The songs that got Eddie Vedder into Pearl Jam
The first song that rock music fans would have heard from Pearl Jam would have been their debut single, ‘Alive’, while for others, it would have been the opening track ‘Once’ from their first album, Ten. Surprisingly, these were also among the first songs that the founding members of Pearl Jam had ever heard from their soon-to-be frontman and lyricist, Eddie Vedder.
When Vedder caught wind of the news that Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard had left their old group, Mother Love Bone, and, alongside Mike McCready, had formed a new band and were looking for a singer, he packed away his surf-board and started writing some songs. Before long, he had sent a demo tape to the group.
When talking about receiving the tape in the post for the 2009 VH1 TV Special Ten Revisited, bassist Ament recalled, “I threw it in the tape machine, and I was pretty blown away by it the first time that I heard it, and I played it again, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is great!’ It was really, really a departure from really anything that Stone and I had done before, and I called Stone up, and I said, ‘You’ve got to come over right now, and you’ve got to listen to this thing because I think it’s pretty good.’”
On the tape were the songs ‘Once’ and ‘Alive’, both of which were fated to appear on the first Pearl Jam album, and a third track called ‘Footsteps’, which didn’t make the cut but was released as a B-side to the single ‘Jeremy’. Not only are the songs tied together by the demo which introduced Vedder’s songwriting talents to his future band, but they share a narrative arc as well and form a sort of musical triptych.
Having written the songs in a single sitting, Vedder has referred to the three collectively over the years as the “Momma-Son trilogy” or the “Momma-Son mini-opera”. The story starts in ‘Alive’, where the narrator, a young boy, learns that his dad is actually his stepfather, and continues into ‘Once’, where the son loses his mind and ends up on a killing spree. Finally, in ‘Footsteps’, he is sentenced to death and is looking back at his life from a prison cell and blaming his mother for all of his problems.
And while the boy from the song had plenty of problems to deal with, the problem for Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard of choosing who would sing in their new band and write their new songs was now very much solved. Vedder was promptly brought on board, as was drummer Matt Cameron, and Pearl Jam went on to become one of the dominant forces in rock music in the early 1990s.
Alongside acts like Nirvana, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, they were instrumental in wrestling rock away from the over-commercialised, theatrical and asinine realm of hair metal that had dominated the scene for so long.
