Pearl Jam‘s Stone Gossard appeared on Revolver‘s Fan First podcast on Monday and defended Mötley Crüe amid Eddie Vedder‘s ongoing feud with the band.
While the frontman dissed Vince Neil and co. — not to mention the entire ’80s glam rock scene — as “vacuous” in a recent interview with The New York Times Sunday magazine, it turns out Gossard is actually a fan.
“For sure Jeff [Ament] and Mike [McCready] and I loved hard rock, you know, like, went through it all,” the guitarist said. “You know, I bought the first Mötley Crüe Leathür 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.”
Elsewhere during the interview, Gossard also named the first artist he idolized (Gary Wright, because of 1975’s “Dream Weaver”), chose some rather surprising picks for his personal “musical Mount Rushmore” (Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Billie Holiday and Devo for “someone way left field”), and opened up about keeping Pearl Jam together all these years.
“It comes from that ’70s love of bands, and seeing our bands disagree and not get along and then think, ‘That’s silly,’ you know?” he mused about the group’s longevity. “Or not silly or whatever. So I think we went into it with some of that egalitarian like, ‘Yes, we’re going to share in publishing, and we’re all going to try to write and we’re going to try to support each other.’ So it’s kind of built in. But building it in and actually doing it are two different things.
“So we’ve learned to compromise with each other and accept each other through many multiple years of ups and downs,” Gossard continued. “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. So yes, I think it’s one of the biggest feats of the band is that we stayed a band and we still all kind of write. It’s huge.”
Watch Gossard’s complete interview with Revolver below.
