![]() It’s a familiar tale, but beautifully told, McCready playing with the lightness of Little Wing-era Hendrix, picking out the descending melody as Vedder marvels bleakly at “how quick the sun can drop away”.Īs they broke into the mainstream, Pearl Jam inspired blind worship from one half of Generation X, while the other half (including Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, a famous, and possibly jealous, PJ hater) decried them as corporate-rock sellouts. “All five horizons revolved around her soul,” croons Vedder, but now she’s gone, and even the sound of children playing only causes him agony. Ten even had a power ballad of sorts: the yearning Black, which told the sorry tale of a man’s agony on losing the love of his life. More subtle and complex than Mother Love Bone, it was nevertheless deeply influenced by rock’s classic era, and certainly showed little evidence of interest in the noisy punk brinkmanship served up by grunge’s flagship label, Sub Pop. Gossard and Ament might have served time with Green River, the Seattle punk band whose 1985 debut EP, Come On Down, is often touted as grunge’s patient zero, but the duo were always ambitious to move beyond the scuzzy milieu of Seattle’s abundant punk clubs. Pearl Jam never called themselves “grunge”, but soon had that tag thrust upon them. Ten sold slowly until the breakthrough of Nirvana, whose Nevermind, released only a couple of weeks after, went on to become a surprise smash hit. ![]() And while the dark backstory of Vedder’s lyrics lends the track a frisson of complexity, Alive’s true charm lies in its uplifting power, Vedder’s impassioned delivery (within a year countless rock frontmen would be mimicking his hearty burr) and that solo, which could move a corpse to play along on air guitar. However, delivered in Vedder’s heroic baritone over Gossard’s incandescent riff, and gifted one of the most unabashedly classic-rock guitar solos in recent memory (courtesy of Mike McCready), Alive was interpreted as an inspirational message by the thousands of fans who sent Pearl Jam’s debut single into the US top 20. Its lyric suggests an incestuous affair between the hero and his mother, while its hookline, “I’m still alive”, was intended as a rueful statement of fact from the homicidal/suicidal teen. Alive is the first chapter in this trilogy ( Once, off Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten, and the early B-side Footsteps tell the rest of the story). A lifelong fan of Pete Townshend, he concocted a song-cycle, Mamasan, telling the story of a troubled young man whose traumatic discovery that his supposed birth father was actually his stepfather (a Tommy-esque drama drawn from Vedder’s own life) sends him on a killing spree, for which he is ultimately executed. Vedder acts as the band's spokesman on these issues.A serious-minded, humble surfer dude – in many ways Wood’s antithesis – Vedder’s first contribution to this new project was to write lyrics for a demo tape of Gossard riffs. Throughout its career, the band has also promoted wider social and political issues, from pro- abortion rights sentiments to opposition to George W. They were ranked eighth in a readers' poll by Rolling Stone magazine in its "Top Ten Live Acts of All Time" issue. Pearl Jam was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017 in its first year of eligibility. Pearl Jam had sold more than 85 million albums worldwide by 2018, including nearly 32 million albums in the United States by 2012, making them one of the best-selling bands of all time. ![]() In 2006, Rolling Stone described the band as having "spent much of the past decade deliberately tearing apart their own fame". The band also sued Ticketmaster, claiming it had monopolized the concert-ticket market. One of the key bands in the grunge movement of the early 1990s, Pearl Jam's members often shunned popular music industry practices such as making music videos or participating in interviews. Their third album, Vitalogy (1994), became the second-fastest-selling CD in history at the time, with more than 877,000 units sold in its first week. Released in 1993, Pearl Jam's second album, Vs., sold over 950,000 copies in its first week of release, setting the record for most copies of an album sold in its first week of release at the time. Ten stayed on the Billboard 200 chart for nearly five years, and has gone on to become one of the highest-selling rock records ever, going 13× platinum in the United States. Formed after the demise of Gossard and Ament's previous band, Mother Love Bone, Pearl Jam broke into the mainstream with their debut album, Ten, in 1991.
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