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Pearl Jam guitarist defends Mötley Crüe following Eddie Vedder beef

By | Published on Wednesday 16 February 2022

Pearl Jam

After Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder recently got into a war of words with Nikki Sixx, a perhaps unexpected person has come to the defence of the latter’s band Mötley Crüe – Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard.

It all began last month when Vedder said in an interview that he’d worked at a venue in the 1980s where hair metal bands like Mötley Crüe had played, and that he had always “despised” what he saw as a “vacuous” music scene.

Sixx then hit back, saying that he was taking Vedder’s comments as a “kind of a compliment”, because Pearl Jam are “one of the most boring bands in history”. This prompted Pearl Jam to tweet a video of one of their audiences apparently having a whale of a time, with the caption “we love our bored fans”.

But while Vedder was not, and is still not, a fan of Mötley Crüe in their heyday, it turns out that several of his bandmates were.

In a new interview with Revolver’s Fan First podcast, Gossard says: “For sure, Jeff [Ament, bass] and Mike [McCready, guitar] and I loved hard rock, you know, like, [we] went through it all. You know, I bought the first Mötley Crüe … records. I thought at the time it was punk-like, you know? It was like Motörhead, and there was things about it that I was discovering about British hard rock at that time that felt also, like, rebellious or against the norm or something that made me interested in it”.

Don’t worry though, this isn’t an issue that Pearl Jam are going to split up over. Musing on how his band has stayed together for 30 odd years, he says: “We’ve learned to compromise with each other and accept each other through many multiple years of ups and downs”.

“And now we can kind of go, ‘Well we’ve got through all that’, so it just gets easier because you’ve already gone through so much that the bumps don’t seem quite as scary”, he adds. “So yes, I think it’s one of the biggest feats of the band is that we stayed a band … It’s huge”.

Nikki Sixx has not commented.



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