Pete Townshend’s opinion on Pearl Jam

Unlike many musicians of his generation, Pete Townshend has remained interested in the music scene over the decades and has been enthusiastic about many bands that emerged during that time. He has shared his opinions on many of them, including Pearl Jam, one of the most enduring bands to emerge from the Grunge movement that changed the course of Rock music in the early 1990s.

What is Pete Townshend’s opinion on Pearl Jam

Pete Townshend has been a fan and supporter of Pearl Jam since the band rose to fame in the early 1990s. According to him, Eddie Vedder is now a family friend and often spends time with his younger brothers whenever he is in England. Townshend has also said that although he enjoys Pearl Jam’s heavier songs, he is an even bigger fan of their acoustic material.

Once, when asked whether he enjoyed bands that cited The Who as an influence, he mentioned them. “I’m not sure. Sometimes. I think you may mean bands like Pearl Jam and Green Day, who actually cite The Who as an influence. But the music of theirs I like best is not always the heavier stuff,” he said while answering fans’ questions on The Who’s website in 2008.

He doesn’t know the rest of the band that well, but like them very much. “I don’t know the whole band that well. I have met them at Neil Young’s Bridge Concert about 10 years ago, and I do like them. But I would count Eddie as a family friend. When he comes to London, he goes to visit my brother Paul, who’s a painter and decorator.”

Pete Townshend continued:

“(Eddie) hangs out with Paul and his family and goes to the local pub and gets drunk. He supports my brother Simon in his solo shows, and he’ll often appear with them. He often invites Simon to appear with him when he does solo shows. So, he’s very close to the family,” he said in an interview with Ultimate Classic Rock in 2017.

They first met in 1993, at the Berkeley Community Centre, when Eddie Vedder attended one of Pete Townshend’s solo shows in the United States. During their conversation, the Pearl Jam frontman asked Townshend for advice, admitting that he was struggling to cope with his newfound fame. “After a show in San Francisco I talked to Eddie Vedder, the lead singer of Pearl Jam. He was having problems adjusting to fame and was thinking about going back to being a surfer. I gave him my philosophy: we don’t make the choice, the public does. We are elected by them, even if we never stood for office. Accept it,” Townshend recalled in his autobiography “Who I Am”.

Pete Townshend admires Eddie Vedder’s dedication to Pearl Jam and solo work

Since the 1990s, they have performed together live on multiple occasions, mostly playing songs by The Who. However, at a Pete Townshend show at the House of Blues in Chicago in 1999, Eddie Vedder joined him on stage for an acoustic performance of Pearl Jam’s “Better Man.” Townshend played guitar and also joined Vedder on vocals toward the end of the performance. In 2019 the American musician was The Who’s opening act in London. He joined them on stage to sing “The Punk and The Godfather”.

More recently, Townshend said that he believes Eddie no longer has the same feelings he had when he asked for help in the early 1990s. In Pete’s opinion, Vedder seems to be managing everything very well, balancing his career with Pearl Jam and his solo work. “But with Eddie, I think the thing we have never talked about is his loyalty and his commitment to his band.”

“Because he also wants to express himself as a solo artist and as a collaborator. And he’s a writer, he’s one of the key writers for Pearl Jam. So it must be overwhelming, but he stuck to it. He seems vigorous to this day. You know, he’s well past the kind of 34-year-old fuckwit that I became, when I was done dangling big record deals with The Who and playing stadiums and trying to do solo albums all at the same time. He seems to be managing really well.”

He continued:

“So that’s when we met. And since then, we’ve been very good friends, but it goes further than that. He’s also very good friends with my brothers. My two brothers are much younger than me. Simon is 14 years younger and my brother Paul is 12 years younger. And they still live in the same street that I grew up in. And often I’ll hear from, you know, somebody in Ealing Common. ‘Oh, we saw Eddie Vedder and your brother Paul in the pub the other day.’ I’m like, ‘I didn’t even know he was here.’ ‘Oh, he was just passing through, but he bought a few rounds.’ In other words, people in Paul’s local pub in Ealing know Eddie Vedder probably as well as anybody,” Pete Townshend Mojo in 2022.

The Who and Pearl Jam went through similar tragedies and Pete Townshend advised them

Back in 1979, 11 people died in a crowd crush at Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati during a Who concert. In 2000, Pearl Jam went through a similar tragedy when nine people died during their performance at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. When he heard the tragic news involving the American band, Townshend promptly called Vedder. He recalled in a post on his website at the time.

“I spoke yesterday to Eddie Vedder, I don’t want to say any more than that. I passed on what I knew the Who had done wrong after the Cincinnati disaster. In a nutshell, I think we left too soon. I spoke too angrily to the press. Without proper consideration of the fact that the people who deserved respect were the dead and their families. Luckily Pearl Jam and their management have stayed in Denmark, and cancelled subsequent shows. Other bands also marked some respect by refusing to play. If you have a faith, please pray for the victims and their families, and for everyone who was involved. It was a horrific experience for them,” he said on his website.

One of the biggest differences between Punk and Grunge according to Townshend

Many musicians, like Robert Plant, have said that Grunge was the American equivalent of the Punk movement in England, a movement that brought Rock and Roll back to its roots by stripping away the excesses in music. In the United Kingdom, bands like the Sex Pistols were against the older generation of Rock bands. They wanted to represent a new movement and could not openly say they admired some of those acts, such as The Who. To Townshend, the main difference between the two movements is that Grunge represented something new while still allowing artists to admire bands like The Who and acknowledge their influence.

“But the punk movement in the UK changed things. It created a particularly British mechanism (chuckles), which is: ‘We love you, but you’re a complete and utter c**t! And we think everything that you did up until the point that we were born was really really great. But since we’ve been born, you’ve just turned into a big pile of rubbish.’ And this is you know, Britpop, it’s The Jam and it’s Oasis…”

He continued:

“The difference with Pearl Jam and I think also with Nirvana – who were also Who fans – is that they were able to kind of roll with it, I suppose, and live with it. You see it in a huge way in Country & Western music, in particular in America, and maybe in folk music, where the older artists are not just respected and lauded but also allowed to continue, not to just roll over and die. A lot of my midlife shit was about the idea that I too felt that I should roll over and die.”

“And I think that is very much a British thing. That you mustn’t outstay your welcome. And you must also embrace new ideas. They call it neotericism. It’s when you value the new more than the old, whether or not the new or the old is better. With Eddie, there’s no question. He doesn’t feel he has to be embarrassed for being a Who fan,” Pete Townshend told Mojo in 2022.