6 December, 1994
In November 1994 Pearl Jam's third album, Vitalogy entered the U.S. Top 200 album chart at number 55. Nothing special about that. Except that the placing was based on sales of vinyl pressings only. The CD and cassette versions were not due to be shipped until two weeks later.
Modernity and the group’s frontman Eddie Vedder were not easy companions, it seemed. When journalist Craig Marks interviewed him about Vitalogy for US magazine Spin, the singer initially suggested they converse by overnight mail. He added that he suspected his cordless phone was being tapped by someone with a shortwave radio.
“No one seems to know how to deal with honesty anymore.”
Eddie Vedder
“No one seems to know how to deal with honesty anymore,” Vedder eventually told Marks. “They see someone being honest and they think there’s got to be a hidden agenda there. And it’s really fucking it up for some of us who are coming clean.”
These were not tranquil times for the Seattle group. Their previous two albums, 1991’s Ten and Vs., which entered the US charts in October 1993 at number one, had both been huge sellers. Suspicious of fame and its compromises, the group had already decided that they would make no more MTV-friendly single videos, and would keep media interviews to a minimum. They’d also been involved in a legal dispute with Ticketmaster over their alleged monopoly in the concert industry. There were other pressures, too. On April 16, during the second leg of the five-month US tour for Vs., the group had debuted the Vitalogy song Not For You on Saturday Night Live in tribute to their peer Kurt Cobain, who had taken his own life less than two weeks previously. The following night, at the tour’s closing date at the Paramount in New York, drummer would Dave Abbruzzese would play his final show before being fired.
Yet Abbruzzese would appear on all but one track on the album Pearl Jam had written and recorded - in fraught style according to producer Brendan O’Brien - on breaks from the Vs. tour in studios in New Orleans, Atlanta and Seattle. It was a mixture of introspection and radio-ready grungy rock, with the fame-weary narrator of reflective ballad Corduroy declaring to the unseen forces of consumerism, “I don’t want to take what you can give/ I would rather starve than eat your bread.” Looking back to simpler times, a telling flashback occurred when Vedder decided to record Better Man, an unhealthy relationship song he'd penned during his high school days and performed with his late eighties band Bad Radio.
The album’s retro packaging was also significant. Vedder had found a vintage copy of Dr E.H. Ruddock medical encyclopedia Vitalogy, first published in 1899, in a thrift store. He decided that he would not only appropriate the book's moniker (he’d originally intended to call the album Life) but also elements of its design. One booklet spread, decorated with cross section of a human head and a skeletal x-ray, declared, “A CD is like bad acid, not for production or consumption. Viva la vinyl.”
Indeed, the band’s seemingly Luddite belief in black plastic remained a central talking point. US trade papers, revelling in what they perceived as a battle for the Christmas best-seller, noted that in vinyl terms Vitalogy was easily seeing off The Beatles’ Live At The BBC. “I have sold 600 copies of The Beatles album,” claimed the owner of a Boston chain. “But Pearl Jam have sold 3,300.” Another dealer enthusiastically claimed in Billboard, “I had people buying vinyl that didn’t have record players anymore.”
When Ten was also reissued on vinyl that month, bassist Jeff Ament explained, “Years ago when the record companies decided they were going to go with the CD format and phase out vinyl, there were a lot of people who listened to records that were unfairly taken out of the loop. I was one of those people. Eddie Vedder loves vinyl, that’s why he wrote Spin The Black Circle.”
Spin The Black Circle, the punky first single from Vitalogy, extolled Vedder's enthusiasm for records via such lines as, “Pull it out, a paper sleeve, oh my joy”. Released in November, it went top twenty and won Pearl Jam their first Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance.
One week after reaching 55 in the Billboard chart, the vinyl version of Vitalogy dropped to 173. Then the release of the CD and cassette editions saw the album leap 172 places to Number One, the biggest jump in the history of the chart. Eddie Vedder smiled briefly, no doubt, as he viewed the ratings. Then he returned to writing a lyric for a forthcoming song, using his trusty typewriter.