Temple of the Dog and their production team had ‘concern’ over if Eddie Vedder was capable of performing on the Temple album, as it was his first recording experience and he wasn’t the Eddie he would later become.
Engineer Dave Hillis told the Cobras & Fire podcast, “The question is really interesting. It wasn’t magic right away, it took a bit. A lot of people don’t realize, but it was a big deal at the time for him to be picking up…
In Seattle, Andy [Wood] was like a legend, and so it was kind of big footsteps to walk into, and they were reinventing themselves as well as a band, and Eddie was new. So there’s a lot of that going on, I know that’s why they were really kind of, having hung out with Chris [Cornell] to get confident.
There’s a lot of that going on, not in the studio, but I know outside of the studio that was a big part of things. It took some time, and I always think about it as he wasn’t really Eddie Vedder that we know yet – the Eddie Vedder I met was a lot different.
The first day I saw him, he showed up first. I’m waiting outside kind of early morning and this bright yellow tinted-window Chevy, and he gets out, and the point is you don’t see tinted-window, yellow low-riding Chevy in wet, rainy, cloudy weather, so that was kind of, ‘Whoah!’
He was kind of discovering this character to be born, in a way. I remember in particular there was a moment when the band and Rick had a discussion or a meeting that I’m not really involved in, but I’m there hearing it while doing whatever I was doing. And there was some concern if Eddie should do this, I didn’t know anything, in particular, that was bad going on, but I remember the discussion.
So what ended up happening was, we had a lot of tracks down, we showed Eddie how to – we’d keep three or four tracks open, and show him on the remote on tape machine how to record himself and switch to another take, and locked him in the studio.” Ultimate-Guitar transcribed his comments.
