Putting the music first but standing up for their rights when necessary, Pearl Jam has
raged both inside and outside of the machine for three decades, and its members have a
lot of stories to tell.
Here's a look into the legendary and untold truth of Pearl Jam.
The core of Pearl Jam, the instrumental duo that gives the band its sound and soul, is
the one-two punch of guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament.
Before forming one of the biggest rock bands the world has ever seen, they'd already been
playing together for years… first in the proto-grunge Seattle band Green River, and
then in Mother Love Bone with charismatic lead singer Andrew Wood.
Mother Love Bone was poised to become one of the biggest bands of the '90s… but sadly,
Wood overdosed on heroin just months before the release of their first album.
However, Ament and Gossard didn't want to quit making music with one another, so they
laid down some demo tracks for a new band.
They needed a drummer for the project, and they sent their tape to their friend Jack
Irons, who'd recently left his gig behind the kit for Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Irons wasn't interested in drumming for the Seattle combo at least, not right away but
he passed the tape along to a guy that he played basketball with, an aspiring singer
named Eddie Vedder.
"How did you guys know that it would work out?"
"We didn't know it was going to work out.
It just felt very good from the time we started."
Irons also gave the band one of its biggest breaks: He asked the Red Hot Chili Peppers
to let this new group open for the band on its 1991 concert tour, and they agreed.
Following Andrew Wood's tragic death, his friend and former roommate Chris Cornell of
Soundgarden formed a supergroup to pay tribute to the man.
Members included Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament, drummer Matt Cameron, guitarist Mike McCready,
and Eddie Vedder.
As the late Chris Cornell told Rockline,
"The name came from a line in a song that was a Mother Love Bone song where the lyrics
were written by Andy Wood."
The self-titled debut record hit record stores in spring 1991 and spawned the hit "Hunger
Strike."
It sold 70,000 copies or so in its initial weeks, and pre-dated the August 1991 release
of Pearl Jam's debut Ten.
Meanwhile, Ament told Guitar World,
"I remember when [Temple of the Dog] was coming out, we had just picked our name, and we said
[to A&M Records], 'Can you put Pearl Jam on the sticker because it'll be a good thing
for us?'
We didn't want it to say Mother Love Bone, and they refused."
Pearl Jam is arguably one of the best band names in rock history but it wasn't the band's
first name.
The group improbably used to go by the name Mookie Blaylock, named after an NBA player
who joined the league in 1989 right around the same time Eddie Vedder joined forces with
his bandmates.
But later, they wisely decided upon Pearl Jam… a name with slightly scandalous origins.
In 1991, Vedder told Rolling Stone that
"My great-grandpa was an Indian and totally into hallucinogenics and peyote.
Great-grandma Pearl used to make this hallucinogenic preserve that there's total stories about.
We don't have the recipe, though."
"It was this hallucinogenic jam.
It was great-grandma Pearl's jam."
Seeing as it's a rather short leap from "Pearl's preserve" to "Pearl Jam," Vedder's story was
accepted as fact for about 15 years.
But then, he admitted to Rolling Stone in in 2006,
"[That story was] total bulls—-."
Vedder did have a great-grandmother named Pearl that much is true.
But how the band got their name is a different story.
The bandmates reportedly sat around a Seattle restaurant and tried to come up with a name
that was better than Mookie Blaylock.
Bassist Jeff Ament thought something with "pearl" in the name would sound nice.
And then the band got inspired after checking out a three-hour Neil Young concert.
As Ament told Rolling Stone:
"Every song was like a fifteen-or twenty-minute jam.
So that's how 'jam' got added on to the name.
Or at least that's how I remember it."
You'll have to decide for yourself whether or not to believe him.
We've been burned By Pearl Jam before.
With its punk-inspired, DIY ethos, the Seattle grunge scene was in many ways the opposite
of the excessive, bloated, hair metal bands that preceded it.
Motley Crue's Vince Neil was clearly displeased by this development:
And it wasn't long before the music industry wanted a piece of the action.
Jeff Ament told Classic Rock in 2016,
"We had about 15 labels come to see us in Seattle.
By the end of the process, [Mother Love Bone] was being offered $400,000.
We'd spent maybe $2000 on Green River and suddenly we were being told we could spend
$250,000 on our first Mother Love Bone record, and we were thinking 'How is that possible?'"
Ament says that when it came to Pearl Jam's Ten,
"I think we spent about $25,000 making the record and about three times that mixing it,
but it was still a third of the money that we'd spent making the Mother Love Bone record.
We didn't expect the record to be a huge deal."
But of course, it was a big deal a straightforward rock record that managed to go platinum 13
times over.
That's not to say it was an easy album to record.
In fact, the band had a really hard time re-creating its demo version of "Alive" in a recording
studio.
They ultimately decided to use the original demo, adding in a new guitar solo from Mike
McCready.
As for "Even Flow," McCready estimates that the band recorded the song as many as 70 times.
He tells the Daily Record that,
"We played that thing over and over until we hated each other."
And now for a surprise pop quiz: What was Pearl Jam's biggest hit?
"Alive"?
"Jeremy"?
"Better Man"?
The answer is none of the above.
While those are certainly some of the band's most memorable songs, Pearl Jam's most successful
tune so far is "Last Kiss."
It's the only Pearl Jam song to ever reach the top five of the Billboard Hot 100 pop
chart, peaking at #2 in 1999.
It's a bit of an outlier for Pearl Jam, as it's a slightly tongue-in-cheek cover of a
song made popular in 1964 by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers.
It's similar in theme to The Shangri-Las' "Leader of the Pack" and Ray Peterson's "Tell
Laura I Love Her" … basically, it's one more melodramatic pop song from the '60s about
a teen dying in a horrific car accident.
Eddie Vedder tells Spin that he had found a copy of the Cavaliers' version one day,
memorized it, then sang it for a small Seattle club audience just hours later.
Soon after the performance, the whole band played it at a sound check, recorded it, spent
$1,500 mixing it, and then released it as a fan-club only single for Christmas 1998.
"Last Kiss" wasn't initially intended for commercial release… but radio stations started
playing the song anyway.
By the summer of 1999, it was as inescapable as Santana's "Smooth."
The band's label wanted to release "Last Kiss" as a physical single, and Pearl Jam went for
it on the condition that the proceeds go to charity.
"Last Kiss" wound up on the track list of the 1999 benefit disc No Boundaries: A Benefit
for the Kosovar Refugees.
Pearl Jam toured far and wide in the early '90s… and to get access to the biggest and
best venues, the band had to work with Ticketmaster.
Pearl Jam wanted as many of their fans to see them live as possible.
According to Rolling Stone, the band capped ticket prices in 1994 at $18, plus a service
fee of no more than $1.80.
That went against Ticketmaster's policy of tacking on fees of double or triple that amount,
and the company ultimately wouldn't acquiesce to Pearl Jam's low-cost demands.
Not that Ticketmaster really needed that money.
According to the company's Encyclopedia.com entry,
"Ticketmaster sold a whopping 52 million tickets to entertainment and sporting events in 1994
and captured about $200 million in revenues."
With an urging from the U.S. Department of Justice, the Pearl Jam filed an antitrust
complaint, triggering a federal investigation into Ticketmaster and whether or not the company
held an illegal monopoly.
Pearl Jam alleged that Ticketmaster bought out competitors and then signed exclusivity
deals with major concert venues, leaving both bands and fans with no choice but to use Ticketmaster
and pay whatever price the company demanded.
"There's no deal with us and Ticketmaster.
We're not playing Ticketmaster shows this summer."
After a year-long investigation, the Department of Justice didn't take any action, simply
closing the case.
Ticketmaster took that as a victory, with a spokesman telling Rolling Stone,
"Luckily the facts were on our side, and we prevailed."
So Pearl Jam didn't really win its case, and its 1995 tour consisted of just a few shows
held in the few venues that weren't controlled by Ticketmaster.
In August 2007, Pearl Jam headlined the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago, and the set was streamed
on Blue Room, AT&T's online service.
According to the Associated Press, AT&T didn't broadcast entirely live, as AT&T instituted
a delay of a few seconds in case it needed to muffle any profanity.
However, the content monitors got a little trigger-happy with the bleep button.
At one point, Eddie Vedder interpolated a part of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the
Wall," and sang,
"George Bush leave this world alone."
Well, the monitors censored that line, and it was cut out of the webcast, as was the
lyric,
"George Bush find yourself another home."
Pearl Jam later took to their website to say,
"If a company that is controlling a webcast is cutting out bits of our performance not
based on laws, but on their own preferences and interpretations fans have little choice
but to watch the censored version."
An AT&T spokesman apologized on behalf of the company and said that the censorship was
made in error.
By the time the band was ready to release their third studio album in 1994, Pearl Jam
was one of the most powerful bands on the planet.
Their two previous records, Ten and Vs., had each sold tens of millions of copies and generated
numerous radio hits.
So when it came time for Vitalogy, Pearl Jam had the freedom to do whatever they wanted
to do... so they decided to use the album to celebrate vinyl.
LPs were still huge throughout the '80s, and they experienced a nostalgic resurgence after
2000, but the format was basically considered obsolete in 1994 thanks to compact discs.
But Vitalogy's first single "Spin the Black Circle" is obviously about playing records.
And in keeping with that theme, Pearl Jam ensured the vinyl version of Vitalogy was
available in stores a full two weeks before it came out on CD and cassette….
And the LP still did remarkably well upon release.
"Pearl Jam's new album Vitalogy was released on CD and cassette this week with the vinyl-only
version already at #55 on the charts."
Curiously, compact disc copies of Vitalogy came with a free prize inside a thick booklet
full of old, creepy medical textbook excerpts.
Bassist Jeff Ament told Spin that these liner notes were exceptionally long and dense…
which meant that Epic Records had to pay an extra 50 cents per album in manufacturing
costs.
That money ended up coming out of the band's cut.
Pearl Jam hit the big time in 1991, back when MTV exposure could make or break a band.
Music videos were an integral part of marketing an act, and Pearl Jam dutifully played along.
They recorded videos for several songs off their debut album, including "Alive," "Even
Flow," "Oceans," and most notably, "Jeremy," a haunting short film about a troubled teenager
whose life ends in tragedy.
The "Jeremy" clip won the band four trophies at the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards, including
Best Group Video, Best Metal/Hard Rock Video, and Video of the Year.
But then for several years, Pearl Jam decided to buck industry trends: The band stopped
making promotional videos and there's a reason for that.
A colleague told Pearl Jam that, contrary to what VMA voters may have thought, he didn't
think the "Jeremy" video was any good.
In 1993, Pearl Jam's Jeff Ament and Mike McCready hung out with the alternative rock band American
Music Club, and singer Mark Eitzel had words about "Jeremy."
As Arment explained to Rolling Stone, Eitzel said,
"'I liked your hit, but the video sucked.
It ruined my vision of the song.'"
This totally shocked Ament, who explained that,
"Ten years from now, I don't want people to remember our songs as videos."
Meanwhile, the song's lyrics were inspired by an actual incident that Vedder read about
in the newspaper about a teenager named Jeremy Delle.
"On January 8th 1991, her son walked into his classroom at Richardson High School and
shot himself in front of his peers."
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide
Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).