POP MUSIC : Eddie’s New Jam : Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder, once an underground band Everyman, finds himself reeling from sudden celebrity: ‘It’s all real weird’

“Eddie! Eddie! Eddie!”

The young blond woman is trying to get the attention of Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder as he enters his trailer backstage at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre on the last day of the “Lollapalooza ‘92” tour.

Vedder pokes his head out the door.

She starts to ask him something--”Eddie, can you . . . “--but he cuts her off.

“Not now,” he says tersely. “Just leave me alone. I’m sorry.”

Vedder closes the door hard, takes a deep breath and tries to explain some of the problems of being the latest in a long line of rock-star sex symbols.

“I can’t stand the little girls,” he says, waving his arms agitatedly. “I just can’t deal with that. They see you on TV and they think weird things and they just want to . . . to touch you or something really gross. I’ve had a girlfriend for eight years and so I’m totally focused. I have no interest in any of them.”

Vedder doesn’t seem arrogant or aloof or self-absorbed as he speaks. Rather, he seems confused and overwhelmed. All this is very new to him.

At 27, he’s a veteran of underground rock, having fronted such unheralded punk-alternative bands in San Diego as Bad Radio and Surf and Destroy, but that was a long way from Seattle and Pearl Jam. The group has now sold more than 3 million copies of its debut album, “Ten,” far exceeding any expectations Vedder had when he joined the band in 1990 as it rose from the ashes of Mother Love Bone after the heroin-related death of singer Andrew Wood.

Vedder was put in touch with former Love Bone members Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard by mutual friend Jack Irons, a former drummer for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. In one whirlwind week two years ago he flew up to Seattle to join the group, wrote songs and recorded for five days and performed the band’s first live show on the sixth--all while members of the band also worked on “Temple of the Dog,” a memorial album to Wood that also featured members of Soundgarden.

“I made the statement onstage and I wasn’t very eloquent,” Vedder says of the Pearl Jam performance that just ended. “But two years ago, I was just a fan in that pit at the front of the stage here at the ‘Gathering of the Tribes’ festival watching Soundgarden, so it’s all real weird.

“The good thing is that it happened so quick that I’m still the same person. It’s not like I’ve been around all these years and feel I have a right to be a celebrity or something. As I see it, I think celebrities suck.”

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But Vedder is a celebrity. His cameo appearance in Cameron Crowe’s Seattle-based movie “Singles” gets almost as many young-girl squeals in movie theaters as ex-teen heartthrob Matt Dillon’s starring role. At first glance, this seems unlikely, with Vedder’s stringy, shoulder-length hair and imperfect complexion. But up close there’s a softness to him and a sweetness in his manner that is very disarming. And onstage he’s a dynamo, hurling himself into the crowd or off stacks of speakers with an innocent abandon that has made him an instant youth hero.

It’s easy for teens to believe that he’s one of them, a troubled but optimistic young person just like the characters in his songs. The ironic twist is that by not being larger than life, he’s become larger than life. That he and his songs--about kids trying to survive in a world that seems to be all questions but no answers, all rules but no guidance--have found so much sympathy both surprises and troubles him.

“I guess when we were writing the songs I had no idea that so many people would relate,” Vedder says. “It’s really, um, depressing--and enlightening at the same time--to think that, Jesus Christ, we’ve got a lot of problems here. A lot of problems with parenting, in general.

“I think the ‘70s and ‘80s were a really weird time for parenting, especially in the middle class. Was that the Me Generation or something? Parents were looking for their things, which means a lot of kids got left behind.”

Vedder, born in Chicago and reared in San Diego, says he is speaking from experience, describing his own parents’ role in his upbringing as “inconsistent, and then nonexistent.”

“That was partly my choice,” he says. “It just got to the point where I said, ‘I’m outta here,’ about when I learned to drive.

“But I don’t really like talking about it. It’ll get back (to my parents) and it’ll affect them. I probably should do it to get back at them, but it’s not my way to approach things. I’d just rather not deal with it at all. I think that probably at least one of my parents is pretty upset about my songs. Sometimes he probably can’t escape from my face in certain places. I’m sure he’s had his MTV removed.”

But Vedder says he has no regrets about his lack of contact with his father.

“Actually, I should be sending Pete Townshend cards for Father’s Day,” he says. “His records--that was more parenting than I got, just relating and having an outlet.”

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Music is still Vedder’s outlet, both onstage and in the studio, although the pressures of Pearl Jam’s success are starting to mount.

“Pretty much, uh, terrified” is how he describes his feelings about the band’s quick rise. “I’m really thankful for all the freedom it gives, but, at the same time, the way I approach music is from a real honest perspective. And when it gets this big, a lot of people are going to become cynical about it.

“I’m still going to write the same way. I’m not going to think about those people. But it’s gonna be a shame. People will be real cynical about future work. And I’m not going to be able to care. Or maybe we’ll release things under different names. We’ll have fun with it.”

Some people are already cynical about Pearl Jam. Vedder’s stage mania is sometimes dismissed as calculated, the band’s music as too safe and its sudden prominence in the Seattle-rock pantheon as bandwagon-jumping.

Vedder has answers to all three knocks.

The concert antics, he swears, are spontaneous expressions of his elation to be performing. “You can ask anybody on any crew if they’ve ever seen me test the scaffolding or light stands before a show to see if they’re safe to climb,” he says.

“I’ve gotten myself in some sticky situations that way. There’s always a risk, but that’s what makes it interesting. I’m just trying to, like, connect , like (expletive) connect! You’ve got one night to do it, the most amazing medium to do it with--visual and physical. I don’t do it when I don’t feel it. I didn’t do anything today.”

As for the musical style, which has little of the chaos conveyed by, say, Nirvana, Vedder acknowledges that there is some incongruity. “We’re not hard-core punks--maybe inside here,” he says, pointing to his head. “But what comes out is different. We have our musical tastes, and it happens to be the way we play.”

And the Seattle angle has been a real bone of contention, within the scene (Vedder recently made peace with Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, who had accused Pearl Jam of trend-hopping) and outside of it.

“I warned Cameron Crowe that if anyone at Warner Bros. (which released “Singles”) made too much of the Seattle scene, that I would, like, go buy a gun and become the martyr of the whole scene,” he says. “There’s just a lot of misplaced attention. There are just so many good underground bands up there.”

Yet for all the pressures of his success and the people who want a piece of him, Vedder remains somewhat charmed by his popularity. Does he ever wish that it hadn’t happened so fast and so big?

“I can’t wish anything that isn’t so,” he says. “I have to just go with what’s here and now. As far as people, it’s been the greatest thing--people that just come and talk to me or come and listen to my music. . . . I don’t mind respect, but I can’t handle adulation.”