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Sub Pop's proprietors had keen ears. They produced some of the first recordings by a whole string of bands that went on to national success: Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. As soon as the bands became widely heard, however, they jumped to major labels. After Sub Pop's most promising band, Nirvana, left the company and released the huge hit Nevermind (more than 4 million copies sold) on the Geffen label, other major labels began an indie-band feeding frenzy. Bands that had been playing in taverns were being offered $300,000 contracts. Many of these groups were founded on the principle that mainstream music was bankrupt, which only made them more attractive to mainstream labels.
Pearl Jam came together as a serendipitous offshoot of a Sub Pop band called Green River. Rock legend, passed along by the resentful, has it that bassist Jeff Ament and guitarist Stone Gossard split from that band because the lead vocalist wanted to stay true to the experimental spirit of alternative rock, while Ament and Gossard wanted to become big-time rock stars. The band they formed, Mother Love Bone, combined a heavy-metal sound with bouncy tunes. Just as the group seemed ready to break through in 1990, its lead singer died of a heroin overdose.
Enter Eddie Vedder. He was living in San Diego, fronting an all too fittingly named band called Bad Radio. A musician friend gave him a cassette marked simply stone gossard demos '91 and told him the guitarists on the tape were looking for a singer. Vedder listened to the tape, then went surfing. Lyrics came to him. "Son, she said/ Have I got a little story for you." Vedder rushed back to his apartment, wrote three songs and recorded himself singing the lyrics over the melodies. Vedder sent the demo tape back to Seattle, where bassist Ament listened to the deep, intense growl of the California stranger. As he recalls that day in Rolling Stone, he played the tape three times, then picked up the phone. "Stone," he told his pal, "you better get over here."
One of the songs would later become one of Pearl Jam's biggest hits: Alive. The song is about a mother who has disturbing news for her son: "While you were sitting home alone at age thirteen/ Your real daddy was dying." The emotions in Alive were torn from Vedder's own life. Vedder was born in Chicago, the oldest of four children. The first records he can remember enjoying were Motown records, songs by the young Michael Jackson. Neil Young came next, and the Who's album Quadrophenia. He identified with its portrayal of adolescent trauma. Vedder never knew his real father. He was raised by a man who he thought was his father and with whom he often clashed. By the time his mother told him the truth, Vedder had migrated to San Diego, and his biological father had died of multiple sclerosis.
Vedder followed the tape to Seattle, where guitarist Mike McCready and drummer Dave Krusen rounded out the new band's lineup (Krusen was later replaced by Dave Abbruzzese). The group landed a deal with a major label, Sony's Epic, but when its first album came out in 1991, the musicians found themselves in the midst of the hype storm about Seattle bands. Nirvana exploded into prominence first, with its anthemic Smells Like Teen Spirit. When Pearl Jam drew attention as the Next Big Seattle Sound, Nirvana's Cobain seemed to bristle at sharing the limelight, dismissing Pearl Jam as retrorockers and copycats.
"Everyone was kind of taken aback because Pearl Jam was such a complete success right away," recalls Eddie Roeser, lead singer of the Chicago-based band Urge Overkill. "They want to make honest music -- it's not their fault that they're commercially huge."
Pearl Jam's fame built steadily with such hits as Alive, Even Flow and Jeremy. What really put the band over the top was its live performances, dominated by Vedder's vocal power and mesmerizing stage presence. He reminded fans of an animal trying to escape from a leash. Especially in the first year or so, he hurled himself into crowds, surfing on upraised hands. He climbed the scaffolds around a stage, dangling from dangerous heights. He stood still in front of a microphone, folded into himself, tearing emotions out of himself as he sang. "I'm kind of a cynic about these guys who cross their arms when they sing," Soundgarden's Kim Thayil says of the first time he heard Vedder sing in a Seattle club. "But there were songs that Eddie sang that sent shivers up my spine." Pearl Jam cemented its reputation as a heavyweight contender in August at the MTV Music Video Awards, where the band won four awards, including best video of the year for Jeremy, and joined Neil Young for a stirring version of his song Rockin' in the Free World.
Pearl Jam's new album, which is full of animal confrontation, was called Five Against One until the band changed the name to Vs. at the last minute. (As a result, the first pressing will be devoid of title.) The new disc combines politically correct views with punk-inspired belligerence. The music is layered with guitars and strong percussion; the tunes have the power of heavy metal but the melodic flavoring of great pop. Several of the songs are vitriolic attacks on patriarchal society. Glorified G. is a slam against rural lugs and their weaponry: "Got a gun/ Fact I got two/ That's okay man, 'cause I love God." The song W.M.A. is a critique of an actual crime in which a black man named Malice Green was beaten to death with flashlights by Detroit police. "White Male American/ Do no wrong," the song goes. "Dirty his hands it comes right off."
The irony is that the initials W.M.A. could stand for many of the people who will buy Pearl Jam's album. In fact, they stand for all the members of the band, as well as most of the people in the alternative rock scene, though female musicians have grown in prominence. In the liner notes to the Nirvana compilation Incesticide, lead singer Cobain wrote, "If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of a different color, or women, please do this one favor for us -- leave us the f--- alone!" And Scott Weiland, the flame-haired singer for Stone Temple Pilots -- grungelike newcomers who have an antirape song called Sex Type Thing -- recalls feeling disturbed at a recent concert when he looked out into a crowd made up of the kind of good-looking, middle- class guys who used to beat him up in high school.