During a new episode of the Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan, Billy Corgan revealed Pearl Jam nearly got kicked off tour with Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1991.
“We were on the Chili Pepper tour,” Corgan recalled. “It was Pearl Jam, Pumpkins, Chili Peppers was the bill. We played about 40 shows on that tour. And during the tour that’s when [the Chili Peppers’ hit single] ‘Under the Bridge’ took off, and that record just blew up like crazy.”
The singer continued, “And Pearl Jam had I think one song out, it would have been ‘Alive’ or something. And I remember coming to one of the gigs, it was about halfway through the [tour], and we were hanging out with them every day, like you do on tour.”
“And they all look like somebody had died. And I said, ‘What’s wrong with you guys?’ Because they’re usually kind of an upbeat bunch,” Corgan shared.
He revealed Pearl Jam members’ response, saying, “And they go, ‘They’re gonna withdraw our tour support.’ I was like, ‘You’re on this massive tour.’ [They said] ‘If this single doesn’t catch, they’re gonna pull our support.'”
“That’s what people don’t understand about the way that business worked back then. If that song hadn’t caught on…,” Billy said of how different the music business was back then.
Pearl Jam’s ‘Alive’ became a hit, and ‘Ten’ went on to sell 13 million copies in the US alone. “The original story being told in the song is of a young man being made aware of some shocking truths,” Eddie Vedder told VH1’s Storytellers about the meaning behind ‘Alive.’
He added, “And one was that the guy he believed to be his father while growing up was not, and number two was that his real father had passed away a few years before. As if adolescence wasn’t tough enough.”
“The guy was me, but I barely knew me then. To be honest I was barely there to be known. So he took this to be a curse, like fine you told me this secret, but I’ve gotta figure a way to deal with this. Fine the dad’s dead but I’m still alive and I’ve gotta deal with this. So it was a curse,” Vedder also said.
Corgan will start a European tour with Smashing Pumpkins on July 27 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.
