Bill Burr Confronted Eddie Vedder Over Pearl Jam Grudge
Amidst all the questions surrounding SNL50 — Is Lorne Michaels going to retire? Where is Bill Hader? Does somebody have an eye on Chevy Chase? — Seth Meyers asked the most important one to Bill Burr this week on Late Night: Did the comedian mend fences with Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder?
Burr protested — he didn’t have an issue with Vedder per se. It’s just that Pearl Jam was the band that made him realize his youth was over.
Turns out Burr was a big hair metal guy back in the day — Mötley Crüe, Poison, Ratt, you name it. “And I was loving them. And they were on the countdown,” he told Meyers, presumably referring to MTV’s habit, back in the day, of counting down the day’s top videos. Burr’s hair-metal bands ruled in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “And then Nirvana came in, and I was like, ‘What’s this?’”
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But Kurt Cobain and the boys weren’t the main target of Burr’s ire. “It was Pearl Jam,” he griped. “When Pearl Jam came, that was another one of those grunge Seattle bands. And that’s when I was like, ‘Oh, my God. This isn’t ending. This is just gonna keep coming.’ And then all my bands, Skid Row and all of them, were gone.”
Blame the grunge bands for ending the glam days of Whitesnake. “It was just these sad guys singing about being under a bridge and not being happy,” Burr groused. “And I’m like, ‘What happened to ‘Nothing But A Good Time’ and ignoring all your problems with cocaine, right?”
SNL50 finally gave Burr the chance to confront his 1991 antagonist. He ambled over and sat next to Vedder. “Man, I hated your band,” Burr told him. “You ended my thing.”
Burr delivered the barbs good-naturedly, he said, and Vedder cracked up at the criticism. The not-so-angry confrontation finally gave Burr a chance to leave the past in the past. “Do you know how long it took me to admit how great a band Pearl Jam is? Because now I love ‘em,” he said. “But it was like 20 years where I was just like, I’m not listening to those guys.”
Meyers was proud of Burr for his personal growth journey. “That’s the nice thing about you, Bill,” he said. “I think, after 20 years, you reassess every position you’ve held.”
“Yeah,” Burr agreed. “I evolve.”
