Rewind to 35 years ago today and it’s safe to say that none of the members who would co-form the band that came to be known as Pearl Jam had any inkling what was about to hit them. They may have been excitement, and certainly an amount of trepidation, but there is no way that Eddie Vedder, Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament, Mike McCready and then-drummer Dave Krusen (the first in a long line of sticksmen for the band) could have known what was round the corner.
It was October 8, 1990, that the five-piece hunkered down in a basement at the Galleria Potatohead practice space in Seattle’s Belltown neighbourhood to rehearse for the first time and see if this thing would fly. Weeks earlier, Vedder had sent his future bandmates a cassette onto which he’d added vocals to three instrumental demos they’d made, songs he had now titled Once, Alive and Footsteps. They were immediately bowled over. “On first listen, I thought, ‘Wow, this is really good’,” bassist Ament recounted in the band tome Pearl Jam Twenty. “I called Stone and said, ‘I think you need to come over here and tell me for sure’.”
Gossard was on board. Still reeling from the death of Andrew Wood, the flamboyant frontman of his previous band Mother Love Bone, and the group’s subsequent dissolution earlier that year, the guitarist had thrown himself into the new project. They had already tried out one vocalist unsuccessfully but now there was a feeling they might have their guy. There was only one way to find out.
Vedder arrived in Seattle from San Diego on the morning of October 8 and was keen to crack on. “Right before he got on the plane to come down, he said, ‘When I get there, I want you to pick me up, and I want to go straight to the practice studio and I don’t want to fuck around’,” Ament recounted. Vedder continued: “I just want to plug in the instruments and get at it. I don’t want to sightsee and I don’t want to get anything to eat or whatever’.”
Theirs was an immediate and explosive alchemy unrivalled by any of their 90s peers, or perhaps any rock band ever. When their first batch of rehearsals wound up five days later (because Vedder had to get back to his job in San Diego), they pretty much had the core of Ten down. As well as Once and Alive, they had also written Even Flow, Release, Black and Oceans, with album outtakes Breath, Just A Girl and Evil Little Goat also done. On October 13, they got these formative takes down on tape, a recording that has become a much-loved bootleg amongst Pearl Jam diehards. “We knocked out ten songs, and that ended up being the bulk of the first record,” Ament marvelled. “So that first week was pretty good!”
From the off, Vedder felt a connection with his new comrades, particularly drawn into the orbit of Ament, with whom he enjoyed deep chats about artwork and how being a proper band member was about more than just the music. “It’s not a slacker job or a rock star thing,” Vedder opined. “It’s about music, it’s about art, it's about all these things in common, which is probably why Jeff and I ended up roommates when we first started touring. We just connected and became really close.”
Vedder didn’t stay back in San Diego for long, returning to Seattle five days later. Instigated by Ament, the band, now going by the name of Mookie Blaylock after the New Jersey Nets basketball player, had already booked their first show. The bassist’s desire to try out their new band onstage in front of a crowd, says Gossard, was part of the reason behind their rampant early productivity – they needed stuff to play. “We didn’t really have time to worry about what we were going to be,” remembered the guitarist, “other than, we need eight songs.”
On October 22, Mookie Blaylock aka Pearl Jam made their live debut at Seattle’s Off Ramp venue, the music that had sprung to life from that first rehearsal released out into the wild. The setlist consisted of Release, Alone, Alive, Once, Even Flow, Black, Breath and Just A Girl, songs that didn’t even exist just a few weeks previously. They made an immediate impression.
“It was absolutely the best inaugural show I’ve ever seen in my life, hands down, no comparison,” raved the late, great Chris Cornell, a close friend of the band and a mentor to Vedder in Pearl Jam’s early days. “I remember exactly what I was thinking then, and it was that they were absurdly great.”
A couple of months later, Vedder would leave San Diego for good. Pearl Jam had signed to Epic by that point and, soon enough, work would begin on their debut album. It’s a classic record that begins 35 years ago tomorrow, when Pearl Jam plugged in and played for the very first time. They never looked back.
Watch footage from the band's live debut at Off Ramp below:
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