![]() It was the best five hours I ever spent,” he said. “It changed our lives in infinite ways, it changed everything. These days he finds the flippancy with which it happened a little terrifying to look back on. He got home, spent a few hours laying down his vocals, and sent the tape back. He went surfing with the songs lodged in his head, and wrote the lyrics as he rode the waves. Gossard’s demo landed in his lap after a mutual friend, former Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Jack Irons, told Gossard and Ament to send a copy to the surfer dude singer he’d become pals with. “I don’t think I ever would’ve sold my guitar – as Pete Townshend would say, never spend your guitar or your pen – but I would be resigned to being the assistant manager of a drug store.”Īs fate would have it, Vedder’s career in the local chemist was not to be. “I gave myself a timeline,” he said in 2011. His band Bad Radio had recently split up, and he was beginning to wonder if that ship had sailed. ![]() Twelve hundred miles south, in the warmer climes of San Diego, Eddie Vedder was at a creative loose end. The problem was not finding a vocalist, it was finding a vocalist whose voice they liked. But singers were tried out and not invited back. There wasn’t exactly a local shortage – Seattle was in the midst of an ‘everybody’s in a band’ boom, and Gossard and Ament’s stock was high after their work in Mother Love Bone and grunge prototype rockers Green River. They emerged with a set of instrumentals titled the ‘Stone Gossard demos’, and set out to find a vocalist. Preparing to get the songs down on tape, McCready persuaded Gossard to enlist his Mother Love Bone bandmate Jeff Ament on bass, and Soundgarden’s Matt Cameron offered his services on drums. The pre-Pearl Jam Jeff Ament (bottom left) and Stone Gossard (top middle) with Mother Love Bone, 1988. That’s a long-term relationship right there.” “We’re into long-term relationships in this group,” Vedder explained, “in our personal lives, with each other as bandmates, and with the audience. Their very existence feels like a reassuring thing. It’s not just in the fact that they still put out great new records (although their output has slowed somewhat), or even in their euphoric, communal live shows. He wanted to know what the future looked like. ![]() He was more interested, he explained, in what Radiohead or Guided By Voices frontman Bob Pollard were doing than in gazing back to rock’n’roll’s Big Bang. His band were about to enter their third decade, and Vedder wanted to face forwards again. It’s more interesting now to see how a band navigates an open field of music.”Īll the looking back required for Cameron Crowe’s career-spanning documentary had the nostalgia-wary frontman feeling uneasy. Even the business of music and digital, it’s always moving and the tides are changing. “Music is not contained,” he continued, “it moves. He was working his way through a box of American Spirit cigarettes and reflecting on the imminent release of the Pearl Jam Twenty film. ![]() Vedder was sitting opposite me at Pearl Jam HQ, on the outskirts of Seattle. “Music ain’t a swimming pool, it’s an ocean,” the singer said in 2011. ![]()
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