“Hitting all the marks”: Stone Gossard names the best live band in history
Pearl Jam are renowned for putting on a show. Some of the most iconic images of the grunge era can be found with Eddie Vedder dangling dangerously high above the stage while a boyish Stone Gossard throws back his luscious locks and looks up from below. With so many bands coming through the same Seattle scene, they knew that you had to stand out to make it.
The group were inspired by the greats of bygone eras on this front. Vedder, in particular, loved The Who’s classic Live at Leeds, which he described as the album that changed his life. “Imagine, as a kid, stumbling upon the locomotive that is Live at Leeds,“ he told Rolling Stone. “‘Hi, my name is Eddie. I’m ten years old, and I’m getting my fucking mind blown!”
However, by the time Vedder, Gossard, and everyone else in Pearl Jam came of age, The Who were beyond their performative prime. A new generation of talent had arrived, and in Gossard’s view, one that would never be dethroned cemented themselves as the greatest live rock band in history. Nirvana might have been bringing a searing sense of sincerity to the scene, but Gossard preferred an old-fashioned spectacle.
“I don’t think there was a better live music experience [than Van Halen],“ the guitarist told Louder Sound, “Just in terms of hitting all the marks of bringing people together, totally joyous, groovy, light-hearted, whimsical. Van Halen were the greatest live rock band of all time,” he proclaimed.
They brought a sense of pantomime and playfulness to having profound musical chops. Yeah, of course, it was a little show-offy, but only in the best possible way—in a punk-adjacent fashion, they proved that you don’t have to be serious to be skilled. As Gossard added, “Van Halen changed the world, and that’s true originality right there. Nobody knows how to really play like him.”
Who did Eddie Van Halen fear live?
That being said, there were certainly groups who Eddie Van Halen himself figured ran his outfit close. As he explained when recalling the time they ditched a tour supporting Black Sabbath to play Day on the Green: “We played at high noon following AC/DC and I’m onstage watching AC/DC,” the guitarist recalled. “80,000 people in the crowd were just jumping up and down because they got that infectious sound.” Suddenly, the first prangs of nerves that the group had felt for a long time began to flutter: how do you follow a band like AC/DC?
“I love ‘em and Angus [Young], they’re all good friends, and Brian [Johnson], and Angus’ brother, we went and saw them when they played L.A., they’re great guys,” he told Forbes. But that mattered not back when Van Halen was relatively inexperienced on the festival stage, and with strict simplicity and swaggering attitude, AC/DC had the audience under their charming spell.
“I’m going, ‘Holy shit, we gotta follow these guys’. So we didn’t blow them away,” Eddie conceded. However, as far as Gossard is concerned, AC/DC are just about the only band who could put the willys up Van Halen in such a manner, and perhaps they wouldn’t have reached that status without the thundering inspiration of Eddie Van Halen himself—an entirely unique musical force.
