The Pearl Jam album that almost made Jeff Ament quit
Pearl Jam has always prided itself on being a mini alternative rock family. Although they may have been able to make some of the most hard-hitting grunge to come out of the Pacific Northwest, they were just as concerned about the well-being of everyone in the band, knowing the pitfalls that often befall a massive rock band from their former band Mother Love Bone. While the group may have liked selling millions of records, Eddie Vedder would push the rest of the band to the side when working on their later material.
Coming from San Diego, Vedder always felt like an outsider in the group. Whenever the band would get together with their friends from Seattle, like Chris Cornell, Vedder was a bit standoffish because he was the last to join. Although the group may have welcomed their new recruit with open arms, Vedder got an all-new problem when their debut, Ten, tore up the charts.
Welcoming in the sounds of caustic rock and roll, Vedder was writing songs that were a lot more cutting than what the rest of the rock scene had to offer, pulling from real-life events on ‘Jeremy’ while also consulting his innermost thoughts on tracks like ‘Black’ and ‘Garden’. Once the group achieved mainstream success, though, Vedder didn’t like being the new face of the band.
Thinking everyone would see the group’s success due to his personality, Vedder would spend the rest of the 1990s trying to break away from the traditional hard rock tropes. Although the band would lash out in anger on their album Vs., Vitalogy was the first time that Vedder made a deliberate attempt to make songs that didn’t have to do with the traditional grunge formula, creating interlude tracks almost designed to piss people off like ‘Bugs’.
Once the band’s star still didn’t wane, Vedder thought it was time to enter their art-rock phase with No Code, only not to tell the rest of the band what he was working on. While Stone Gossard and Mike McCready were on hand to start production, bassist Jeff Ament wouldn’t be told that the band had started recording after working for three days.
Looking back on that time, Ament wondered whether he should leave the band for how little he was being asked to contribute, saying, “I wasn’t super involved with that record on any level. I found out three days into the sessions that they were actually recording. I’d worked really hard, demoed up a bunch of stuff, and luckily at that point, I was working on the Three Fish record. If I hadn’t had Three Fish at that point, it probably would have broken the camel’s back”.
While the group preserved, Ament did contribute some decent material for the album as well, working with the entire band to create the song ‘Red Mosquito’ and playing guitar and composing the music to the track ‘Smile’. For all of his contributions, though, that didn’t stop the rest of the band from having their own moments to shine, with Stone Gossard making his lead vocal debut on the track ‘Mankind’.
The band’s art rock direction would end up continuing for the next few years, making even more daring experiments on albums like Binaural and Riot Act before going back to straight-ahead rock on albums like Lightning Bolt. Although Pearl Jam may have struggled with an identity crisis in the early days, they learned a valuable lesson about how to treat band members during this album.
