"Every third person was shooting heroin," says Gossard, remembering Seattle when Pearl Jam first started. Here, hidden away on an industrial estate, they clock in and out of their shifts, a return to normality which has enabled them to survive. More than a decade and a half later - and more than 20 years since "grunge" was coined to describe the metal-punk hybrid of the Pacific northwest - Vedder is in Pearl Jam's vast HQ, home to everything from their rehearsal space to fan club to guitarist Stone Gossard's rescue dog. It was like the world couldn't get me in the laundry room." And it had this laundry room, and I would sit in there with an ashtray that I trusted. "I had this house - not a giant house, but three or four nice rooms, and a jukebox. "I was almost overwhelmed by it all," he says. He says Gus van Sant's 2005 film - a fictionalised account of Cobain's end - nails "that weird malaise, that feeling of almost looking at your life from outside. Cobain, similarly alienated, retreated into heroin and killed himself. At the 1992 Roskilde festival in Denmark, he found himself attacking bouncers (who were attacking a fan) he'd forgotten he wasn't in the crowd any more. But some of us weren't built for speed." He hated that he had lost control of his own identity, his face cropping up on billboards and magazines, crowding him. He wasn't prepared to be America's in-demand rock star - it was like "being strapped to a rocket ship. ![]() Vedder was not one of the "industry kids who they groom on the fucking Disney channel and who do what they are told". ![]() But he didn't want all his life to change. He was grateful for Pearl Jam's success, for the way it had changed his life. Like Cobain, Vedder was being torn into two directions. I felt like my brain was a whore and I was getting mindfucked." ![]() And now people are driving into the wall. "One of the reasons you're protecting yourself is because you've been forthcoming with your emotions," he says. Pearl Jam's enigmatic frontman Eddie Vedder.
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