The bands Stone Gossard could never figure out how to play like: “There was a very free attitude”
Music goes through strange periods of freedom and stagnation. When grunge was made, it was during a time of complete freedom.
When music goes through periods of stagnation, it’s not usually the result of bands not having any kind of creativity; rather, it’s caused by a few specific bands becoming such monumental acts that people can’t shake off their impact. This happened a lot throughout the development of rock music, as artists such as Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden and Motörhead were all received so well by the public at large that anyone with a guitar was trying to sound like them.
Well, this wasn’t the case for a budding Pearl Jam. Stone Gossard was very open that he couldn’t play like these bands, and so he didn’t try to. What would be the point in another guitarist trying and failing to sound like Jimmy Page? Instead, the guitarist opted for his own style, and in the process became a quintessential part of the development of grunge.
“I didn’t really know how to play like that,” he admitted when talking about working out his sound, “So I was just doing what sounded right to me.”
It was a good time for a developing artist to be looking for his own sound, as when Gossard ditched the idea of playing hard rock, he found himself in a sea of creativity. It seems the genre was on the way out, but elements of it were here to stay. As such, people could pick and choose what they liked from the style, but also ditch different components at will, chopping and changing until they came up with something that was unique and unmistakably theirs.
“There was a very free attitude about art and music that was brewing in the wake of hard rock, and a lot of people were experimenting with sounds, and the bands formed from there,” said Gossard, “There was something about it that was fresh, that really captured people’s ears, and that had a huge effect on it all, too.”
The band that Gossard formed as a result of this freedom wasn’t Pearl Jam, but Mother Love Bone, who went on to release a grunge album before the name grunge had been uttered, Apple. Each band member involved kept that freedom and creativity at the heart of everything they wound up writing. The band disbanded early because of the sad passing of lead singer Andrew Wood; however, even when Gossard and Jeff Ament started auditioning singers for Pearl Jam, once again, originality remained one of the most important things for them.
Every vocalist who was sending in demos was trying to replicate the sound of Andrew Wood. While Ament and Gossard were big fans of his vocals, they didn’t want their new band to just be a tribute to Mother Love Bone, as that went totally against the freedom that was being explored by musicians at the time. As such, it took Eddie Vedder getting in touch with a totally different style of singing for them to realise how this new band could sound. A lot had to happen for grunge to find form, but at the heart of everything was a new sense of creative freedom derived from the dissolution of hard rock.
“My initial impression was, well, he can sing, and it sounds cool,” said Gossard, “The only other things that I’d heard were from singers trying to be Andy, who were really into Mother Love Bone, so hearing Eddie was like, Thank God! I was like, low and clear… that’s pretty interesting. It was the first thing we heard that worked at all musically.”
