Pearl Jam
Formed from the ashes of Mother Love Bone after Andrew Wood's heroin overdose in 1990, Pearl Jam became the most popular American rock band of the 1990s. Their debut Ten outsold Nevermind domestically and they survived grunge's implosion by refusing to play the industry's games. In June 1994, Eddie Vedder, Stone Gossard, and Jeff Ament testified before Congress about Ticketmaster's monopoly, willing to sacrifice touring revenue for their principles. Vedder had been 'noticeably reticent in speaking about the history of his band and of the scene in general,' as one observer noted, but when a music journalist caught him on the phone three weeks after Ten came out in September 1991, he'd sounded uncertain, out of breath. 'I every day sound like that,' he said. 'Even when I feel good… it seems like every time I start to feel good, something really awful happens.' That vulnerability, caught on cassette via an answering machine, captured something essential about Pearl Jam: even when the music was ascending, the people making it were still falling apart. Greg Prato chose Andrew Wood's death as the breaking point in his oral history Grunge Is Dead: 'Everything leading up to that moment was a slow build up of momentum. What followed was an explosion.' Pearl Jam was born from that explosion.
Listen
Featured in
Discography
Ten
Pearl Jam's debut stayed on the Billboard 200 for nearly five years and outsold Nevermind domestically, making them the most popular American rock band of the decade. Formed from the ashes of Mother Love Bone after Andrew Wood's 1990 heroin overdose, the album arrived in the year following Wood's death—part of the explosion Greg Prato describes in Grunge Is Dead: 'Everything leading up to that moment was a slow build up of momentum. What followed was an explosion.' Ten dropped alongside Alice in Chains' Facelift, Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger, and Nirvana's Nevermind. When a music journalist caught Eddie Vedder on the phone three weeks after Ten came out in September 1991, he sounded uncertain, out of breath. 'I every day sound like that,' he said. 'Even when I feel good… it seems like every time I start to feel good, something really awful happens.' That vulnerability, caught on cassette, runs through every song on Ten. The album's emotional weight came from real tragedy: Wood's death, Vedder's own damaged past. Co-produced by Rick Parashar, Ten refused to sand off its rough edges even as it climbed the charts.