The artist Pearl Jam said was a dream to work with
Let’s be real here, Pearl Jam were never, ever cool, and I say that as a massive compliment. When the Seattle grunge legends broke through in the early 1990s, they stood out like a sore thumb. Amongst a sea of disaffected, irony-poisoned hipsters, apathetic to the point of rigor mortis, Pearl Jam cared about stuff. More than that, they cared deeply, and there wasn’t a force in this world that was going to shut them up. Or stop them from playing guitar solos the length of most Minutemen songs.
It’s true, their unaffected, blinding sincerity was only half of what made Pearl Jam so lame in the eyes of grunge overlords like Kurt Cobain. The other half was that while so many of their peers took their cues from 1980s hardcore and 1960s garage rock, Pearl Jam were in thrall to the decade in between. They lived and breathed the legends of 1970s hard rock and did so, like they did with everything else, with absolutely no shame whatsoever.
At the time, this took some serious guts. After all, they say that at any point, there’s never anything so brutally tasteless as what was hot around a decade and a half prior—too old to be modern and too modern to be retro. At the time of writing, it’s 2025. A decade and a half ago, the biggest songs of the year were ‘Airplanes’ by BOB, ‘Billionaire’ by Travie McCoy, and ‘Like a G6’ by the Far East Movement. You see what I mean?
When Pearl Jam’s debut album, Ten, was released in 1991, a decade and a half prior was 1976. The year of Peter Frampton, Eagles and Rush. Today, we can look back fondly at those bands, but in the early 1990s, they were anathema. Yet they were also the kind of bands that Pearl Jam worshipped at the altar of. Of all those heroes of the 1970s, there was one above all that Pearl Jam wanted to emulate, and it’s not who you think.
Who did Pearl Jam want to work with above all else?
In Cameron Crowe’s wonderful documentary, Pearl Jam Twenty, the band are effusive in their praise of Neil Young as something of a musical north star for them. An artist who was never anything less than himself, bullish in his belief that no matter the tides of taste and cool, he would only ever make the music he wanted to make, for better and (in the 1980s in particular) for worse.
In the documentary, the band talk about how they first made contact with Young when he invited them to play at his famed Bridge School Benefit Concert series in 1992. Perhaps sensing a kindred spirit in their rejection of rock star bullshit and embrace of down-to-earth relatability, Young invited them on tour soon afterwards.
Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament put it best when he said that being taken under Young’s wing “seemed like a dream” to him. The band have since repaid Young’s kindness by wearing his influence on them, on their sleeves, somewhat literally in their shared predilection for plaid shirts. More importantly, the band have since added Young’s immortal ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ to their permanent setlist as a mainstay of their encores.
After all, when you’ve played the song with the man himself, you’ve learned from the best. No matter what the tastemakers might say.
