Vedder was, by all accounts, a tireless hustler. 'He was the one trying to plug the shows. 'It was his deal,' says Marco Collins, one of the San Diego DJs who used to field Vedder's calls. He xeroxed elaborate handmade publicity fliers and designed the artwork for the band's demo cassette, which he shilled to local radio stations. Though hired simply as the group's singer, he quickly seized the reins of the operation, becoming not only Bad Radio's chief songwriter but their manager, booker and chief promoter. If Vedder was the focal point of the band onstage, he was also the focal point offstage. 'I'd be at shows, and people would be going, 'Wow, check this guy out!' They may or may not have liked the music,īut everybody was just like, 'Whoa, this guy's good!'' 'Eddie's always been a great performer,' says his San Diego friend Mike Aitken, whose parents where Vedder's landlords for four and a half years. Constantly fingering his long mane of hair, grimacing, pounding his mike stand against the floor, Vedder brought all his theatrical know-how to bear. Onstage, Vedder's early dramatic training came in handy. Here, Vedder's vocal manner emerges full-blown: the testosterone-heavy, David Clayton-Thomas style baritone that would become his signature. Vedder sings in a thinner, higher register than he's known for today-that is until the last song, a version of 'Better Man', which would eventually appear on Pearl Jam's Vitalogy and become one of that band's biggest radio hits. 'We were blown away, ' says bassist Dave Silva.Ī Bad Radio demo cassette from 1989 reveals the band trying to mix bland, radio-friendly rock with the funk-inflicted grooves of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Everybody agreed that Eddie was the choice.' Only after Vedder got the gig did his Bad Radio mates learn that their new singer had a cache of finished songs. 'But Eddie had something from the inside, some energy. 'One guy wasn't too bad', says Valery Saifudinov, who ran the rehearsal studio and was present for the audition. Vedder submitted a homemade audition demo, which included his cover of Bruce Springsteen's brooding 'Atlantic City'.Īt a live audition, Vedder sang a number of cover songs, including the Rolling Stones' 'Paint It Black'. A Duran Duran influenced rock band, Bad Radio, was looking for a singer to help take them in the more alternative, Love and Rockets direction. Working low end jobs as a hotel security guard and petroleum-station attendant, he penned a large number of original songs while working the graveyard shift but did not take his talents public until late 1986, when he responded to an ad in the San Diego Reader. Selected portions of the article, those relating to Bad Radio, are reprinted without permission here:

Note that many of the details of this article are disputed by other Bad Radio band members, so it likely contains several factual errors. The November 28, 1996, issue of Rolling Stone magazine contained a cover story about Eddie called 'Pearl Jam's Mystery Man.' Though this article was widely considered to be an anti-Eddie smear article and was not received well by either music fans or musicians, it contained the most complete published narrative of the Bad Radio era to date. In fact, Eddie's published comments on this time are essentially restricted to 'I had just broken up with a band, Bad Radio, mostly because of the lack of ambition on the other members' parts.' ( Pearl Jam, by Mark Blake, c. Most books about Pearl Jam skip over the Bad Radio era of Eddie's music career, likely due to the fact that the band was never signed to any record contract and few outside the southern California area knew them. Bad Radio may enjoy more notoriety and interest today than when they were performing due to the current success of their former vocalist, Eddie Vedder, now known to the world as the frontman for Pearl Jam.

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