TSSnSF: Pearl Jam Twofer

Pearl Jam has two songs that could easily be described as "effed up."



Jeremy, from their first album "Ten," concerns a young boy by the name of, well, Jeremy. From the opening lyric we know something's wrong, since he's drawing pictures of mountaintops with him on top, arms raised in "V" formation in front of a lemon yellow sun. And the dead are laying in a pool of maroon below him.

Well as it turns out, Jeremy is from a broken home. Daddy doesn't give him any love and Mommy doesn't even want him. Meanwhile at school, he's the frequent target of bullying. All of this culminates as Eddie Vedder starts screaming of how to "try to forget this, try to erase this, from the blackboard," before repeating the song's chorus that "Jeremy spoke in class today," a dark refrain reflecting a hidden event.

While the song is more than clear that Jeremy did something as a form of revenge, it's never made clear. Unless you watch the video or know Jeremy's backstory. Jeremy Wade Delle, a 15 year-old boy from Texas shot himself in front of his class. Relegated to a small newspaper paragraph to eventually be forgotten who wasn't friends, family or classmates, Eddie wanted a story like Jeremy's to have importance and eventually made one of the band's few music videos (which faced controversy since it shows the boy playing Jeremy pulling the gun out of his pocket and putting it in his mouth).





The other song, with a decidely more gruesome (if fake) tale, tells of a cannibalistic tour bus driver for Pearl Jam who goes by the name of Dirty Frank. While Jeremy has a much more grim message, Dirty Frank is more or less a dark comedy.

Frank Dahmer (named after famed serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer) kills and eats everything. Groupies, children, eventualy moving on to lead guitarist Mike McCready, leaving Eddie and the band to fear who's next on the menu. The answer to that is revealed near the end as Eddie lets out death screams as the sound of a dirty chainsaw (Dirty Frank's dirty chainsaw) squeal in the foreground.

Oh, also if you had doubts this was for comedic purposes Eddie drops a Shaft reference.