“I don’t put it on”: The Pearl Jam album Stone Gossard didn’t need to hear again
It’s never easy for artists to go back to some of their old songs. Some of their tracks might be an ever-evolving thing whenever they go onstage, but there are occasionally those few studio creations that sounded great at the time but end up being one of the most embarrassing tunes in their catalogue later. And while Stone Gossard has normally been the mastermind behind many classic riffs for Pearl Jam, he had enough sense to realise when some of their records didn’t turn out the way he heard them in his head.
When the band first got together, though, it was clear that Gossard was taking charge of everything. He had already written plenty of riffs for Mother Love Bone, and after Andy Wood’s passing, many of the first demos for what would become classics like ‘Alive’ would exist on random tapes before it fell into the hands of Eddie Vedder.
And while Vedder wasn’t the type of singer that everyone would have been looking for in the era of hair metal, his thick baritone is what set him apart from everyone else. Not everyone could pull off something as brooding as ‘Jeremy’ or ‘Even Flow’, but by working with the right kind of groove between Gossard and Jeff Ament, there was a certain synergy to the way they played that no one had heard since the days of classic 1970s rock.
All roads seemed to lead to them making a classic record, but Ten always existed in a weird place in Vedder’s mind. He loved the idea of being able to work on music with his friends, but there are also moments on the record where things ended up sounding a bit too polished for his liking.
If Nirvana had a similar issue with Nevermind sounding commercial, that feeling was almost tenfold when everyone heard the first mixes of tracks like ‘Black’ and ‘Why Go’. It still sounded like the band playing together in the room, but there was also a sixth element that came into play when Rick Parashar added the reverb to everything, which made it fit right at home next to the biggest names in hair metal like Guns N’ Roses and Motley Crue.
Despite the band having a majority of the track list as a main part of their set every night, Gossard willingly admits that he doesn’t listen to the record that much anymore, saying, “I think Ten’s still good, but I don’t put it on. The new mix of the record is great. That’s one of the things I’m most excited about is Brendan [O’Brien] doing another mix on it. It sounds a little bit more like our subsequent records sounded so it gives it a different treatment.”
Strangely enough, though, a lot of the records that came after their breakthrough release would end up having a lot less of Gossard’s contributions on them. It’s pretty clear on theur debut that he had a heavy hand in almost every song, but listening to albums like Vs and Vitalogy, you can see that the group got more democratic about who was writing every song, to the point where Vedder had almost fully taken over everything when working on their subsequent records like No Code.
But that’s probably the greatest strength anyone can have when being a member of a rock band of that size. While it’s easy to put your foot down and tell everyone that you want your song to get played, it’s a lot harder to look back on those old records and see moments that can be improved.
