The classic Pearl Jam song the band was never happy with
In a perfect world, there’s a good chance that Pearl Jam would have never got together in the first place. Even though the band may have been able to craft grunge-rock anthems in the early 1990s, the first incarnation of the group began in the ashes of Mother Love Bone after Andy Wood passed away from a drug overdose in 1990. Once guitarist Stone Gossard began shopping around various demo tapes for a new outfit, things began falling into place when it landed in the hands of Eddie Vedder.
While everyone in the group was based out of Seattle, Vedder was still working as a gas station attendant in San Diego when he got the infamous tape. As the music began to emotionally move him, Vedder put together the basis of future Pearl Jam songs, putting together the initial chorus for songs like ‘Alive’ and ‘Once’.
When the band invited Vedder to come up to Seattle for a jam session, they were also putting the finishing touches on the supergroup Temple of the Dog with Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, which would be a tribute to Wood’s memory. While Vedder would have time to lend his skills to the song ‘Hunger Strike’, the real groundwork for Pearl Jam would come in the next few weeks.
Workshopping different ideas for songs, the band had the basis of their debut album Ten intact within a matter of days, with Vedder putting together painful odes to his pain on songs like ‘Black’. Outside of his personal vignettes, Vedder also turned his attention outward when writing songs like ‘Even Flow’, talking about the perils of those living on the street and striving to find their place in the world.
Even though the song is one of the darker tunes on the record, the music behind Vedder is some of the funkiest of their career, creating a slick groove reminiscent of early Jimi Hendrix. While the central riff gave Mike McCready an excuse to channel his blues heroes like Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan, the rest of the band wasn’t satisfied with how it turned out.
Of all the songs released on Ten, ‘Even Flow’ would go through numerous takes before settling on the version they finally got on the record. Despite putting so much effort into getting the final product, the take on the album is a glorified demo version of the tune.
As McCready recalled in The Daily Record, the band didn’t like the way the song initially turned out, saying, “We did ‘Even Flow’ about 50, 70 times. I swear to God it was a nightmare. We played that thing over and over until we hated each other. I still don’t think Stone is satisfied with how it came out”.
While that may have been for just one song, Vedder would be highly critical about most of the album when it was released. Thinking that it sounded far too close to arena rock, Vedder made it his personal mission to get as far away from that sound as he could in the years following its release, getting heavier on Vs. before making art-rock detours throughout albums like No Code and Vitalogy. Pearl Jam may have had the rock world in the palm of their hands by 1991, but it didn’t matter to them since the public was celebrating a song that they didn’t like.
