Rock and Hard Places (33 page)

“Just make it up,” says Emma Anderson, one of Lush’s singer-guitarists. “You usually do.”

Trying to gain journalistic access to bands who are not Lush at an American festival is not easy. At British festivals, it is perfectly possible, once you’ve got backstage, to find yourself queueing for lentil stew alongside Tom Jones and Blur. American bands, in contrast, surround themselves with people whose job consists largely of stopping other people from doing theirs. They say things like “We cannot comply with your request for an interview at this time” and have lots of keys hanging off their belts.

I ask someone with lots of keys hanging off his belt about the possibility of speaking to one or more members of Pearl Jam. “We cannot comply with your request for an interview at this time,” he says. We are arguing next to Pearl Jam’s astonishing tour bus, which is painted from front to rear in a mural replicating the cover art for The Eagles’
Hotel California
album. “It used to belong to Gene Simmons from Kiss,” explains Mr. Keys, sounding suddenly less commanding. On cue, Eddie Vedder climbs off the bus. To the evident irritation of Mr Keys, Eddie recognises me and gives every indication of remembering me fondly.

Eddie looks a wreck even by his standards, but we have a bit of a chat about what we’ve both been up to since I’d accompanied Pearl Jam on a memorably mayhemic Scandinavian tour six months previously (me: editing a music paper reviews section; him: rapidly becoming one of the most famous rock stars on earth). He says he hadn’t realised till he’d read my piece that he’d had the same surname as me at one point in his multi-family childhood, and we agree that it’s nonetheless unlikely that we’re related. This is as far as we get, before Mr. Keys comes back with someone with even more keys, who hustles Eddie back onto the bus and gives me a look that could curdle milk.

“I’ll talk to you later, when everyone’s gone home,” says Eddie. “Nice to see you, anyway.”

There are, of course, official channels through which all media requests for access should be directed. Lollapalooza includes in its retinue a Minister for Information, whose job includes deciding who can talk to who, and when, and for how long. Happily, this almighty personage was, until a few months ago, a colleague at
Melody Maker
.

“Have you seen my golfcart?” asks Ted.

The production office have brought along a fleet of these nippy little vehicles for getting around Lollapalooza’s vast venues. They are already
proving an irresistible temptation to bored musicians. Last time I saw Ted’s, Emma was chasing a cow in it.

“Fuck.”

I was wondering if there was any chance of talking to the Mary Chain.

“What? Oh, yeah, they’re in that dressing room over there, just go and knock, though I think they’re in a bit of a strop. Did you see which way she went?”

It’s not been the best of days to be in The Jesus & Mary Chain. At what is effectively the Seattle date on the tour, they’ve been little more than a convenient portaloo break between local heroes Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. I knock on the door just as Soundgarden are starting. Jim answers, lets me in, and apologises for the mess.

“Um . . . yeah. William knocked a few things over and then went off somewhere. I’m a bit pissed, Andrew. Actually, I’m quite a lot pissed. You’d better have a beer as well.”

Jim’s laconic East Kilbride drawl sounds like someone twanging a loose rubber band; it would make Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech sound witheringly deadpan. Jim’s really not happy.

“The thing that’s wrong with this,” he begins, “is that musically, at least, there’s not enough variation. They ought to have had Nirvana headlining. And more than just a token rap band. There’s too much heavy metal ideals and rap tokenism, man . . . it should have been more 50-50, with Public Enemy and De La Soul or whoever. And if that would have meant there was no room for us, so be it.”

I don’t know. I’ve been enjoying myself.

“Why, for fuck’s sake? You can’t call this alternative, surely? The headliners have been Number One for about five thousand fucking years. No, I’m not enjoying myself. I enjoy it when we’re out there, playing, but all the rest of the bullshit, all this . . . this fucking vegetarian food backstage . . . there’s something too organised about this, too pinstripe-suity, too un-rock’n’roll.”

I am genuinely saddened that I have to decline Jim’s kind offer to “stick around and get bladdered,” as I have go and find out why Ice Cube hasn’t arrived yet. By the time I get outside, just as Soundgarden’s finale is shaking the Mary Chain’s trailer, he has.

“Shit, man,” Ice Cube says. I’ve figured that if he didn’t throttle that
ghastly twerp in Vancouver when he had the opportunity and every excuse, he can’t be that scary. “They found a little fuckin’ residue from one motherfuckin’ joint and busted us, the motherfuckers. Fuck ’em, man. They jack off to that shit.”

No Christmas card for United States Customs & Excise from Ice Cube this year, I fear. Ice glowers impressively from the lounge of his bus. Someone, somewhere, is working on a short-notice lineup compromise that will involve Ministry going on early and Ice doing a shortened appearance by way of ushering on the Chili Peppers.

“Aw, shit,” he continues. “It pisses me off, man, because I got fans out there that have never seen me before, fans who’ve been buying my records for years but wouldn’t come to a rap concert because of all the bad press rap concerts get.”

It must be a hard thing for the kind of kid who buys Ice Cube records to admit, that he’s scared to go to a gig.

“Shit, man,” says Ice, suddenly cheering up. “Did you see them down the front last night? These kids don’t seem like they’d be scared to go anywhere, man. They’re crazy! Never seen anything like it. But that’s what this is about, you know? These kids are down with me, just like they’re down with Ministry, and Soundgarden and Lush, you know what I’m saying? Music has a way of doing that. If musicians were politicians, we’d have no problems.”

No different problems, anyway.

“This kind of stuff can change things, if only a bit, you know? A bit. It’s a small dent. But it’s a dent worth making.”

Around some trucks and up a hill and across the catering tent and picking gingerly at broccoli that smells like it has been boiled in roadies’ socks, Paul Barker of Ministry isn’t so sure.

“Politically,” he says, “to join this kind of thing rubs us up the wrong way. There are too many compromises we have to make, as a touring band. But, four days in, so far so good, I have to say.”

Barker, half the creative core of Ministry, is a funny bloke. He leaps like a schoolteacher on any loose arguments or doubtful propositions, can’t be bothered about projecting a united front and is refreshingly honest about his band’s motivations.

“Money,” he smiles. “Basically, six weeks of this pays for a studio for us. And we want a studio so bad. That’s not entirely it, but it is 90 percent of
it. We’re not in this for Lollapalooza’s benefit. That is, we are because we deigned to do it, but it’s not the kind of thing we like doing.”

Nor is Barker taken with Lollapalooza’s ideological subtext, offering the admirably arrogant argument that people enlightened enough to like Ministry are already enlightened enough to be aware of the festival’s pet causes.

“The next generation of politicians,” he says, “are going to have grown up on punk rock. What does that tell you?”

That America is in real trouble. Americans think punk rock happened in 1989 and had something to do with The Sisters of Mercy. And besides which, the next generation of politicians is married to a woman who believes that rock’n’roll is turning our children into serial killers.

“Well, that’s the only good that’s going to come out of this. Tipper Gore is going to have a fuckin’ muzzle put on her, because she can’t be allowed to embarass the presidency.”

Two words: Dan Quayle.

“Well, Jesus. Who runs that White House? I think it’s . . . what’s the name of the dog who writes the books? Millie. She’s making all the money.”

I’m attempting to find my way back through the dark to see Ice Cube’s truncated set when I hear a rustling in the trees next to me, followed by the shriek of a tortured engine, a squelch of rubber on mud and a familiar voice squealing, “Shit! Look out!”

It’s Emma, in Ted’s hijacked executive conveyance. I swiftly realise that the cart’s passenger seat is the only place on the site where I’m unlikely to be run over by it, and climb aboard.

 

“HEY, THERE YOU are. I thought you’d gone.”

No . . . at least, only to hell on a golf cart.

“Come with me. We can talk now.”

Eddie Vedder looks even more of a mess than he did this afternoon, and walks like he’s trying to hide his head between his shoulders. I wonder, guiltily, how long he’s been waiting here, sitting in the rain on a step outside a deserted dressing trailer. I know he said we’d talk later, but I’d have forgiven him if he’d got a lift back to Seattle with the rest of his band. We find a dressing trailer that hasn’t been locked and sit on wooden benches.

Eddie still looks like the guy I met in Oslo in February, but has changed completely in every other respect. He was so infectiously energetic that talking to him for an hour was like drinking six espressos. He’s as listless tonight as a flag on a calm day. He was unabashedly, recklessly romantic about the possibilities of rock’n’roll. Now, he sounds like he’s been broken on a wheel.

“It’s nice to see a friendly face, anyway . . .”

No end of crap has rained down on Eddie since we last spoke. As Pearl Jam have grown from a promising new addition to the Seattle lineage to one of the biggest bands on earth, they’ve suffered a vicious backlash from the press and from their contemporaries, derided as careerist chancers and bandwagon-jumping fakers (the fact that two of Pearl Jam, Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard, had been members of Seattle punk pathfinders Green River—pretty much the template on which every bunch of goateed northwestern grungeniks have based themselves—has been conveniently forgotten).

The record-buying public, however, have continued to snap up Pearl Jam’s debut album,
Ten
, as fast as the world’s CD plants can press it. As sales have cleared seven figures, the band have been toured into the dust, rolling out their uniquely punishing live show night after night, city after city. Everyone wants a piece of them and, most of all, of Eddie. Eddie, being Eddie, has tried to give all comers their minute of his time—he has a Boy Scout-ish belief in answering what he perceives to be the demands of his position. Six weeks ago, while Pearl Jam played in Stockholm, a souvenir-hunter broke into their dressing room and took Eddie’s book of lyrics and stories, collected over the last two years. Eddie freaked out, cracked up and broke down. The European tour was cancelled the following day, amid a blizzard of press releases repeating that catch-all euphemism for every variety of road fever: “exhaustion.”

“I hate to get sentimental,” says Eddie now, hunched over in his chair, “but to write while you’re travelling, with no solitude, is a lot harder than when you’ve got a bit of time to think about things, you know. And these words and passages were really hard to come by, much more work than usual. And they were gone, and some bastard had them. I felt totally raped, I lost my mind. And then I got home and found one my friends—Stephanie, from Seven Year Bitch—had died of a heroin overdose. And that . . . well, it kind of put me in a tailspin.”

It’s amazing, and not a little sad, what five months and a million album sales have done to Eddie. But he’s enjoying Lollapalooza, surely.

“Should be.”

But.

“Parts of it I am. But today . . . you know, if there’s a moment where things should be better, then I want to go and make them better. It’s probably going to kill me, because if it doesn’t happen, then I get really upset. Today’s example was that Ice Cube was stuck at the border, so there was this . . . dead space, and we should have been up there with Soundgarden doing those
Temple of the Dog
songs, especially seeing we are where we’re are. Everyone was up for it, a perfect opportunity in the only place we’d do it. But trying to get everyone in the same place . . . it’s impossible.”

Outside, the Chili Peppers are cranking up “Suck My Kiss.” Earlier, during Pearl Jam’s predictably hysterically-received set, Eddie announced that he’d be taking a personal stand against Washington State’s risible “anti-erotica” law, to the extent of hanging around Tower Records in Seattle and volunteering to buy warning-stickered records for anyone under sixteen who asked him. It’s the sort of thing musicians say all the time, but I can imagine Eddie doing it. I can also imagine him being genuinely surprised when it starts a riot.

“Yeah, I know. I can’t keep my mouth shut, I guess, and that’s what gets me into trouble. I mean, you know me, I think it’s great seeing youth get out and come together and think they can change things, which they can, but . . . whatever.”

I wish Eddie luck. I suspect he’s going to need it. He’s still coming to terms with his job, and hasn’t quite figured out where the line is that divides what he can actually do and what people think he’s capable of, between good intentions and delusions of grandeur. He still seems a fundamentally decent human being—he’s waited here for hours to see me, just because he said he would—and I hope he doesn’t lose that, or give it away without a struggle.

“If it’s something important,” he mutters, “I’ll use my voice to speak for a bunch of people, but only if the issue is hardcore and heavy. But don’t come to me about a backstage pass, or . . . if I did all that, I’d have no time left for the important shit. Some people think singers can do anything, I know that . . . but leave us to the big miracles.”

 

“WANKER! RUBBISH! GET off! Booooo!”

We are in a hotel in Bremerton.

“Bollocks! Booooooo! Go home!”