Historian Howard Zinn Interviews Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder
While Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder and historian Howard Zinn may lead very different lives, their conversation here shows there’s no greater bridge than a desire to shake up the status quo.
Eddie Vedder, a rock star whose band’s breakthrough video (Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy,” 1992) showed a student erupting from his desk, has never taken a political science class. Howard Zinn, a retired professor and author of the landmark history text A People’s History of the United States had never before been to anything like the Pearl Jam concert he saw last summer. But the media-critical academic was the interviewer of choice for the media-wary singer. When the doctor and the rocker met for this conversation, they found they have similar class backgrounds and consciousnesses that have been shaped accordingly – and that they could each learn from the different world in which the other works.
HOWARD ZINN: I remember reading that in your early years you had a job that enabled you to read a lot. Was that when you were working as a security guard?
EDDIE VEDDER: Yeah. In an eight-hour shift, usually four hours are quiet. So I’d write bring drum machines to work – whatever I could to still do what I have a passion for and get paid at the same time.
HZ: At that time you weren’t getting paid for your music?
EV: No.
HZ: But you were already writing songs?
EV: Oh, yeah. [Writing songs] is like a curse, actually. It’s something you’re doomed to do. [laughs]
HZ: So many people have a secret desire to do something artistic – music, art, poetry. And they know they’re not going to get paid for it, so they drive a taxi, do carpentry, work as a security person, waiter, busboy. And most of them never get out of those jobs. I think of that whenever I see anybody doing a menial job, like when somebody takes my bag into the hotel. I think, what are the secret longings of that parson? What are their secret talents?
EV: That’s why you never really have a silent cab driver. My wife and I both have this theory: ask a cab driver one question and learn about other parts of the world.
HZ: Was it your reading that got you so interested in the world beyond music, in social issues? Or was it something else?
EV: I think for me, it stems from having had nothing, and knowing how scary that can be, and knowing that no one is going to help you and that you’re gonna raise your hand and no one will call on you. We were hard-working, ambitious young folks, and I remember thinking, Man, there might not be any way out of here. I don’t know how we’re gonna get anything more, if we’ll be able to afford to travel. How big is our world going to be? Is it going to be the apartment to the bus to the job and back again? How much of life will we get to experience?
HZ: So in your case, thinking about other people who had little emerged from the fact that you yourself had so little.
EV: Yeah. I still remember how it feels.
HZ: I think that’s the thing: remembering how it feels. There are people who have had very little, but then become successful, prosperous, well known, and they forget – or maybe they choose to forget, maybe that’s easier – what it was like, what it is like for other people. My parents were poor; we lived in the slums of New York. My father was a waiter with a fourth-grade education; my mother had a seventh-grade education and she was the educated one in the family! Actually, she was a very smart woman, and my father was a hardworking man trying to keep his family alive. Being aware of that, looking at how hard my father worked, at my mother taking care of four sons, and then at the end, seeing them having nothing [material] to show for it, nothing . . . From that point on, for the rest of my life, I never believed anyone when they said – some of my students would say this to me, and my students came from well-off families – “Oh, my father made it; in this country if you work hard, you’ll make it.” The implication being, if you didn’t make it, you didn’t work hard. And I knew that wasn’t true.
EV: I think it helps to hang on to that stuff as a writer, too. I think I got a lifetime of material out of the whole experience.
HZ: You started writing early, right?
EV: Pretty much, yeah. [pause] I’m not . . . see, I don’t . . . I’m not a . . . see, that’s why songs and rock ‘n’ roll are good for me. I have time to put together a thought [laughs], and you don’t have anyone checking the punctuation.
HZ: You’re better off that way.
EV: Yeah, well, songwriting is a good medium.
HZ: I say that on the basis of having been in the academic world. You see people who are meticulous about their grammar and punctuation and spelling, and you fall asleep at the second sentence. There is no life to it. I always wanted to see essays that had life to them – I didn’t care if the students spelled right. The important thing is the feeling. I guess with rock ‘n’ roll, you know right away that you don’t have to pay attention to those rules. You can do whatever you want. Was it always songs that you were writing?
EV: Yeah. I needed something that in the end would give the writing volume. With guitars and drums behind it, you can turn it up. With melody and rhythm, these simple sentences have a little more life to them.
HZ: It’s a mix, a collective thing. It’s not just you as an individual doing something great, it’s you plus this person, that person, that person, and so you become a team. That’s something I discovered for myself after I spent years working on a number of individual projects, writing articles and books. Then I wrote a play in the mid ’70s about the anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman from the early twentieth century. If ever you get a chance, read her autobiography, Living My Life, ’cause that’s what she did. She said, “I’m gonna live my life the way I want to live it. I’m not going to let the government tell me, the church tell me, my bosses tell me, I’m net going to let anyone tell me how I’m going to live my life – my personal life, my sexual life, my political life.” Of course, that got her thrown in jail. When I wrote this play about her, the great moment for me was when I handed my words, the script, to the director so he could cast the play with actors, choose the set designer, select the right music, etc. Suddenly I go to opening night and look at this thing onstage and say, “Wow!” What you’re describing sounds like that experience. The song is no longer just about your words, there are all these other elements to it now as well. I had never been witness to a scene like the one I saw at your concert in L.A., and what was interesting to me was how much everything in the atmosphere contributed to what you were doing onstage. It all created a fantastic mood. And it’s exciting that the audience is in it with you – they feel they’re part of what’s happening onstage.
EV: It is exciting to see twenty thousand people all agreeing on something. Wow, that’s quite a concept right there.
HZ: When you started composing songs, did you think you would write things that had some sort of social message? Did you have that desire from the beginning?
EV: I did, but that was because of the music I was listening to at the time. The music that affected me always had some kind of story line or substance to it. It wasn’t just about motorcycles or rock ‘n’ roll.
HZ: What music were you listening to?
EV: This guy called Pete Townshend.
HZ: Oh, Pete Townshend. I’ve actually heard of him.
EV: He was a little more theatrical. Some of the songs would tell stories or describe characters. One of the biggest periods in my writing, or learning to write, or improving my writing, was the early ’80s, when most mainstream music was just – it wasn’t communicating anything. It just got silly for a while. I knew I could do better than that. I was writing music for myself, to keep myself inspired, not necessarily inspired about music but just about life. I wanted to hear things that I couldn’t go out and purchase myself at the time.
HZ: Do you find that the other people in the band are on your wavelength as far as the songs you write? Are there disagreements about the substance of what you do, or the content of your songs?
EV: No, there’s never been that at all. Which I like to think is because I’m so hard on myself that by the time I bring a song to them it’s at least halfway decent. I respect everyone in the band, so that when they pick up on something, it means a lot to me. Every once in a while they’ll go, “Wow, I was listening to this and I figured out what you’re saying there” or “I see the double meaning there.” I consider that a huge compliment. And they’ve been writing, too, and bringing social issues of their own to the table. Our guitar player has gone out to Indian reservations and actually helped to build structures with native Americans and other volunteers. And we donate money – in Seattle we raised five hundred grand by playing two shows, and the money went to buying books for schools – stuff I believe the government should really be taking care of, that rock bands shouldn’t have to support. And then there’s all the money we give for taxes. This is where my frustration gets raised to another level. Every year we hand over a huge chunk of money to the government, none of us uses a lot of loopholes, and there still isn’t enough money for stuff like schoolbooks. My wife says when you fill out your taxes, there should be a checklist at the bottom, and everyone gets to pick three things they’d like to see some of their money go to.
HZ: I think most people would say, Let’s give more money to the important things, like healthcare, education, kids – all of that – and not the military. I think that’s a terrific idea.
EV: Here’s a bigger question. Near the end of your book A People’s History of the United States, you quote Marlin Fitzwater [White House press secretary, 1983-92] talking about how when individuals and corporations pay up to four hundred thousand dollars to attend a Republican party dinner to raise campaign funds, they have access. And then when asked about people who don’t have so much money, he replies that they have to demand access in other ways. That’s the frustration. How do you get that access? And how do you get enough people motivated and together?
HZ: It’s very hard to sustain that powerful an interest in politics. We were able to do it in the ’60s; there are certain issues that have such an inherent pull, such a tug at people’s consciences, that they will stay with you and you will stay with it for a long time. Racial segregation in the late ’50s – early ’60s was one of them. The war in Vietnam was another. I think what’s happening now is we haven’t found the issue that will excite people enough to build a great national movement, a central dramatic issue that will grab people and keep them focused for a while. You know from the benefit concerts you do that there are people working on Tibet, people working on choice, people working on providing food and medicine. There’s a huge number of people in this country we don’t know about who are doing good things. It’s important to know about those things because otherwise you would be very discouraged – you would look on TV or in the newspapers and see nothing but what this senator or congressman or secretary of state is saying. Television and newspapers are not telling you what these other people are doing. I think of music as playing that kind of role. I think, Here’s politics on this level up here, and it’s corrupt and awful, and then underneath that surface there are the people, there’s culture, there’s music, there’s writing, there’s painting, there’s poetry. There are people who link things and they are, little by little, having an effect. Things are bubbling beneath the surface. I think of music as being part of that.
EV: Someday I really hope to take a political science class. Until then, I’m reading your work.
HZ: I think you would learn more from just reading and talking to people than by taking classes. People who haven’t taken classes have a romantic notion of what classes do. Like people who haven’t gone to college think, Oh, If only I went to college, I’d really be smart.
EV: Wow, so I can just let go of all that?
HZ: Yeah, absolutely.
EV: I’m going to walk out of here feeling a lot . . . taller.
HZ: To me artists have always been wonderful – what would we do without them? But whenever I come across an artist who is a little more than an artist, who doesn’t just do the art but really thinks about the world outside, to me that is a great blessing. When I was a teenager listening to Pete Seeger, I thought, He’s not just a folksinger; he knows, he cares about what’s going on in the world. And that made me feel something for him I didn’t feel for other good folksingers.
EV: Or even Sinatra. . . This has been great. I’ve appreciated every moment of your time. And it was really nice of you to come see us play. Actually, it made me a little uncomfortable.
HZ: Well, going to a Pearl Jam concert was an experience I would not have had in my life if it hadn’t been for you. Just to take in that whole scene, and to be affected by it, was something I never would have imagined.
