The song gained popularity for its music video, directed by Mark Pellington and released in 1992, which received heavy rotation by MTV and became a hit. The original music video for "Jeremy" was directed and produced by Chris Cuffaro. Epic Records and MTV later rejected the music video, and released the version directed by Pellington instead. In 1993, the "Jeremy" video was awarded four MTV Video Music Awards, including Best Video of the Year.
"Jeremy" features lyrics written by vocalist Eddie Vedder and music written by bassist Jeff Ament. The song's music was written before the band went out on tour in support of Alice in Chains in February 1991.
Ament on the song:
I already had two pieces of music that I wrote on acoustic guitar...with the idea that I would play them on a Hamer 12-string bass I had just ordered. When the bass arrived, one of [the pieces] became "Jeremy"...I had an idea for the outro when we were recording it the second time...I overdubbed a twelve-string bass, and we added a cello. That was big-time production, for us....Rick [Parashar]’s a supertalented engineer-musician...Stone [Gossard, Pearl Jam’s rhythm guitarist] was sick one day, and Ed, Rick and I conjured up the art piece that opens and closes the song. That was so fun—I wanted to make a whole record like that.
In another interview, Ament stated:
We knew it was a good song, but it was tough getting it to feel right—for the chorus to sit back and the outro to push over the top. The tune went from practically not making it on the record to being one of the best takes. I'm not sure if it's the best song on the album but I think it's the best take. On "Jeremy" I always heard this other melody in the choruses and the end, and it never sounded good on guitar or bass. So we brought in a cello player which inspired a background vocal, and those things made the song really happen. Most of the time if something doesn't work right away, I just say fuck it—but this was an instance when perseverance paid off.
"Jeremy" is based on two different true stories. The song takes its main inspiration from a newspaper article about a 15-year-old boy named Jeremy Wade Delle from Richardson, Texas, who shot himself in front of his teacher and his second period English class of 30 students on the morning of January 8, 1991. In a 2009 interview, Vedder said that he felt "the need to take that small article and make something of it—to give that action, to give it reaction, to give it more importance."
Delle was described by schoolmates as "real quiet" and known for "acting sad". After coming into class late that morning, Delle was told to get an admittance slip from the school office. He left the classroom, and returned with a .357 Magnum revolver. Delle walked to the front of the classroom, announced "Miss, I got what I really went for", put the barrel of the firearm in his mouth, and pulled the trigger before his teacher or classmates could react. Lisa Moore, a schoolmate, knew Jeremy from the in-school suspension program: "He and I would pass notes back and forth and he would talk about life and stuff," she said. "He signed all of his notes, 'Write back.' But on Monday he wrote, 'Later days.' I didn't know what to make of it. But I never thought this would happen."
When asked about the song, Vedder explained:
It came from a small paragraph in a paper which means you kill yourself and you make a big old sacrifice and try to get your revenge. That all you're gonna end up with is a paragraph in a newspaper. Sixty-four degrees and cloudy in a suburban neighborhood. That's the beginning of the video and that's the same thing in the end; it does nothing … nothing changes. The world goes on and you're gone. The best revenge is to live on and prove yourself. Be stronger than those people. And then you can come back.
The second story the song is based on, involved a student that Vedder knew from his junior high school in San Diego, California. He elaborated further in a 1991 interview:
I actually knew somebody in junior high school, in San Diego, California, that did the same thing, just about, didn't take his life but ended up shooting up an oceanography room. I remember being in the halls and hearing it and I had actually had altercations with this kid in the past. I was kind of a rebellious fifth-grader and I think we got in fights and stuff. So it's a bit about this kid named Jeremy and it's also a bit about a kid named Brian that I knew and I don't know...the song, I think it says a lot. I think it goes somewhere...and a lot of people interpret it different ways and it's just been recently that I've been talking about the true meaning behind it and I hope no one's offended and believe me, I think of Jeremy when I sing it.
In July 1991, Vedder became acquainted with photographer Chris Cuffaro. Vedder suggested Cuffaro film a music video for the band. On Vedder's insistence, Epic gave Cuffaro permission to use any song off Ten. He chose "Jeremy", which was not intended to be released as a single at the time. Epic refused to fund the clip, forcing Cuffaro to finance it himself.
Cuffaro raised the money by taking out a loan and selling all of his furniture and half his guitar collection. He first filmed several scenes of a young actor, Eric Schubert, playing the part of Jeremy. Cuffaro and his crew spent a day filming Schubert playing the part of Jeremy. The scenes with Pearl Jam were filmed in a warehouse on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles, California. A revolving platform was rigged at the center of the set, and the members of the band climbed on it individually to give the illusion of the song being performed as a crew member spun the giant turntable by hand. Vedder appeared with black gaffer's tape around his biceps as a mourning band for the real Jeremy.
By the time Cuffaro finished his music video, Epic had warmed up to the idea of releasing "Jeremy" as a single. Music video director Mark Pellington was brought in to handle the project. Pellington said that he "wasn't a huge fan of the band, but the lyrics intrigued me—I spoke to Eddie, and I really got connected to his passion." Pellington and Pearl Jam convened in Kings Cross, London, England, in June 1992 to film a new version of the "Jeremy" music video.
Working with veteran editor Bruce Ashley, Pellington's high-budget video incorporated rapid-fire editing and juxtaposition of sound, still images, graphics and text elements with live action sequences to create a collage effect. The classroom scenes were filmed at Bayonne High School in New Jersey. The video also featured many close-ups of Vedder performing the song, with the other members of Pearl Jam shown only briefly. Some of the stock imagery was similar to the original video, but when it came to the band Pellington focused on Vedder. Vedder thus serves as the video's narrator. Ament said, "It was mostly Mark and Ed's vision. In fact, I think it would have been a better video if the rest of the band wasn’t in it. I know some of us were having a hard time with the movie-type video that Mark made, because our two previous videos were made live." Jeremy was played by 12-year-old Trevor Wilson, in his only acting role. Wilson died in 2016 at age 36 in a drowning accident in Puerto Rico.
The video premiered on August 1, 1992, and quickly found its way into heavy rotation on MTV. Michele Romero of Entertainment Weekly described the music video as "an Afterschool Special from hell." She stated that "when Eddie Vedder yowls the lyric 'Jeremy spoke in class today,' a chill frosts your cranium to the point of queasy enjoyment." The success of the "Jeremy" video helped catapult Pearl Jam to fame. Pellington stated, "I think that video tapped into something that has always been around and will always be around. You're always going to have peer pressure, you're always going to have adolescent rage, you're always going to have dysfunctional families." The video won four MTV Video Music Awards in 1993, including Best Video of the Year, Best Group Video, Best Metal/Hard Rock Video, and Best Direction. Trevor Wilson appeared with Pearl Jam onstage when they won 'Best Video Of The Year.' Vedder introduced him to the crowd: "This is Trevor. He lives."
In Pellington's video, Jeremy is played by Trevor Wilson. He is shown being alienated and taunted by classmates at school, running shirtless through a forest, and screaming at his parents at a dinner table. Only Jeremy is shown moving in the video; every other character in his life is frozen in a series of stationary tableaus (the only exception being his teacher at the final scene, when she catches the apple that Jeremy tosses her). Shots of words depicting others' presumed descriptions of Jeremy—such as "problem", "peer", "harmless", and "bored"—frequently appear onscreen. Included are three biblical allusions: "the serpent was subtil", from Genesis 3:1, "the unclean spirit entered", from Mark 5:13, and "Genesis 3:6", referencing the concept of original sin.
As the song becomes more dense and frenetic, Jeremy's behavior becomes increasingly agitated. Strobe lighting adds to the anxious atmosphere. Jeremy is shown standing, arms raised in a V (as described in the lyrics at the beginning of the song), in front of a wall of billowing flames. Jeremy is later shown staring at the camera while wrapped in an American flag, surrounded by fire. Jeremy then stands shirtless in an artificial forest surrounding by various drawings, becoming aggravated, breaking off a branch, and swinging it at various trees in anger, all the while the lights flashed around Jeremy's body.
The final scene of the video shows Jeremy striding into class shirtless, tossing an apple to the teacher, and standing before his classmates. He reaches down and draws back his arm as he takes a gun out of his pocket (The gun only appears onscreen in the unedited version of the video). The edited version cuts to an extreme close-up of Jeremy's face as he puts the barrel of the gun in his mouth, closes his eyes, and pulls the trigger. After a flash of light, the screen turns black. The next shot is a pan across the classroom, showing Jeremy's blood-spattered classmates, all completely still, recoiling in horror. The video ends on a shot of a dangling blackboard, on which all the harsh terms and phrases seen earlier had been scrawled.
MTV restrictions on violent imagery prevented Pellington from showing Jeremy putting the gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger at the climax of the video. Ironically, the ambiguous close-up of Jeremy at the end of the edited video, combined with the defensive posture of Jeremy's classmates and the large amount of blood, led many viewers to believe that the video ended with Jeremy shooting his classmates, not himself. In 1997, Rolling Stone described the song and video as depicting an unpopular student bringing a gun to class and shooting people.
Pellington himself dismisses this interpretation of the video. He said, "Probably the greatest frustration I've ever had is that the ending [of the "Jeremy" video] is sometimes misinterpreted as that he shot his classmates. The idea is, that's his blood on them, and they're frozen at the moment of looking." He had filmed a scene where Jeremy is shown putting the gun in his mouth, but this footage was edited with a zoom effect for the MTV version of the video so the gun was not visible. Pellington also filmed a slightly different take of the classroom Pledge of Allegiance sequence. In the MTV version of the video there is a brief shot of Jeremy's classmates making a gesture that could be either the American Bellamy salute or the Hitler salute; in the original cut of the video this scene is longer. The video is shot in such a way that the camera pan shows the alternate salute while traveling in the opposite direction...left to right as opposed to right to left with the normal hand over heart positioning.
After "Jeremy", Pearl Jam backed away from making music videos. "Ten years from now," Ament said, "I don't want people to remember our songs as videos." The band did not release another video until 1998's "Do the Evolution", which was entirely animated.
In 1996, a shooting occurred at Frontier Junior High School in Moses Lake, Washington, that left three dead and a fourth injured. The prosecutors for the case said shooter, Barry Loukaitis, was influenced by the edited version of the music video.
After the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, MTV and VH1 rarely aired the video, and mention of it was omitted in retro-documentaries such as I Love the '90s. It is still available on the internet, on websites such as YouTube. It can also occasionally be seen playing at Hard Rock Cafe locations. The video occasionally airs on MTV Classic. The video was included in MuchMusic's list of the 12 most controversial videos. The reason was because of the topic of suicide, and recent school shootings. The scene of Jeremy with the gun in his mouth was not shown. It was also included on VH1's countdown of the "100 Greatest Songs of the '90s" at number 11, with several clips of the video shown, including part of the ending. The uncensored version of the video was shown as part of the retrospective "Pearl Jam Ten Revisited" on VH1 Classic in 2009 prior to the album's re-release, including the shot in which Jeremy puts the gun in his mouth. On June 4, 2020 it was released on YouTube for National Gun Violence Awareness Day.
Promo CD
- "Jeremy" (Promo Version) – 5:21
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