The three songs that made Eddie Vedder believe in Pearl Jam
All bands really start the same: just a gaggle of musicians jamming out and trying to see if it works. Writing songs and testing out new sounds, practising over and over to get it right. And then, if you’re lucky, a breakthrough. When all the right pieces are in the right places, there’s the moment when it clicks. Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder remembers that moment well.
That’s pretty much word-for-word Pearl Jam. Mostly existing within Seatle’s thriving music scene in the late 1980s and ‘90s, the members were all in different groups beforehand. However, as seems to be the way with local band crowds, lineups were chopped, changed, and broken up during regular rotation. Members jumped ship to couple up with a new band like one big incestuous gaggle of talent.
However, their formation was motivated by tragedy. Originally, Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard were planning to form a band called Mother Love Bone with Andrew Wood. But just as they’d written some songs and gained a bit of interest, Wood died from an overdose.
With a shell of a band and a few demos, the musicians, along with their friend Mike McCready, began looking around for a new leader. As Eddie Vedder himself puts it, “I think that they were kind of ready to go on something. There was a lot of energy there, from their loss and their expectation. They had a band, and then they didn’t have a band, so they were ready to kind of have a band again.”
That’s how a tape of instrumental starts-of-songs landed in his hands in his San Diago home, to which he sent his own tape back. “It was a tape that I sent up through my friend Jack Irons,” he said of the somewhat audition process. “They said, ‘If you know any singers…’ That was just kind of a random tape that I sent up to Seattle.”
But really, before they’d even got in a room together, those two tapes were the start of something. It was not just the start of an embryonic band but the start of Pearl Jam, which is exactly what the world would come to know. On the tape Vedder received, there was the instrumental for three songs. On the one he sent back, he’d written the lyrics to ‘Alive’, ‘Once’, and ‘Black’, all of which would appear on their debut album.
In an interview with Sleater Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein, she asked, “What’s the first song that you wrote with Pearl Jam that you felt really proud of?” It’s an impressive feat that Vedder mentions this very first second. “I think the first one on that tape, there were three songs on that tape; I think that ‘Alive’ was one of them, and ‘Black’ was one of them, and I think ‘Once’ was one of them,” he remembered. “‘Alive’ and ‘Black’ are the same as they were then. And they’re kind of cool.”
After Vedder passed the tape test, the band got into a rehearsal room, and the songs quickly took their permanent shape. “We recorded a lot, we practiced for a week and we recorded on the last day. I think I went home with a tape of ten or eleven songs, and most of them were on the record,” he said, making it all sound so simple.
But that’s how it felt to the members, as everything that had come before, all the old bands and failed projects, were finally giving way to something with legs. “It seemed like a lot of stuff I’d participated in before was kind of derivative or overly derivative, and this kind of had its own thing,” Vedder remembered, and that was how Pearl Jam was born.
