Who Jeremy was
Jeremy Wade Delle was fifteen, and lived in Richardson, Texas. On the morning of 8 January 1991 he arrived late to his second-period English class. His teacher sent him to the office to get a tardy slip. He left the room, came back with a .357 Magnum revolver, walked to the front of the class, said "Miss, I got what I really went for", put the barrel in his mouth and fired, in front of his teacher and about thirty classmates, before anyone could move.
Schoolmates described him as "real quiet" and known for "acting sad". One of them, Lisa Moore, had got to know him through the in-school suspension program, and gave an account afterwards that is more affecting than anything in the song: "He and I would pass notes back and forth and he would talk about life and stuff. 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."
Vedder read about it in a newspaper. What moved him was the size of the item. As he put it in a 2009 interview, 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."
The second boy
The part most people miss is that the song has two sources, and Vedder said so as early as 1991.
The second is a boy he actually knew, from his junior high school in San Diego — a student who shot up an oceanography classroom. Vedder's account:
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.
That detail changes the song's angle. Vedder is not writing purely as a reader of newspapers; part of the material is his own memory of having been on the other side of a fight with a boy who later did something like this. It also explains the lyric's insistence on the classroom's point of view — the picture-drawing, the ignoring, the sudden reversal of who is being looked at.
What Vedder says it argues
The song is often taken as sympathetic, and it is, but its actual position is harder than that. Asked about it, Vedder was direct:
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.
So the song is a rebuttal. The thing an isolated teenager might imagine such an act would achieve — being seen, finally, and on their own terms — is exactly what the song denies. The world does not stop. The weather report stays the same. The revenge fails.
Vedder added, in that same 1991 interview, that people interpret it in different ways and that he had only recently started discussing what was actually behind it, hoping nobody would be offended: "believe me, I think of Jeremy when I sing it."
How the music was built
The music came first and it is Jeff Ament's, written on acoustic guitar before the band toured with Alice in Chains in February 1991, with the intention of playing it on a twelve-string bass he had ordered. When the bass arrived, one of those pieces became this song — which is why the opening figure sounds like neither a normal bass part nor a normal guitar part.
Ament has described the rest of the arrangement as unusually elaborate by their standards at the time: an overdubbed twelve-string bass on the outro, a cello, and — on a day when rhythm guitarist Stone Gossard was ill — the "art piece" of noise that opens and closes the track, put together by Ament, Vedder and producer Rick Parashar. "That was big-time production, for us," he said.
He has also been candid that it nearly did not make the album:
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 … 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.
The video, and the two of them
There are two videos for "Jeremy", and the one people remember is the second.
The original was directed and produced by Chris Cuffaro. Epic Records and MTV rejected it. The replacement, directed by Mark Pellington and released in 1992, is the one that went into heavy rotation and won four MTV Video Music Awards in 1993, including Video of the Year.
Pellington's video is why the song became a phenomenon rather than an album track, and it is also why the song is so frequently misremembered — it is a far more literal piece of work than the lyric, and its imagery has largely replaced the words in public memory.
Directed by Mark Pellington, 1992 — the official 4K restoration. The earlier Cuffaro version was rejected by the label and MTV.
What it did to the band
"Jeremy" was released as a single in Australia and Europe on 17 August 1992 and in the UK on 14 September, backed with the previously unreleased "Footsteps" and "Yellow Ledbetter" — the latter now one of the band's best-loved recordings, and originally a throwaway.
In the United States it was not released commercially until 27 June 1995, three years later, which is why its Hot 100 peak of 79 badly understates it. Where it actually lived was rock radio, where it reached number five on both the Billboard Mainstream Rock and Alternative charts, the band's best showing from Ten. It went top twenty in the UK, top ten in Ireland, and top forty in Canada and New Zealand, and was nominated for Best Rock Song and Best Hard Rock Performance at the 1993 Grammys.
AllMusic's Chris True marks it as the moment "Pearl Jam mania galvanized and propelled the band past the 'Seattle sound' and into rock royalty" — "arguably Pearl Jam's most earnest work". Not everyone agreed; Pitchfork's Stephen M. Deusner called it "the most pat Freudian psychodrama on an album full of them".
Both can be true. What is not in dispute is that a fifteen-year-old's death got a paragraph in a Texas newspaper, and then, because a singer in Seattle read it, did not stay a paragraph.