Strange Brew: Vedder Vs. Spotlight; A New Strategy for Morrissey

Ready for the Pearl Jam blitz?

With the band’s new album, titled “Vs.,” expected to enter the pop album charts at No. 1 after it’s released on Oct. 14, the music industry is set for a big sales campaign.

One problem: The band isn’t.

Pearl Jam is eschewing the standard media blitz that accompanies albums as highly anticipated as this--apparently because singer Eddie Vedder is having trouble coping with being famous.

According to Pearl Jam manager Kelly Curtis, the band had even planned to avoid some of the media overkill by sneak-releasing “Vs.” a month before the announced date, so that it would be in the stores before the press had a chance to latch onto it.

The plan was abandoned only when it was announced that Nirvana’s “In Utero” was to be released close to that earlier date, and Pearl Jam didn’t want to intensify the talk about a rivalry between the two Seattle groups.

As it is, the media profile will be relatively low.

The band will be the cover story of the Rolling Stone magazine that goes on sale Oct. 12--written by “Singles” writer-director Cameron Crowe in a return to rock journalism. A Spin magazine cover story will come a month later, and there may be one more new interview published in December. But, sources close to the band say, that’s it.

That’s left the rest of the rock press scrambling. Musician magazine, for example, could have had a new interview with Vedder, but only if it waited until the Rolling Stone and Spin stories were published. So editor Bill Flanagan chose instead to run a story combining his “scene” observations from the band’s summer European tour with interview material from a piece done by a German journalist.

“As an editor of a magazine, my job is to plaster (Vedder’s) face on 10,000 newsstands,” says Flanagan. “He’s not sure how useful that is to his music.”

Is this just Vedder’s way of creating a mystique?

No, say a variety of friends and music business associates. The singer, they say, has a real dread of fame that some compare to the spotlight-phobia experienced by Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain when his band first reached superstar status. And some of Vedder’s friends say they’re concerned about him.

Anyone who saw him on the MTV Video Music Awards telecast last month knows that something was wrong. A bloated-looking Vedder stumbled and mumbled his way through a performance (including a teaming of the band with Neil Young) and accepted the awards the band won. He carried a bottle of red wine with him on stage--it’s just his latest “prop,” say associates--and backstage made a point of being photographed gulping from two bottles of beer at once.

But one friend of the singer insisted that Vedder was just painfully ill-at-ease. He is known to be critical of MTV in general and reportedly only consented to appear on the show because he would be performing with Young, one of his heroes.

Spin magazine’s music editor Craig Marks says that Vedder addresses his feelings about being in the spotlight in the magazine’s Pearl Jam story, written by Jim Greer.

“Eddie seems a lot less tortured than Kurt,” says Marks. “He just doesn’t really like being famous.”