Pearl Jam

Pearl Jam formed in Seattle in 1990 out of the wreckage of Mother Love Bone, the band guitarists Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament had built before singer Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose that March.^[1] Gossard and Ament regrouped with guitarist Mike McCready and recorded an instrumental demo in search of a vocalist. Former Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Jack Irons passed the tape along to Eddie Vedder, then living in San Diego, who wrote and recorded vocals for three of the songs, later described together as a mini opera called "Mamasan." The band was won over almost immediately, and Vedder joined within a week.^[1]

The band's name has a layered origin story: Ament proposed "pearl," and the group settled on "Pearl Jam" after watching Neil Young stretch songs into fifteen and twenty minute improvisations in concert.^[1] Their 1991 debut, Ten, turned out to be a phenomenon, eventually certified 13 times platinum and staying on the charts for nearly five years, establishing the band alongside Nirvana and Soundgarden as one of the defining acts of the Seattle grunge movement.^[1]

That success came with a cost. By the time the band regrouped to record its second album, Vs., in 1993, they were worn down by two years of nonstop touring, press junkets, and award shows, and by fans whose devotion had tipped into something closer to obsession.^[2] The band responded by pulling back, refusing to make music videos for the new record and scaling down their public presence, a pattern of resisting the machinery of the industry that would come to define much of their career, including their prominent mid 1990s standoff with Ticketmaster over service fees.^[1]

Ten was recorded in the spring of 1991 at London Bridge Studios in Seattle with producer Rick Parashar and released that August on Epic Records.^[3] Its lyrics circled depression, loneliness and violence, and the record was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2021.^[3] The band's wariness of commercial packaging showed early. When the label pushed for "Black" to be issued as a single, the members declined, protecting the song's personal character, and Vedder reportedly called radio programmers himself to confirm it had not been promoted without their consent.^[4]

Pearl Jam has continued recording and touring for more than three decades since, outlasting most of their grunge era peers and building one of rock's most loyal fan communities in the process. The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017.^[1]

Vedder's own history shaped his best known early songs. A student he knew in San Diego who brought a gun to school, along with a newspaper report about a Texas teenager's suicide, fed the writing of "Jeremy," the third single from Ten, and at the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards he said that music was what had kept him from a similar fate.^[5]