The story of Pearl Jam

Out of the ashes of Mother Love Bone

Before Pearl Jam there was Green River, a Seattle band from the mid eighties that is often called the first grunge band. It featured bassist Jeff Ament, a skater kid from a tiny Montana town, and guitarist Stone Gossard, a Seattle native. The band split in 1987 because Ament and Gossard wanted a major label deal, while singer Mark Arm wanted to stay independent and saw them as careerists. Ament later pointed out that he was working in a restaurant to pay his rent, while the others had help from their parents. Arm went on to form Mudhoney. Ament and Gossard went looking for something bigger, and they found it in a flamboyant singer called Andrew Wood.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Andrew Wood had fronted the glam loving band Malfunkshun, performing as Landrew the Love Child. With Ament, Gossard, guitarist Bruce Fairweather and drummer Greg Gilmore he formed Mother Love Bone in 1988. Wood was funny, theatrical and magnetic, and by late 1988 the band was one of the hottest in Seattle. PolyGram signed them and even created a label imprint just for them, and their debut EP Shine came out in March 1989. But Wood had struggled with drugs since his teens. He went to rehab in 1989 hoping to be clean for the release of the first album, Apple, which was due in March 1990.[1] [2]

On the sixteenth of March 1990, days before Apple was due out, Andrew Wood was found unconscious by his fiancee after a heroin overdose. He was taken to Harborview Medical Center and kept on life support so that friends and family could say goodbye. He died on the nineteenth of March 1990, at the age of twenty four. Mother Love Bone died with him, and Apple came out that July to warm reviews. Gossard and Ament were devastated and almost went their separate ways. Ament later said he felt Andy's death was a sign that he should do something else with his life.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Gossard kept writing, and his new riffs were darker and heavier than before. He reconnected with Mike McCready, a guitarist he had known since before high school, when the two used to trade pictures of rock bands. McCready's band Shadow had tried and failed to make it in Los Angeles, and he had almost quit guitar, until a Stevie Ray Vaughan concert at the Gorge lifted him out of his slump. Gossard saw him play Vaughan's Couldn't Stand the Weather at a party and was hooked. The two jammed in Gossard's parents' house, and McCready pushed Gossard to call Jeff Ament again. With Soundgarden's Matt Cameron sitting in, they cut a five song instrumental demo.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The surfer from San Diego

Eddie Vedder was born Edward Louis Severson the Third on the twenty third of December 1964, in Evanston, Illinois. His parents divorced when he was a baby, his mother remarried, and he grew up believing her new husband, Peter Mueller, was his father. The family moved to San Diego County, where Eddie found comfort in surfing and in the Who's album Quadrophenia. When he was seventeen, during his mother's divorce from Mueller, she told him the truth. His real father was her first husband, Ed Severson, a man Eddie had met as a child and been told was just a family friend. By then Severson had died of multiple sclerosis. Eddie took his mother's maiden name, Vedder.[1] [2]

Through the eighties Vedder drifted between jobs and bands in San Diego. He worked nights, recorded demos at home, and sang with a funk rock band called Bad Radio. One friend was Jack Irons, the original drummer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who played basketball with him. In 1990 Gossard and Ament asked Irons to join their new band. Irons said no, but in September 1990 he passed their demo tape to Vedder. Vedder listened to it, went surfing, and the lyrics came to him in the water. He later insisted that famous story is completely true. He sang over three of the instrumentals and mailed the tape back to Seattle.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The three songs formed what Vedder called a mini opera. In the first, a young man learns that the man he calls father is not his father and that his real father is dead. In the second, he goes on a killing spree, and in the third he waits in a prison cell for his execution. The songs became Alive, Once and Footsteps. In Seattle, Gossard and Ament heard the tape and flew Vedder up. He arrived on the thirteenth of October 1990, and in a week of rehearsals with drummer Dave Krusen the band wrote eleven songs. On the way north Vedder had also written words to an instrumental called E Ballad. He called it Black.[1] [2] [3]

At the same time, Soundgarden's Chris Cornell, who had been Andrew Wood's roommate, was recording a tribute to him with Gossard, Ament, McCready and Matt Cameron. They called it Temple of the Dog, after a line in a Mother Love Bone song. Vedder sat in the corner of one rehearsal taping up a drum when Cornell struggled with a song called Hunger Strike. Vedder walked to the microphone and sang the low part. Cornell realized at once that the new guy's voice was perfect for it, and it became a duet and the album's single. Vedder called it the first time he ever heard himself on a real record, and he said he was indebted to Cornell forever.[1] [2] [3]

The new band played its first show at the Off Ramp Cafe in Seattle on the twenty second of October 1990. They called themselves Mookie Blaylock, after the basketball player, because Ament was a huge fan. Vedder was painfully shy, and Seattle was still grieving for Andy Wood. So when the band opened for Alice in Chains at the Moore Theatre that December, Chris Cornell walked out carrying Vedder on his shoulders. Soundgarden's manager Susan Silver remembered it as a moment of healing for the whole scene. McCready said Cornell had welcomed Vedder and given him his blessing, and after that the new singer began to relax.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Ten and the breakthrough

The band signed to Epic Records, and the label was nervous about the name Mookie Blaylock, especially once the player signed an endorsement deal with Nike. So the band needed a new one. According to Ament and McCready, Ament came up with the word pearl in a restaurant brainstorm. Then, on a trip to New York to sign the deal, Gossard, Ament and Vedder went to see Neil Young at Nassau Coliseum, where every song stretched into a fifteen or twenty minute jam. That, Ament said, is how jam got added. As a nod to the old name, they called the debut album Ten, after Mookie Blaylock's jersey number.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ten was recorded at London Bridge Studios in Seattle in the spring of 1991 with producer Rick Parashar, and mixed in England by Tim Palmer, who used a pepper shaker and a fire extinguisher as percussion on Oceans. Drummer Dave Krusen played on the album, but when the sessions ended in May 1991 he checked himself into rehab for alcoholism. He said later that the band gave him many chances but had to let him go. Matt Chamberlain filled in for a few weeks and appears in the live video for Alive, then left for the Saturday Night Live band. He recommended Dave Abbruzzese, a Texas drummer who was in the crowd the night that video was filmed.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Ten came out on the twenty seventh of August 1991, a month before Nirvana's Nevermind, and at first it sold slowly. The band toured relentlessly, including dates opening for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a slot Jack Irons helped arrange. The songs were darker than their big choruses suggested. Even Flow was about a homeless man, inspired by a homeless Vietnam veteran, also named Eddie, whom Vedder befriended in Seattle. Black was about losing a first love, and the band refused to release it as a single because it was too personal. Vedder even phoned radio station managers to make sure Epic had not sneaked it out against his wishes.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The song that made them stars was Jeremy, with music by Ament and words by Vedder. It was based on a newspaper story about Jeremy Wade Delle, a fifteen year old in Richardson, Texas, who shot himself in front of his English class on the eighth of January 1991. Vedder also drew on a boy he knew at school in San Diego who had fired a gun in a classroom. Mark Pellington's video went into heavy rotation on MTV and won four MTV Video Music Awards in 1993, including Video of the Year. On stage Vedder introduced the young actor Trevor Wilson with the words, this is Trevor, he lives. By the second half of 1992, Ten had climbed to number two.[1] [2] [3]

Fame, Vs. and pulling back

In 1992 Pearl Jam were everywhere. They played Saturday Night Live, the Lollapalooza tour and MTV Unplugged, where Vedder stood on his stool and wrote pro choice on his arm with a marker. Ament, Gossard and Vedder appeared in Cameron Crowe's film Singles as Citizen Dick, the band of Matt Dillon's character, and Dillon wore much of Ament's own wardrobe. They also threw a free thank you concert for about thirty thousand fans in Seattle, and had their first fight with Ticketmaster when the company wanted a one dollar fee for each free pass. The band handed out the tickets themselves.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Not everyone was a fan. Kurt Cobain of Nirvana spent a lot of time attacking Pearl Jam in the press, once accusing them of pioneering a corporate, alternative and cock rock fusion, and Britain's NME sneered that the band was stealing money from alternative kids' pockets. Yet at the MTV Video Music Awards in September 1992, Vedder and Cobain found themselves under the stage while Eric Clapton played Tears in Heaven, and they slow danced together like kids at a school dance. Years later Vedder said Cobain never really figured the band out, but that if he had lived, he thinks he would have got it.[1] [2]

The second album was recorded in the spring of 1993 at a ranch studio called The Site in Nicasio, California, with producer Brendan O'Brien. Vedder hated how comfortable it was. To keep his edge he slept in his truck and in the studio's sauna, and he later called it the album he enjoyed making least. It was meant to be called Five Against One, after a line in Animal, but the title changed at the last minute to Vs. Released on the nineteenth of October 1993, it sold about nine hundred and fifty thousand copies in its first five days, a record that stood until Garth Brooks broke it in 1998. It spent five weeks at number one.[1] [2]

Pearl Jam decided the answer to fame was to step away from it. They made no more videos after Jeremy, gave fewer interviews and did less television. Ament said he did not want people in ten years to remember their songs as videos. Much of the pressure fell on Vedder, who by then was dealing with a stalker. He later revealed that a woman drove her car at fifty miles an hour into the wall of his house and nearly killed herself, and he wrote about the ordeal in the song Lukin. In November 1993 he was arrested after a bar fight in New Orleans that also involved the baseball pitcher Jack McDowell.[1] [2] [3]

On the eighth of April 1994, the day Kurt Cobain's body was found in Seattle, Pearl Jam were on tour near Washington. That night in Fairfax, Virginia, Vedder told the crowd that none of them would be in that room if it were not for Kurt Cobain. He later said he was lost and did not know whether to play or go home, and that he decided to finish the last two weeks of the tour and then never play again. He did not quit. But the band's relationship with its own success had become a fight, and the biggest fight was just beginning.[1] [2]

The Ticketmaster war and Vitalogy

Pearl Jam had promised themselves that if they ever made it they would keep ticket prices down. For the 1994 tour they wanted eighteen dollar tickets with service fees of no more than a dollar eighty, printed clearly on the ticket. Ticketmaster usually took four to eight dollars a ticket. After two shows in Chicago in March 1994, the band found extra service charges had been added, and Ticketmaster chairman Fred Rosen would not back down. On the sixth of May 1994 the band filed a complaint with the Justice Department, accusing Ticketmaster of running a national monopoly. A Ticketmaster spokesman called it a brilliant marketing ploy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the thirtieth of June 1994, Gossard and Ament testified before a congressional subcommittee in Washington. Gossard said the fight was not about money but about fairness. Bands including R.E.M., the Grateful Dead and Aerosmith voiced support, and President Bill Clinton had invited the band to the White House that spring. But Ament came away disillusioned, saying the lawmakers seemed more interested in getting autographs for their children. The Justice Department closed its investigation in 1995 without taking action. Pearl Jam cancelled their 1994 summer tour and kept boycotting Ticketmaster venues, and to their surprise, almost no other bands joined them.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The third album, Vitalogy, was recorded in bursts during the Vs. tour, and the band was fraying. Producer Brendan O'Brien said, politely, that there was some imploding going on, and Ament said communication was at an all time low. Gossard thought about quitting. Mike McCready went into rehab in Minneapolis for alcohol and cocaine abuse, and there he met bassist John Baker Saunders. Back in Seattle they formed a side band with Layne Staley of Alice in Chains, which became Mad Season. Vedder, now playing more guitar, was making the final decisions, and many songs were written minutes before they were recorded.[1] [2]

In August 1994 the band fired drummer Dave Abbruzzese, who had played on Vs. and most of Vitalogy. He was replaced by Jack Irons, the friend who had passed Vedder the demo tape four years earlier. Vitalogy came out on vinyl in late November 1994 and on CD on the sixth of December, selling more than eight hundred and seventy thousand copies in its first week. The title came from an old medical book Vedder found at a garage sale. It held Better Man, a song Vedder wrote as a teenager about a woman trapped in a bad relationship. In 1994 he dedicated it on stage to the man who married his mother.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The boycott made touring a nightmare. In 1995 the band built shows from scratch in makeshift venues. They also backed Neil Young on his album Mirror Ball, but could not tour it in America because of the Ticketmaster fight, so they played eleven shows in Europe. On the twenty fourth of June 1995, at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, Vedder had food poisoning, managed only seven songs, and Neil Young stepped in to finish the show. The rest of the tour collapsed. Ament later said they were so hard headed about proving they could tour alone that it pretty much killed their career.[1] [2] [3] [4]

No Code, Yield and a new drummer

No Code, released on the twenty seventh of August 1996, was a deliberate break from the sound of Ten, full of quiet ballads, Eastern touches and noisy garage rock. It debuted at number one and then dropped fast, and it became their first album not to go multi platinum. The sessions were tense. Ament was not told the band was recording until three days in, walked out at one point, and thought about quitting because Vedder controlled so much. McCready credited Jack Irons for calming things down and getting everyone to talk. Vedder said that to him, the title meant do not resuscitate.[1] [2]

At the end of the No Code sessions, Vedder suggested the others bring in finished songs so he would not carry the whole load. The result was Yield, released on the third of February 1998, and it felt like a real team record. Ament and Gossard wrote lyrics for the first time, and Vedder sang them. The band had been reading Daniel Quinn's novel Ishmael, and it shaped songs like Do the Evolution, which got the band's first video since 1992, an animated clip co directed by Spawn creator Todd McFarlane. McCready noticed a change in Vedder, saying he used to be afraid of him but that now they talked and hung out.[1] [2]

After tours of Hawaii and Australia in early 1998, Jack Irons left the band. The official reason was that he was unhappy with touring. Irons, who has spoken about living with bipolar disorder, had struggled to find the energy for Pearl Jam's long shows, and Vedder said his decision really hurt. The band called Matt Cameron, the Soundgarden drummer who had played on their very first demo. Soundgarden had broken up the year before. Cameron said he was ambushed by a phone call asking what he was doing that summer. He learned more than eighty songs in two weeks, and the temporary job became permanent.[1] [2] [3]

The Yield tour marked Pearl Jam's return to full scale touring in America, and this time they used Ticketmaster again, because fans had grown tired of remote, out of the way venues. That same year, during a soundcheck, the band recorded a cover of Last Kiss, a teen tragedy song from the sixties, and sent it to fan club members as a Christmas single. Radio stations started playing it anyway. In 1999 it was released to the public, with all proceeds going to refugees from the war in Kosovo, and it reached number two, becoming the highest charting single of their career.[1] [2] [3]

Roskilde and the dark years

The sixth album, Binaural, came out on the sixteenth of May 2000, produced by Tchad Blake, the first since Ten without Brendan O'Brien. It was a hard record to make. Vedder had writer's block, banned himself from playing guitar, and wrote Soon Forget on a ukulele because, as he put it, a ukulele is not a guitar. McCready went back into rehab, this time for prescription drugs. Binaural was the first Pearl Jam studio album not to go platinum. But the band started something new on that tour. They recorded every show and sold them as official bootlegs, and released seventy two live albums in 2000 and 2001.[1] [2]

On the thirtieth of June 2000, Pearl Jam headlined the Orange Stage at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark in front of about fifty thousand people. Minutes before going on, they had heard that Chris Cornell and his wife had just had a baby daughter, and they hugged and cried with joy. About forty minutes into the set, in heavy rain, waves in the crowd knocked people over near the front. Others fell on top of them. The band stopped playing and pleaded with the crowd to step back, but it was too late. Nine young men, aged seventeen to twenty six, from Denmark, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and Australia, died of suffocation.[1] [2] [3]

The last two dates of the tour were cancelled, and members of the band talked about quitting altogether. Danish police, prosecutors and later civil trials all ruled it an accident with no criminal wrongdoing, though they criticized how long it took to reach the victims. For Vedder it came at the same time as his divorce from Beth Liebling, his partner since he was a teenager. He said he was in a fetal position. Pete Townshend, whose band the Who had lost eleven fans in a crush in 1979, told him he could handle it. Vedder was asked to write something for one victim's funeral and called it the hardest thing he ever did.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

A month later they were back on the road in North America, and Vedder said that playing together was how they began to process it. They left Alive out of every show until the last night in Seattle. On the twenty second of October 2000 they marked ten years as a band at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. The band vowed never again to play a festival where outsiders ran the security. Two years later the song Love Boat Captain remembered the nine fans with the line lost nine friends we'll never know, and Vedder still changes the number of years each time he sings it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Riot Act, protest and independence

Riot Act, released on the twelfth of November 2002, was shaped by Roskilde, by the September eleventh attacks and by a lot of death. It introduced keyboardist Boom Gaspar, a Hawaiian musician Vedder met through Ramones bassist C J Ramone. After their first jam together, Vedder asked him if he was ready to go to Seattle. The album also held a song called Bushleaguer, and on the 2003 tour Vedder sang it wearing a rubber George W. Bush mask, then hung the mask on his microphone stand. In Denver some fans walked out, and on Long Island the crowd booed and chanted U S A. The band answered with the Clash's Know Your Rights.[1] [2] [3]

Death kept coming close. Vedder's friend Layne Staley of Alice in Chains died of an overdose in April 2002, and Vedder wrote a song the night he heard. In 2003 Pearl Jam's contract with Epic ended and they walked away, saying they had no interest in another label. Their first release on their own was Man of the Hour, written for Tim Burton's film Big Fish, which earned a Golden Globe nomination. In 2004 they allowed a song on television for the first time, as Yellow Ledbetter played in the final episode of Friends. That autumn they joined the Vote for Change tour with Bruce Springsteen to campaign against President Bush.[1] [2] [3]

In September 2004 Johnny Ramone died, and Vedder was at his side. He called the Ramones guitarist the best friend he ever had, and said half of the next album was about losing him. That album, simply called Pearl Jam, came out on the second of May 2006 on J Records. It was loud, fast and angry, and its single World Wide Suicide, an attack on the Iraq War, went to number one on the modern rock chart. Vedder said the record was the band raising their hand and speaking out in class. Rolling Stone called it their best work since Vitalogy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

By now Vedder had found peace. He was with the model Jill McCormick, and their first daughter, Olivia, was born in June 2004. On the Vote for Change tour he had a long rooftop talk with Bruce Springsteen about fathers and families that helped him make peace with his stepfather, whom he met again at a brother's wedding. In August 2006 Pearl Jam headlined the Reading and Leeds festivals, their first festival shows since Roskilde. Vedder opened by asking the crowd to look after each other, and said staying away had nothing to do with guts. They had just needed the audience's trust.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Backspacer to the Hall of Fame

Vedder stepped out alone in 2007 with songs for the film Into the Wild, and his song Guaranteed won a Golden Globe. Pearl Jam returned in 2009 with Backspacer, their first album with Brendan O'Brien since 1998 and their first on their own label, Monkeywrench, sold in big stores through a deal with Target. It was short, bright and poppy, and Vedder credited the election of Barack Obama for the hopeful lyrics. It became their first number one album since No Code. Earlier that year Jeff Ament had been attacked by a gang of muggers outside a studio in Atlanta, knocked to the ground and hurt his head.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2011 the band turned twenty. Cameron Crowe, who had cast them in Singles, made the documentary Pearl Jam Twenty, and the band held a festival weekend at Alpine Valley in Wisconsin where Chris Cornell joined them for Temple of the Dog songs. Lightning Bolt followed in October 2013, their fifth number one album, and Ament's design for it won a Grammy for best packaging. In 2014 Vedder caused an uproar at a show in Milton Keynes with an anti war rant that some read as aimed at Israel. He replied that he was simply still anti war, and that it hurts no matter which side the bombs are falling on.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the seventh of April 2017 Pearl Jam entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in their first year of eligibility. Neil Young was due to induct them but dropped out through illness, so David Letterman did it instead, and joked about the band taking on those beady eyed weasels in 1994. Only Krusen and Cameron were inducted among the drummers, and Dave Abbruzzese publicly demanded recognition. The band responded by inviting all their former drummers to the ceremony. Weeks later, on the eighteenth of May 2017, Chris Cornell was found dead in a Detroit hotel room after a Soundgarden show. His death was ruled a suicide. Vedder said Cornell had been like an older brother to him.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Gigaton, Dark Matter and life after Cameron

Gigaton, released on the twenty seventh of March 2020, was supposed to launch a tour, but the COVID pandemic shut it down and the shows were pushed to 2022. When the band finally returned, former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Josh Klinghoffer had joined as a touring member. In May 2022 Matt Cameron caught COVID and missed his first shows in twenty four years. Fill ins included Klinghoffer, Richard Stuverud and even fans, and in Fresno the original drummer Dave Krusen came back to play a set heavy on songs from Ten, the album he had drummed on three decades earlier.[1] [2] [3] [4]

For their twelfth album the band turned to Andrew Watt, who had produced Vedder's 2022 solo record Earthling. Dark Matter was recorded mostly in three weeks at Shangri La studio in Malibu, with the five of them playing in one room, and McCready said Watt kicked their asses. Released on the nineteenth of April 2024, it drew some of their best reviews in decades and three Grammy nominations. On the world tour that summer an illness swept through the band, forcing them to cancel shows in London and Berlin. Vedder told a crowd in Barcelona it had felt like a near death experience, like you might not make it through the night.[1] [2] [3]

On the seventh of July 2025, Matt Cameron announced he was leaving. After twenty seven fantastic years, he said, he had taken his final steps down the drum riser for the mighty Pearl Jam, and he thanked Jeff, Ed, Mike and Stone for the opportunity of a lifetime. The band called him a singular and true powerhouse. Days later he made clear he was not retiring from music. Fans wondered whether old drummers might return, but Dave Abbruzzese said the years of estrangement made that unlikely. He had been the longest serving drummer in the band's history, and after he left the band did not play a single show for more than a year.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In May 2026 the band announced their first show since Cameron left, headlining the Ohana Festival in Dana Point, California, the beach festival Vedder founded, on the twenty seventh of September 2026. They refused to say who would play drums. Stone Gossard called it their mystery wrapped in an enigma. More than thirty five years after Andrew Wood's death, the four men who came together in 1990 are still the core of the band. Ten alone has been certified thirteen times platinum in the United States, and Pearl Jam have sold more than a hundred million albums, outlasting nearly every band of their era.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Pearl Jam

Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell. Cornell was one of the first people Vedder met in Seattle. He invited the shy newcomer onto Hunger Strike, carried him on stage on his shoulders, and lived near him for a while. Vedder called him the best singer on the planet. They last sang Hunger Strike together in October 2014. After Cornell's suicide in May 2017, Vedder said he had looked up to him like an older brother and would love him forever.[1] [2] [3]

Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament. The two met in Green River, where Gossard was the Van Halen fan and Ament the Black Flag fan, and they left together when Mark Arm wanted to stay independent. They built Mother Love Bone, nearly split after Andrew Wood's death, then founded Pearl Jam. In 1994 they testified side by side before Congress against Ticketmaster. They remain the band's founding core.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Stone Gossard and Mike McCready. They knew each other before high school, trading pictures of rock bands. Gossard later saw McCready play Stevie Ray Vaughan at a party and asked him to jam, and McCready in turn pushed Gossard to reunite with Ament. Rolling Stone later named the pair a four armed monster among new guitar gods, and in 2023 both were ranked at number one hundred twenty four among the greatest guitarists.[1] [2] [3]

Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain. Cobain publicly mocked Pearl Jam as corporate cock rock, and the press cast the two bands as rivals. Yet at the 1992 MTV awards the two singers slow danced under the stage to Tears in Heaven. After Cobain's death, Vedder told a crowd none of them would be there without him, and in 2006 he said he still missed him and thought about him all the time.[1] [2]

Pearl Jam and Neil Young. Young inspired half the band's name and was called the godfather of grunge. Pearl Jam backed him on the 1995 album Mirror Ball and a European tour, and he finished a show for them when Vedder fell ill in San Francisco. They played his Bridge School Benefit many times. He was due to induct them into the Hall of Fame in 2017 but pulled out through illness.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Eddie Vedder and Johnny Ramone. An unlikely pair, the liberal singer and the hard line Republican guitarist became close friends. Vedder joked that he made Ramone a nicer person and Ramone made him more of an asshole. Vedder was at his side when he died in 2004, wrote Life Wasted driving home from the funeral, and called him the best friend he ever had.[1] [2]

Eddie Vedder and Pete Townshend. The Who were Vedder's favorite band, and Quadrophenia got him through his teens. Townshend talked him out of retiring in 1993, and after Roskilde, drawing on the eleven deaths at a Who concert in 1979, he told a devastated Vedder that he could handle it. Vedder later wrote the foreword to a Townshend biography.[1] [2]

Pearl Jam and Brendan O'Brien. The Atlanta producer made Vs., Vitalogy, No Code and Yield, remixed parts of Binaural, then returned for Backspacer and Lightning Bolt. He was the one who heard Better Man and called it a hit, which made Vedder groan. O'Brien admitted he may have quietly sabotaged an early version so the band would keep the song.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Eddie Vedder and Jack Irons. Basketball partners in San Diego, Irons passed Vedder the tape that changed his life, then helped get the new band an opening slot with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He joined as drummer in 1994 and was credited with healing the band during No Code. His exit in 1998 hurt Vedder deeply.[1] [2]

Pearl Jam and Fred Rosen. Ticketmaster's chairman was the band's great adversary in 1994. They clashed over service fees, over a charity donation at a 1993 Seattle show, and over Chicago tickets, leading to the Justice Department complaint. His company dismissed the band as grandstanding, and the investigation closed in 1995 without action.[1] [2] [3]

Eddie Vedder and Jill Vedder. Vedder met the model Jill McCormick around 2000, after his divorce from his teenage sweetheart Beth Liebling. He had once savaged models in a Vitalogy song, and joked that the relationship had to pass a harder test. They married in September 2010, have two daughters, and founded a charity fighting the skin disease epidermolysis bullosa.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Pearl Jam

• As a thirteen year old, Matt Cameron played in a cover band called Kiss, until Kiss's management threatened to sue. Cameron and his friends named their band Kiss, with the word imitation in small print underneath. He even met Paul Stanley, but a legal letter from the real band's management ended the stunt.[1]
• Matt Cameron sang a song in the cult film Attack of the Killer Tomatoes as a teenager. In 1978, under the name Foo Cameron, he sang Puberty Love for the film. The nickname Foo came from his older brother, who pronounced Matthew as Ma Foo.[1]
• Jeff Ament is the eldest of twelve children, and his father was the mayor of Big Sandy, Montana. Big Sandy has fewer than seven hundred people. George Ament was mayor for fifteen years and also worked as a barber and a school bus driver.[1]
• Matt Dillon's grunge wardrobe in the film Singles mostly belonged to Jeff Ament. Ament also wrote a list of fake song titles for Dillon's band Citizen Dick. Chris Cornell took it as a challenge, and one title became Soundgarden's hit Spoonman.[1] [2]
• On Oceans, the percussion includes a pepper shaker and a fire extinguisher. Mixer Tim Palmer added them while finishing Ten at Ridge Farm, a converted farm studio in England, in June 1991.[1]
• After his second show with the band, Dave Abbruzzese got Jeff Ament's stick figure drawing tattooed on his shoulder. The stick figure came from the sleeve of the Alive single. Abbruzzese had been reluctant to join full time, then went straight to a tattoo parlor.[1]
• The pink cover of Ten was supposed to be burgundy, with a black and white photo. Ament, who built the wooden Pearl Jam cutout on the cover, said there was head butting with the label's art department, which changed the colors.[1]
• McCready says his famous Alive solo copies Ace Frehley, who in turn copied Robby Krieger of the Doors. He named Kiss's song She as his model, which he said was lifted from Five to One. The final solo was recorded in one take with a Uni Vibe effect.[1]
• Alive spent a record sixty one weeks on Billboard's Bubbling Under chart. It was only sold as an import in America at first, so it could not enter the Hot 100, yet it lingered just below it for more than a year.[1]
• Vedder has said the famous line in Black paraphrases a song by the band American Music Club. Critic Allan Jones linked it to Western Sky, and Vedder told him nobody had ever picked up on that, adding he was surprised anyone had heard of the band.[1]
• The little girl on the cover of the Jeremy single is the daughter of the band's manager. The photo by Lance Mercer shows Jessica Curtis, daughter of longtime manager Kelly Curtis.[1]
• Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town took about twenty minutes to write. Vedder wrote it in a tiny outbuilding where he was sleeping during the Vs. sessions. Gossard, reading the paper outside, liked it, and they recorded it that day. The long title mocked their habit of one word titles.[1]
• The goat on the cover of Vs. was photographed by Jeff Ament on a farm in Montana. Ament said the fenced in goat showed how the band felt at the time. We were slaves, he said.[1]
• Vitalogy's first week vinyl sales stood as a record for twenty years. It sold thirty four thousand LPs in its first week in 1994, a record since tracking began in 1991, broken only by Jack White's Lazaretto in 2014.[1]
• Instead of lyrics, the Corduroy page of Vitalogy shows an X ray of Vedder's teeth. The booklet mimicked an old medical book Vedder found at a garage sale. Its sideways, book like packaging cost an extra fifty cents a copy and annoyed record stores.[1]
• The sound collage Hey Foxymophandlemama, That's Me was built from real recordings of psychiatric patients. It was also Jack Irons's first recording with the band, made right at the end of the Vitalogy sessions.[1] [2]
• One of the Polaroids on the No Code cover is Dennis Rodman's eyeball. Another shows Vedder's foot after a stingray sting. Rodman, a friend of the band, also said the song Black stopped him from attempting suicide in 1993.[1] [2]
• The lyrics of the No Code song Smile came from a note another musician hid in Vedder's notebook. Dennis Flemion of the Frogs slipped it in while Vedder was on stage, using lines from Frogs songs. He is credited on the vinyl but not the CD.[1]
• The empty road on the Yield cover is Montana Highway 200, and a yield sign hides in every booklet photo. Ament loved the idea of a yield sign with nothing to yield to, on a road near his Montana home.[1]
• Jeff Ament does not play on Do the Evolution. Stone Gossard recorded the bass. Vedder called it his favorite song on Yield, saying he could listen to it like a band that came out of nowhere.[1]
• The cover of Binaural is a Hubble Space Telescope photo of the Hourglass Nebula. The band got NASA's permission. Ament said the space theme was about scale, a reminder that even powerful music is tiny in the big picture.[1]
• Binaural hides a track called Writer's Block that is just the sound of a typewriter. It nods to the block Vedder suffered while making the album, and to his habit of writing lyrics on typewriters.[1] [2]
• Pearl Jam twice set the record for the most albums debuting on the Billboard 200 at the same time. It came from their official bootleg series, which put out seventy two live albums across 2000 and 2001.[1]
• On Pearl Jam records, Vedder credits his artwork to a pseudonym, Jerome Turner. He has also used the name Wes C. Addle, a pun on West Seattle.[1]
• In 1995 Vedder was swept two hundred and fifty feet out to sea while surfing with Tim Finn in New Zealand. Lifeguards rescued him. A decade later he was nearly lost at sea again while trying to paddle an outrigger canoe between Hawaiian islands.[1]
• Better Man borrows its chord progression from the English Beat's Save It for Later. Vedder has acknowledged the debt, and the band often plays the two songs as a medley.[1]
• Stone Gossard's label released the debut album by Queens of the Stone Age. His label Loosegroove released their debut in 1998. Matt Cameron, meanwhile, played drums at the very first Queens of the Stone Age show in Seattle in 1997.[1] [2]
• Backspacer is named after an old typewriter key and shares its name with a sponsored sea turtle. The band sponsored a leatherback turtle called Backspacer in a conservation race. Vedder said the title meant going back to look at your mistakes.[1]
• Bradley Cooper based parts of his A Star Is Born rock star on Eddie Vedder. Cooper spent four or five days with Vedder picking up tips for the character Jackson Maine.[1]
• During the Vs. sessions, Vedder slept in his truck and in the studio sauna to keep his edge. The ranch studio in Nicasio was so peaceful that he said he hated it, asking how anyone could make a rock record there.[1]
• The band recorded Even Flow for Ten somewhere between fifty and seventy times. McCready said they played it until they hated each other, and Ament called it the best song they got the worst take of.[1]
• Before joining Pearl Jam, Matt Cameron learned more than eighty of their songs in two weeks. He was called in at short notice for the 1998 Yield tour, and said he felt ambushed by the phone call.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.