Vitalogy is the third
studio album by the American
alternative rock band
Pearl Jam, released on November 22, 1994 through
Epic Records. Pearl Jam wrote and
recorded while touring behind its previous album
Vs. (1993). The music on the record was
more diverse than previous releases, and consists of aggressive
rock songs, ballads, and several
experimental tracks.
Vitalogy was packaged in a booklet that replicated
material from a 1920s medical book. The album was first released on
vinyl record, followed by a
release in other formats two weeks later on December 6, 1994. Upon
its CD release,
Vitalogy became the second-fastest-selling
album in history, behind only
Vs. The album has been
certified
five times platinum by
the
RIAA
in the United States.
Recording
For its third album, Pearl Jam again worked with producer
Brendan O'Brien. The band
wrote many of the songs during soundchecks during its
Vs. Tour and the majority
of the album's tracks were recorded during breaks on the tour.
The first
session took place late in 1993 in New Orleans
, Louisiana
, where the band recorded "Tremor Christ" and
"Nothingman". The rest of the material was written and
recorded in 1994 in sessions in Seattle
, Washington
and Atlanta
, Georgia
, with the band finishing the album at Bad Animals Studio in Seattle after the
tour's completion. "Immortality" was written in April 1994
when the band was on tour in Atlanta. Sources state that most of
the album was completed by early 1994, but that either a forced
delay by Epic, or the band's battle with ticket vendor
Ticketmaster, were to blame for the
delay.
Tensions within the band had dramatically increased by this time.
Producer
Brendan
O'Brien said, "
Vitalogy was a little strained. I'm
being polite—there was some imploding going on." Bassist
Jeff Ament said that "communication was at an
all-time low." Drummer
Dave
Abbruzzese stated that the communication problems started once
guitarist
Stone Gossard stopped acting
as the band's mediator. According to Gossard,
Vitalogy was
the first album in which lead vocalist
Eddie Vedder made the final decisions. At the
time, Gossard thought of quitting the band. Gossard said that the
band was having trouble collaborating, so most of the songs were
developed out of
jam sessions. He added
that "eighty percent of the songs were written 20 minutes before
they were recorded." During the production of
Vitalogy,
lead guitarist
Mike McCready went into
rehabilitation to receive treatment for alcohol and cocaine
abuse.
Drums on "Satan's Bed" were performed by Abbruzzese's drum tech
Jimmy Shoaf. On the day it was recorded, Abbruzzese was in the
hospital having his tonsils removed. Vedder and Gossard asked for
Shoaf's help to get a drum machine working, and after setting it
up, the pair asked Shoaf to perform the same beat on the drums. He
is credited on the lyric sheet as "Jimmy". Months after finishing
the initial recording sessions for
Vitalogy, Abbruzzese
was fired in August 1994 due to personality conflicts with the band
members. Gossard said, "It was the nature of how the politics
worked in our band: It was up to me to say, 'Hey, we tried, it's
not working; time to move on.' On a superficial level, it was a
political struggle: For whatever reason his ability to communicate
with Ed and Jeff was very stifled. I certainly don't think it was
all Dave Abbruzzese's fault that it was stifled."
Jack Irons, the original drummer for the
Red Hot Chili Peppers and Abbruzzese's
successor, plays drums on "Hey Foxymophandlemama, That's Me".
Gossard said, "Jack entered the band right at the end of making
Vitalogy. Jack's a breath of fresh air, a family man.
Everybody had a strong sense of friendship with him immediately. He
was just there to play drums and help out."
Music and lyrics
In a 1995 interview,
Guitar
World writer Jeff Gilbert described
Vitalogy as
"strange" and "very eclectic." McCready agreed, saying, "There is
some weird stuff on there." McCready attributed the album's sound
to the group recording it on tour. During this period Vedder began
to contribute in a large capacity as a guitarist. Gossard said,
"
Vitalogy is the first one where Ed plays guitar and he
wrote three to four songs. I remember thinking, 'This is so
different. Is anyone going to like this?'...It had a more
punk feel to it. Simple songs recorded really
quickly." The album has a notable lack of guitar solos compared
with the band's first two albums. McCready said, "
Vitalogy
is not really a 'solo' album. I don't think the songs demanded
solos; it was more of a rhythmic album."
Stephen Thomas Erlewine of
Allmusic said that "thanks to its
stripped-down, lean production,
Vitalogy stands as Pearl
Jam's most original and uncompromising album." He added that "in
between the straight rock numbers and the searching slow songs,
Pearl Jam contribute their strangest music—the mantrafunk of 'Aye
Davanita', the sub-Tom Waits accordion romp of 'Bugs', and the
chilling sonic collage 'Hey Foxymophandlemama, That's Me'." "Bugs"
features Vedder playing an accordion that he found at a thrift
shop, while "Hey Foxymophandlemama, That's Me" was created using
looped recordings of real patients from a
psychiatric hospital.
Many of the songs on the album seem to be based on the pressures of
fame and dealing with the resulting loss of privacy. These include
"
Not for You", "Pry, To", "
Corduroy", "Bugs", "Satan's Bed", and
"
Immortality". Vedder
said, "I'm just totally vulnerable. I'm way too fucking soft for
this whole business, this whole trip. I don't have any shell.
There's a contradiction there, because that's probably why I can
write songs that mean something to someone and express some of
these things that other people can't necessarily express." The
lyrics of "Not for You" express anger at the bureaucracy of the
music industry and "how youth is being sold and exploited," while
Vedder said "Corduroy" is about "one person's relationship with a
million people." In "Pry, To" the phrase "P-r-i-v-a-c-y is
priceless to me" is repeated. Many think that the lyrics of
"
Immortality" may be
about
Nirvana frontman
Kurt Cobain's suicide, although Vedder has
denied this, suggesting instead that it's about "the pressures on
someone who is on a parallel train." The lyrics that appeared in
the first live version of "Immortality" were altered before the
song was released as part of the album. Vedder said regarding
"
Nothingman" that "if you love someone
and they love you, don't fuck up...'cause you are left with less
than nothing." "
Better Man" is a song
about an abusive relationship. Vedder wrote "Better Man" when he
was in high school and performed it with his previous band,
Bad Radio. Considered a "blatantly great
pop song" by producer Brendan O'Brien, Pearl Jam was reluctant to
record it and had initially rejected it from
Vs. due to its accessibility.
Release and reception
Vitalogy was released first on vinyl on November 22, 1994,
two weeks before the CD release. It debuted at number 55 on the
Billboard 200 album chart.
The album sold 35,000 copies in its first week of release. It
was the first vinyl album to appear on the chart due to vinyl sales
since the proliferation of compact discs.Strauss, Neil.
[http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D07E0DA1239F93BA35751C1A962958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
"Music Lovers Are Voting for Vinyl"]. ''[[The New York Times]]''.
December 8, 1994. Retrieved on March 9, 2008. When ''Vitalogy'' was
released on CD and cassette on December 6, 1994, it reached number
one on the ''Billboard'' 200 album chart. The album sold more than
877,000 copies in its first week of release on CD and became
the second-fastest-selling CD in history, behind only the band's
previous release
''Vs''.[http://web.archive.org/web/20080109033804/http://www.pearljam.com/timeline/
"Pearl Jam: Timeline"]. pearljam.com. ''Vitalogy'' has been
certified five times platinum by the [[Recording Industry
Association of
America|RIAA]],[http://riaa.com/goldandplatinumdata.php?table=SEARCH_RESULTS&title=Vitalogy&artist=Pearl+Jam&perPage=25&go=Search
Gold and Platinum Database Search]. RIAA.com. Retrieved on February
12, 2007. and, as of March 2007, has sold 4.7 million copies
in the United States according to
Nielsen SoundScan.
Rolling Stone staff writer Al
Weisel gave
Vitalogy four out of five stars, describing
the album as "a wildly uneven and difficult record, sometimes
maddening, sometimes ridiculous, often powerful." While Weisel
praised several songs as "[matching] the soaring anthems of
Ten," he criticized
some of the more
experimental
songs as "throwaways and strange experiments that don't always
work."
Jon Pareles of
The New York Times praised the
album's diversity compared to the band's previous records. He
commented that the band incorporated "fast but brutal punk,
fuzz-toned
psychedelia and
judicious
folk-rock, all of it sounding
more spontaneous than before." Pareles felt that the band continued
to be "unremittingly glum", and described the majority of the songs
as "tortured first-person proclamations." Pareles concluded,
"Vedder sounds more alone than ever."
Time reviewer
Christopher John Farley singled out
"Bugs" as one of the album's "share of stinkers." Farley added,
"But that's one admirably experimental failure on a largely
successful album." Despite writing negatively of the album's
"shapeless high-energy riff-rockers",
Newsday staff writer
Ira
Robbins lauded
Vitalogy s sound and called it a
"compelling triumph of surface over substance". In a mixed review
of the album, Mark Jenkins of
The Washington Post perceived a
lack of subject matter and lyrical substance as
Vitalogy s
weakness.
Q magazine gave the album four
out of five stars, stating "It speaks volumes for Pearl Jam's
continuing creative acumen that they can respond so confidently to
a new punk scene that has sprung up."
Robert Christgau of the
The Village Voice gave the album an
A- rating, writing that "Three or four of these songs are faster
and riffier than anything else in P. Jam's book, token experiments
like "Bugs" are genuinely weird, and in an era of compulsory irony
[Vedder's] sincerity is something like a relief—a Kurtlike relief
at that." David Browne of
Entertainment Weekly gave the
album a B+. He said, "
Vitalogy marks the first time it's
possible to respect the band's music as much as its stance." He
added that "despite its musical advances,
Vitalogy leaves
an odd, unsettling aftertaste. You walk away from it energized, but
wondering what price Eddie Vedder, and Pearl Jam, will ultimately
pay for it."
Chicago
Sun-Times writer
Jim
DeRogatis gave it three out of four stars and commended Pearl
Jam for their earnest songwriting. However, DeRogatis also wrote
that the album "leaves you wishing that they'd just lighten up".
USA Today s Edna Gundersen gave
Vitalogy three and a half out of four stars and stated
that it "delivers the band's most compelling, inventive and
confident music to date", while calling it "the rebel yell of a
band that is maturing without mellowing".
Los Angeles Times critic Robert
Hilburn gave
Vitalogy four out of four stars and viewed
its music as an improvement over Pearl Jam's previous work, writing
"This isn't just the best Pearl Jam album but a better album than
the band once even seemed capable of making". Allmusic staff writer
Stephen Thomas Erlewine gave the album four and a half out of five
stars, saying, "Pearl Jam are at their best when they're fighting,
whether it's Ticketmaster, fame, or their own personal demons."
According to
The New
Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), "By
Vitalogy PJ
hit their apex … the band's creative zenith, finding them doing a
Led Zeppelin III on
acoustic tracks like 'Corduroy' and turning in a
Tom Waits-like weird attack on 'Bugs'".
Three singles were released from
Vitalogy. The lead single
"
Spin the Black Circle"
(backed with
B-side "
Tremor Christ", also from the album), was the
band's first to enter the
Billboard Hot 100, reaching
number 18. At the
1996 Grammy
Awards, "Spin the Black Circle" won the band its first
Grammy Award, receiving the award for
Best Hard Rock
Performance. Neither of the album's other commercially released
singles, "
Not for You" and "
Immortality", charted on the
Hot 100, but both placed on the
Mainstream Rock and
Modern Rock charts. Album tracks "
Better Man" and "
Corduroy" also charted. "Better Man" was the
most successful song from
Vitalogy on the rock charts,
spending a total of eight weeks at number one on the Mainstream
Rock charts and reaching number two on the Modern Rock charts. At
the 1996 Grammy Awards,
Vitalogy received nominations for
Album of the Year
and
Best Rock
Album. In 2003, the album was ranked number 492 on
Rolling Stone magazine's list of
the 500 greatest albums of
all time.
Packaging
The
Vitalogy album booklet
and disc.
album is packaged in a booklet based on a book from the 1920s
Vedder found at a garage sale. Ament stated, "Ed brought in that
book, and we said man that would make a great album cover." He
explained that from
Vs. onwards the band tried to take
different approaches to packaging its records. Ament said, "We
tried really hard, to make it like a book, kind of tipped it so it
opened horizontally, which pissed off record stores: they had to
put it in sideways." The packaging cost an extra 50 cents per copy.
Problems arose when the band discovered that later versions of the
book were still under copyright. The band had to confer with its
lawyers in order to work out a final version utilizing the material
it wanted to include with the album.
The booklet contains outdated discussions of health and well-being.
Other notes in the booklet, dealing with life and death
reflections, seem to be more personal, like a message typed on one
of the last pages, supposedly referring to the loss of a loved one
("I waited all day. you waited all day.. but you left before
sunset.. and I just wanted to tell you the moment was beautiful.
Just wanted to dance to bad music drive bad cars.. watch bad TV..
should have stayed for the sunset... if not for me."). The booklet
also displays some poems or original sayings not belonging to the
songs' lyrics, but to be interpreted as a commentary to the songs
and, again, as a reflection on how life should or shouldn't be
lived. An example is the poem typed on the "Aye Davanita" page. The
song's subtitle is "The song without words", as it is an
instrumental track. But the page displays a sort of poem about the
wasted life of a young girl. Another episode of "intruder words" is
on the "Not for You" lyrics page. After the second refrain, instead
of the actual lyrics, the typed words give a hint about the
Sisyphus myth ("Yeah, you call me Sisyphus
love. Yeah, I move the rock. I just don't want to talk about moving
the rock. Anything that distracts me from moving the rock"). The
lyrics to "Whipping" are written on a copy of a petition to
Bill Clinton against Pro-Life killings
of
abortionists. An X-ray of Vedder's teeth
was pictured instead of lyrics on the page for "Corduroy".
The original title for the album was
Life. The first
single, "Spin the Black Circle", was released before the album was
released, and on the back of the single it states "From the Epic
album
Life." The album title
Vitalogy comes from
the early 20th Century medical book from which the cover art and
liner notes are based.
Vitalogy
literally means "the study of life."
Tour
Pearl Jam
promoted the album with tours in Asia, Oceania, and the United States
in 1995. The band was joined by new drummer
Jack Irons. The short tour of the United States focused on the
Midwest and the
West Coast. The band
continued its boycott against
Ticketmaster during its tour of the United
States, refusing to play in Ticketmaster's venue areas, but was
surprised that virtually no other bands joined it in refusing to
play at Ticketmaster venues. The band chose to use alternate
ticketing companies for the shows.
The tour of the United States faced various troubles. Ament said
that the band and its crew had to "[build] shows from the ground
up, a venue everywhere we went."
In June 1995, the band was scheduled to
play at San
Francisco
, California
's Golden Gate Park
in front of 50,000 people. Before the
concert Vedder was forced to stay at a hospital after suffering
from the effects of
food
poisoning. Vedder left the hospital to play the show, however
he was not able to finish and ended up performing just seven out of
twenty-one songs with the band.
Neil
Young filled in for Vedder for the rest of the show that day.
Vedder said, "That whole [Golden Gate Park] thing was a blur based
on some bad food. It was really, really bad. Looking back at it, it
doesn't seem as intense as it was, but it was horrible. I just felt
not human and looking back I should have got through that show
somehow, and I think the fact that Neil [Young] was there made me
feel like I could get off the hook in some way and I did go out for
a few songs." Because of Vedder's health the band was forced to
cancel the remaining dates of its tour of the United States. Some
dates were reinstated while the rest were rescheduled for the fall.
About cancelling the dates, Vedder said, "I think we all agreed
that it had gotten insane, that it was no longer about the music."
Ament later said, "We were so hardheaded about the 1995 tour. Had
to prove we could tour on our own, and it pretty much killed us,
killed our career."
Track listing
Outtakes
"Hard to Imagine", a song previously rejected from
Vs.,
was also recorded during the
Vitalogy sessions. This
version found its way on to the soundtrack for the 1998 film,
Chicago Cab. "Hard to Imagine" is also included on the
2003 rarities compilation,
Lost
Dogs, however this version is the one from the
Vs. sessions. According to Gossard, "Hard to Imagine" was
cut from
Vitalogy because it didn't fit with the other
songs the band was writing at the time. "Out of My Mind", which is
featured as a B-side on the "Not for You" single, was premiered on
the band's 1994 spring tour of the United States and was played
twice. According to Vedder, the song was just a live
improv.
Chart history
Album
Singles
| Year |
Single |
Peak chart positions |
US
|
US Main
|
US Mod
|
AUS
|
CAN
|
GER
|
IRE
|
NLD
|
NOR
|
NZ
|
SWE
|
UK
|
| 1994 |
"Spin the Black Circle" |
18 |
16 |
11 |
3 |
— |
92 |
6 |
21 |
5 |
2 |
16 |
10 |
| "Tremor Christ" |
— |
16 |
16 |
— |
67 |
— |
— |
— |
— |
— |
— |
— |
| 1995 |
"Better Man" |
— |
1 |
2 |
— |
9 |
— |
— |
— |
— |
— |
— |
— |
| "Corduroy" |
— |
22 |
13 |
— |
— |
— |
— |
— |
— |
— |
— |
— |
| "Not for You" |
— |
12 |
38 |
29 |
— |
— |
26 |
— |
— |
10 |
— |
34 |
| "Immortality" |
— |
10 |
31 |
— |
62 |
— |
— |
— |
— |
29 |
— |
— |
| "—" denotes
singles that did not chart. |
|
Accolades
The information regarding accolades attributed to
Vitalogy
is adapted in part from AcclaimedMusic.net.
| Publication |
Country |
Accolade |
Year |
Rank |
| Rolling Stone |
United States |
"The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" |
2003 |
492 |
| Juice |
Australia |
"The 100 (+34) Greatest Albums of the 90s" |
1999 |
101 |
| Juice |
Australia |
"The 50 Best Albums of All Time" |
1997 |
35 |
Personnel
- Pearl Jam
- Dave Abbruzzese – drums
- Jeff Ament – bass guitar, standup,
vocals, black and white photography
- Stone Gossard – guitar, vocals, mellotron
- Jack Irons – drums on "Hey
Foxymophandlemama, That's Me"
- Mike McCready – guitar,
vocals, slide guitar
- Eddie Vedder – vocals, guitar,
accordion; credited as "e.v." for book
concept, theory of Vitalogy, typist
- Additional musicians and production
Notes
References
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