The Pearl Jam classic Stone Gossard didn’t enjoy making: “We overthought it”
The worst critic of any artist’s work is usually the one making the music. You can put any bad review in front of a musician, and they might be pissed off, but when they are working away in the studio trying to get the right take, it’s always ten times harder trying to find something they are satisfied with. Even when you’ve made a classic, you’re still not always there, and when Stone Gossard was working on Ten, he was far from pleased with how the studio sessions went.
For newcomer Eddie Vedder, though, Gossard seemed like the seasoned professional who had been playing in bands for years. The guitarist had already been in two of the biggest bands in Seattle, Green River and Mother Love Bone, and his guitar prowess was much more about making something indebted to classic rock than anything too flashy.
In fact, that’s the whole reason why Green River broke up in the first place. It’s noble for anyone to try to reach for the stars whenever they’re playing a gig, but those massive riffs Gossard made didn’t exactly click with what Mark Arm had in mind, later deciding to form Mudhoney to get something closer to what he wanted.
Given how Ten started shaping up, Gossard started to see that Arm may have had a point. While there was no problem with the performances on the record, producer Rick Parasher was known for butting heads with Gossard once it came time for him to mix the final record, which Gossard was never comfortable with.
He certainly wanted to get the best take that he could, but Gossard believed that the sessions were gruelling for all the wrong reasons, telling Rolling Stone, “We overthought it. You can get really bogged down as a young band in the process of recording. It felt dysfunctional. We didn’t know where we wanted to go, and that’s where it broke down, so communication got bad, and it just went south.”
If everything was hell behind the scenes, you’d hardly hear it in the performances. That kind of tension that comes with starting a new band is palpable on Ten, but there are also some of the biggest hits of the group’s career. As much as Gossard had a problem articulating what he wanted, it hardly mattered when you listened to ‘Alive’ or ‘Evenflow’.
Gossard wasn’t the only one unhappy with how the record turned out, though. Vedder was insanely critical of how Ten was mixed, having the same problem Kurt Cobain had with Nevermind, with everything sounding far too slick. If the record came out the way the band wanted it, chances are it wouldn’t have been the hit that they had wanted.
When listening to the Brendan O’Brien mix that was released for the album’s anniversary, this amended version that was closer to what the band wanted sounds almost too dry, especially with the guitars and vocals sounding a little too upfront half the time. While it’s every producer’s job to make the kind of record that the band hears in their head, Parasher’s job on their debut record is probably the reason why they are treated as one of the biggest names in alternative music.
