Eddie Vedder’s fateful Pearl Jam audition
You don’t imagine bands having to interview someone. You picture The Ramones arising from a New York gutter like fast-forwarded conglomerates of matter evolving into punky beings like a time-lapse of life in a David Attenborough documentary. However, like it or lump it, admin is everywhere in the modern world. Hell, even Dave Grohl had to ‘network’. And Pearl Jam came together with a fair dose of linked-in happenstance too.
Before Pearl Jam, Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament’s start in music was a tragic one. Things were going swell with their band Mother Love Bone when, suddenly, frontman Andrew Wood died following a heroin overdose just months before their debut album was set to be released. The band disbanded, and both Gossard and Ament gave up music in a period of mourning.
However, Gossard soon got back on the horse and eventually teamed back up with Ament after encouragement by future Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready. Their next job was to find a drummer and a frontman. They put out an instrumental demo and passed it to Jack Irons of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, hoping to recruit him as their own sticksmith. He declined, but he did fatefully pass the tape onto a singer he knew in San Diego called Eddie Vedder.
Vedder listened to the demo before heading out to go surfing. Then, the part-time gravell-voiced gas station employee was hit with a great idea while rollicking in the waves. He would pen his own three-part opera over the instrumental tracks describing the tragic rise of a killer. This gave birth to a trilogy of tracks known as Momma-Son (Mamasan).
In fact, it seems the songs helped Vedder compute the life that had gone before them. When Vedder was growing up, he had no knowledge of his own biological father. When you pour over the lyrics of ‘Alive’ this is the tale that it tells with a few notable twists. The song details a son whose father passed away, but he grows up to look exactly like his old man. Vedder’s dark turn to the tale is that this makes his mother lust after him in an incestuous way.
As Vedder told Rolling Stone: “Everyone writes about it like it’s a life-affirming thing—I’m really glad about that. But ‘Alive’ is… it’s torture. Which is why it’s fucked up for me.” It gets even more torturous when you stack it alongside the other tracks that complete the narrative.
Following on from the tale of psychological dismay at an unfortunate childhood comes the song ‘Once’. In this brooding second act, things get even darker. Following the confusion of ‘Alive’ things worsen for the protagonist, in fact, they get just about as bad as they can get—he becomes a serial killer. As the lyrics explain, “Backstreet lover on the side of the road, I got a bomb in the temple that is gonna explode.”
The final chapter never made it onto Ten which is perhaps why the Mamasan trilogy is missed by many fans, with the last song ‘Footsteps’. The whole thing takes one final dark twist, so dark, in fact, that it cuts abruptly black in the final act of a grisly grunge tale. Vedder explains that he took inspiration from the story of the Green River Killer with the bruising song that sees the protagonist face the death penalty.
He presented these three tracks – ‘Alive’, ‘Once’ and ‘Footsteps’ – to his recruiters, and within a week, he was flown out to Seattle, and Pearl Jam had formed. As Vedder concludes: “I’m just glad I became a songwriter.”
