The double-diamond selling album that Eddie Vedder desperately wanted to flop
It seems impossible for music to evolve without some form of tragedy, and grunge is no different, as one of the genre’s biggest bands was the result of an exciting artist passing before their time.
When people first heard the band Mother Love Bone and their debut album, Apple, they knew they were listening to something special, with the droning style of music and chaotic approach to melody very much setting the foundation for grunge, and while people struggled to define it, they didn’t find it difficult to love.
The band would have surely gone on to have a great deal of success; however, before this could be realised, lead singer Andrew Wood passed away due to a heroin overdose. They had the chance to replace the lead singer with someone else and revel in the hype surrounding them, but such a move was out of the question as band member Jeff Ament thought it would be amoral.
“Mother Love Bone as a band is history,” he said in an interview with Metal Hammer, “Us going out and using the name, pretending in a sense that Andy’s still there, was never even a consideration… Getting out on the road as a band and promoting [Apple] with a singer pretending to be Andy would be a terrible waste. It would be just total prostitution. None of us got into music to be the next New Kids on the Block.”
Two of the quintessential members of Mother Love Bone were Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard, who worked together on writing new music after Wood died, but they weren’t looking to force any specific idea; instead, they were happy to just see what came to mind and then run with anything that had legs. After landing on a few songs they thought had potential, they sent demos out to a few different singers, but they all fell flat, and knowing the duo’s history, everyone who put vocals to their demos was simply trying to impersonate Andrew Wood.
This is where Eddie Vedder came in: he was sent the demos and put his vocals to them, but was willing to be completely original and individual in the process. Vedder didn’t just inject the songs with his unique style of singing; he also rewrote lyrics and changed titles so that they fit better with his vision. Some would see such a move as audacious, but Ament and Gossard admired his bravado, such that there wasn’t much of a discussion needed, as they liked the sound, so they started recording.
“My initial impression was, well, he can sing, and it sounds cool,” Gossard said in 2016, “The only other things that I’d heard were from singers trying to be Andy, who were really into Mother Love Bone, so hearing Eddie was like, Thank God! I was like, low and clear… that’s pretty interesting. It was the first thing we heard that worked at all musically. So if you have a guy that sounded pretty good and he was into it, don’t screw around, just start making music. We were pretty quick to go, ‘Let’s just do it’.”
The recording sessions the band took part in resulted in the creation of Pearl Jam’s debut album, Ten, a record that is still considered one of the band’s most successful, and when you look at the circumstances surrounding the LP at the time of release, it’s pretty easy to understand why.
There was already an established audience waiting to hear what the members from Mother Love Bone would do next. Additionally, you had Nirvana topping the charts with their album Nevermind, which meant record labels were keen to push grunge as a mainstream genre, so Ten was always going to be successful, but that’s not what Vedder wanted.
“I would love for everybody to listen to what we write, but I want it be a slow process,” he said, “I think it would be counter-productive for Ten to be a huge seller […] In order for people to get the most out of Pearl Jam, it has to be a slow growth. It does worry me that we will be a big success, and that our songs will be taken out of context. We are not user-friendly.”
The singer continued, “I am broke at the moment […] I live in a shack with my girlfriend. And I plan on staying broke. I’m not one for excess. And any money I will make, I will happily give away to others. Print that, because I will stand by that statement!”
