The Seattle Grunge Group Made it Big
Pearl Jam became one of the inductees of the Rock Hall Class of 2017
By Bailey Mount Managing Editor
No one, least of all its members, ever thought that Pearl Jam would gain international success. Bursting out of the Seattle grunge scene in the early 90s, the band went from playing an unadvertised cafe gig to debuting their first album in less than a year.
The 25 years that followed saw 9 more albums, nearly 1000 performed shows, a yearlong boycott of Ticketmaster and now, an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Brooklyn, New York. The ceremony opened with a tribute to the band’s inception and another band — Mother Love Bone.
You can’t tell the story of Pearl Jam without first telling the story of Mother Love Bone. Created by late lead singer Andrew Wood, Mother Bone Love was the band that could have been and the one that almost was. By early 1990, they had a record deal and a debut album on the horizon. By March, Wood was dead of a heroin overdose.
The band broke up shortly after.
In the months that followed, former members Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament reconnected through Mike McCready, a guitarist as well as an old friend of Gossard. Now they just needed a singer. Replacing the charismatic and talented Wood wouldn’t be easy. A singing surfer in San Diego got a hold of their demo tape and recorded the vocals for three songs, mailing it back to them and by October, Eddie Vedder was in Seattle for the first time.
Soon after, the band, called Mookie Blaylock at that point, performed their first show. They changed their name for copyright reasons after they gained traction and a record deal, and
on March 10, 1991, they became Pearl Jam.
Then came the album “Ten.”
“[Ten] had an anger to it and appealed to twenty-something people who felt displaced and unemployed and left out,” said David Letterman in the band’s ceremonial speech.
He couldn’t have been more apt in that description. “Ten” carries in it a raw, painful energy that seems both anguished and spiteful. The album itself, if personifying it could even come close to describing how it comes across, sounds like the kid that stands back up because someone told him to stay down.
There’s an angry darkness to Vedder’s vocals. He jumps from haunting howls to whispers, seemingly taken by the direction of the music than through his own singing. “Ten” is both jaded and emotional. But perhaps most importantly, it and by extension Pearl Jam itself, inspires the will to live on, if only to prove those who hurt you wrong.
And no matter how big they got, they never lost track of that small Seattle stage. They frequently refused press interviews. They hardly released music videos, instead opting for high-quality live releases from every show they performed. To them, their music was and has always been something delivered directly to the fans, foregoing the music industry red tape and fineries for something more grounded, something personal that has kept Pearl Jam off an untouchable pedestal and in the arms of its fans.
“Those are the things that really kept us together…” said Vedder in their acceptance speech, “We knew we were better together than apart. It was you [the fans].”
At their induction ceremony, they performed “Alive,” “Given To Fly” and “Better Man.” The first was the first single they ever released. They also performed a cover of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” with the other inductees. In that moment, they were what everyone knew them as : that band from Seattle that had no idea what was coming, but was more than ready to take it on.
Selected discography:
“Even Flow,” “Alive” and “Jeremy” from “Ten”
“Daughter” and “Animal” from “Vs.”
“Better Man” from “Vitalogy”
“Hail, Hail” and “Off He Goes” from “No Code”
“Given To Fly” from “Yield”
“Last Kiss,” a cover of the Wayne Cochran song by the same name
The albums Binaural, Riot Act, Pearl Jam, Backspacer and Lightning Bolt
