“Garage approach”: the bands Stone Gossard wanted to join
In 1991, Dave Grohl had been drumming for Nirvana for a year and was already enjoying all the unexpected spoils of that gig. Having only recently moved to the state of Washington from the faraway city of Washington, DC, though, Grohl wasn’t as privy to the inner workings of the Seattle scene as his bandmates. And so, when he heard Pearl Jam on the radio for the first time that year, he was unaware that many of the band’s members were already local legends, including guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament, whose roots in the scene went back to the mid-1980s and arguably the “original Seattle grunge band,” Green River; not to mention the mighty Mother Love Bone.
Free of all that knowledge, a young Dave Grohl’s introduction to Pearl Jam’s ‘Alive’ inspired a very different vision. “I pictured Mountain or some serious ’70s throwback,” Grohl later recalled to Spin. “The music just seemed like classic rock to me, so I pictured the singer being some husky, fuckin’ bearded, leather-jacketed Tad type, big and fat and tortured and scary.”
Soon enough, Grohl—and many millions of other rock fans—came to know Pearl Jam on a much more personal and visual level. On the heels of the release of their debut 1991 album Ten, the band dominated MTV in America for the next year, as hit singles ‘Jeremy’ and ‘Even Flow’ suddenly bumped even the likes of Nirvana down a peg for a while. Frontman Eddie Vedder was, quite clearly, not a husky, bearded ‘70s rocker but a young, long-haired surf kid, famously athletic enough to climb up to the top of the lighting rigs at his concerts on a regular basis.
Even as Pearl Jam became one of the new leading lights of so-called “grunge” and the “Seattle sound”, it was hard not to acknowledge a certain truth in Dave Grohl’s initial, blind reaction to their music. Whereas Nirvana had clearly come from a punk world, Alice in Chains from glam metal, and Soundgarden from a sort of heavy Zeppelin and Sabbath root, Pearl Jam did feel a bit more like straight-forward “classic rock”—not necessarily brighter or cheerier, but with a stadium-sized 1970s sensibility.
The showmanship, in particular—whether it was Vedder swinging from the light rigs or Gossard and Mike McCready stomping about with contorted faces during another extended guitar solo—made Pearl Jam feel like something more familiar to a slightly older audience. This wasn’t entirely lost on the band itself.
“For a long period of time, me and Jeff [Ament] would have loved to be in Get Your Wings-era Aerosmith, or Iggy Pop, or David Bowie,” Stone Gossard told Spin on the occasion of Ten’s 10th anniversary in 2001. “But there was something going on in Seattle that added a different element, a kind of garage approach.”
That didn’t necessarily stop Gossard from trying to live his classic rock dream once Pearl Jam started to gain traction. “We made an ‘Even Flow’ video that never came out that I’m sensitive about,” he admitted, “because it was my idea. It ended up being totally rawk: lots of big lights, out on a cliff, definitely comic to look back on now. Hopefully, at some point, we’ll be able to laugh at ourselves enough to show that one.”
Gossard was born in 1966, so the influence of the great ‘70s “rawk” bands was formative and would carry through most of his work across all his bands. Admitting a love for Aerosmith was not quite so cool in the 1990s when Steven Tyler and Co were best known for slickly produced movie ballads and their own clifftop music videos (usually starring a teenage Alicia Silverstone).
But in 1974, the Get Your Wings album was certainly a vibe worthy of chasing. The record, which includes ‘Same Old Song and Dance’ and ‘Train Kept a Rollin”, also showcases the direct influence of Joe Perry’s guitar work on Gossard. Factor in that Pearl Jam’s other guitarist, Mike McCready, was a Stevie Ray Vaughan fanatic, and you start to realise that, yes, perhaps Pearl Jam always was kind of a classic rock band deep down inside.
Of course, if you’re under the age of 35, you probably already thought of them that way anyway: another set of granddads from the days before it became illegal to smoke in clubs or to play guitar solos longer than 30 seconds.
