despised as a frontman and as a person. He judged Axl a bit too harshly but to be fair to Kurt, Axl was at the peak of his difficult behavior in that era so it was easy to dislike him. Kurt also dismissed Pearl Jam as well but later softened up on them and Eddie in particular.

I miss that Axl 

[EvanG]

On 2/1/2022 at 9:19 PM, EvanG said:

he joined Pearl Jam on stage when they first came to LA and AIC stayed at his house like most of the Seattle bands that came to town, seeing as Duff was the ''Seattle guy''. I believe Duff knew some of the members from Pearl Jam before he moved to LA already.

Here's a clip of Dave Grohl interviewing Duff and he talks about some of the Seattle bands, including briefly mentioning Pearl Jam.

 

[mystery]

22 hours ago, WhazUp said:

I can see not digging the artistic choices from post-Yield PJ, personally speaking Binaural, the s/t and Gigaton are three of my favs.  But just am not quite seeing what about their attitude is different than before except for not climbing rafters and knowing that you can't win against Ticketmaster ha

I don't think they are more or less preachy than they ever were to begin with and I never felt as if they were telling me what I should think, just what they think

In other words I just still am not quite getting the "they are like daddy telling you what to believe" wordage in the original critique lol.  I never really felt that way, as much as I never felt that Axl was subliminally suggesting to watch more Mickey Mouse cartoons since 2011

Some people get weirdly defensive over Guns N' Roses here. Pearl Jam isn't a hard rock/heavy metal band but their best music hits deep, especially live. It's funny because Axl was in to them in the mid-90s when trying to make a new album with the old band. He also hired Dave Abbruzzese briefly as a member in 1997.

Edited February 9, 2022 by mystery

[Nintari]

On 2/7/2022 at 5:29 PM, k12 said:

I am sure he means musically, Motley Crue is just garbage, they got where they are on their image and the bad boy thing, Guns N Roses put out good music 

Exactly. Most of the hair metal bands (Motley Crue included) tried to look and sound dangerous. Guns N Roses actually were.

On 2/7/2022 at 8:47 AM, SoulMonster said:

It is definitely not history revisionism to say that Guns N' Roses' music stood out from their peers' back in the day. Although they couldn't rid themselves of their origins in glam, hard rock, punk, etc, the music they created was quite different to the other contemporary music back then, both lyrically and sonically. This was noted primarily in the string sales numbers but also in other musicians and journalists talking about the band back then and discussing what made their music different to theirs. I am not arguing that they came up with a new genre or something like that, just that their brand of rock, which combined their individual interests, was much darker (in lyrics but also in melodies) and complex (with codas and song structure) than most of their poppier peers and that this made GN'R quite different. It was a fairly abrupt break with the contemporary glam scene which was a bit vapid and more about having fun. GN'R brought some dirty realism into it and seemed to be more ambitions when it came to song-writing. Basically, it was a return to hard rock, but a fairly complex hard rock and a hard rock that leaned towards describing the the seedier and angrier and worse parts of humanity.

I think to sum it up, GNR was the bridge from cheesy, shallow hair metal to the Seattle movment of raw, grounded music that was firmly rooted in what was actually happening in the world. I don't know if Seattle would have happened without them, but GNR was definitely the missing link.

Edited February 9, 2022 by Nintari