1991: Pearl Jam, Ten

By Nicholas Russell

A couple years before the recording and release of Pearl Jam’s Ten, Eddie Vedder would come off his midnight shift as a security guard at a petroleum company around 8am, head home, grab a basketball, and shoot by himself at a local park while listening to bands like Bad Brains and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. On an episode of the Bill Simmons Podcast (for research!), Vedder has said his habit of listening to music while playing is why he has “absolutely no left hand. Because I was always holding the cassette player”. At this, bassist Jeff Ament jokes that Vedder’s court style resembles Indiana NBA legend George McGinnis, who famously sunk jump shots with one hand. 

I keep returning to this image: Vedder on an empty outdoor court in the morning singing to himself, running round in vibrating circles, a guy before he was no longer just any guy. That foreknowledge is such a potent, skin-tingling idea. The thought of seeing someone before they inevitably transform into who they’ve always been to you, like Marty the first time he sees his parents in Back to the Future. The McGinnis comparison might not be apparent to people who remember him, a giant 6’8, 235lb power forward who charged down the paint, soaring high above his opponents. But the image sticks in a way, squares with all the footage out there of Pearl Jam on their first world tours in 1991 and 1992, five white dudes with long, brown hair thrashing about onstage, unbridled and bursting with energy. “I’m scrappy”, Vedder tells Simmons. 

You don’t necessarily count on the origins of the music you listen to to line up with the reason why you’re listening to it. Which is to say, Pearl Jam doesn’t write songs about basketball. However, I learned later that the name was a rewrite, replacing “Mookie Blaylock”, the band’s original moniker, after the then-New Jersey Nets point guard. Blaylock’s jersey number “Ten” is a vestige of that influence after Epic Records told the band to change their name. 

I came to Ten through the same avenue many kids born in the late 90s and early 2000s did: by playing “Even Flow” on Guitar Hero III and hearing “Jeremy” on local rock stations. I didn’t practice my shot while carrying an iPod on the court but I had the rhythms of those songs in my head while doing so. “Jeremy”, track six, couldn’t have been a more mysterious or dark song when I first heard it in elementary school. There was that nightmarish music video I watched on repeat in my parents’ upstairs den, the only room in our house with a computer, which forced me to pay attention to the lyrics of the song, one that takes the perspective of a bully reminiscing about a fellow student who shot himself in front of his class. Brooding, dark, melodramatic, but coming from a place of sincere curiosity, like most of the songs on Ten. 

I remember thinking that kids didn’t have access to guns where I lived (which was false), kids didn’t shoot themselves (also false), and they definitely didn’t do it in front of their classmates. At the dinner table one night, I gushed to my parents about “Jeremy”, telling them every gory detail I could dig up. I assumed they’d never come across the song before. It often doesn’t occur to children that your parents might have been around for the thing you’ve recently “discovered”, that they paid attention. When “Jeremy” and its controversial video shot Pearl Jam into the torrent of fame characterized at the time by heavy rotation on MTV and covers on Time magazine, my parents were still in college in southern California. I don’t doubt Vedder’s voice floated around them from passing cars or open shop doors, if not from their own headphones. 

What draws me to Ten, beyond nostalgia for basketball and beyond the thought experiment of my parents in their early 20s, cannot be broken down into tidy parts. For one, it is an album I find difficult to separate into sections, no front or back half. The opening track, “Once”,  feels like a cross between a soundcheck in slow motion and spa music but when the rest of the band comes in, it’s like they’re climbing up over a wall and sprinting across an open field. Vedder’s wordless vocalizations and Ament’s bass spin around your head, ear to ear, until everything stops before the far-off strumming of an electric guitar at a fast tempo. Cymbals crash, guitars ring loud, the band seems to say “Now that that’s over.” After some characteristically tight-lipped lyrics, Vedder opens his throat in the chorus and shouts “Once upon a time, I could control myself! Once upon a time, I could lose myself!” 

Amidst the foot-stomping, head-bobbing groove and frenetic drumming, Vedder’s simultaneously deep, cracking, wailing voice summons something mythic, pushing past the reverb, lifted on the shoulders of his bandmates’ instrumentation. He doesn’t get mercilessly parodied for nothing, what with the dramatic “woah”s and “ehhyahyehhs” in between lyrics and the legacy of copycats like Scott Stamp from Creed. But any gags about the way Vedder dances or pulls faces radiates outward from his voice, which commands such unvarnished force, even if it can seem laughably incongruous for a rock band. 

In 1991, Ten made its debut in American record stores less than a month before Nirvana’s Nevermind. The latter became an instant hit, largely because of the airtime given to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the increasing media scrutiny that surrounded Kurt Cobain. Meanwhile, Pearl Jam enjoyed critical success but slow album sales, touring as a band known more by the previous Pacific Northwestern groups its members used to be in rather than as its own cohesive unit. Many had heard Ament and guitarist Scott Gossard with the band Green River and later, Mother Love Bone. No one had heard of Vedder, except for his spot on a Temple of the Dog single alongside Chris Cornell from Soundgarden. 

In 1992, their wave crested. Nearly a year after Ten came out, it reached number two on the Billboard 200 and became certified gold, Kurt Cobain famously derided the band as commercial sellouts, and Eddie Vedder was diving into crowds of thousands from camera cranes in the Netherlands. Two years after its release, the album was still selling so well, it outsold Pearl Jam’s follow-up, Vs. 

Once you listen to their first album, it’s not hard to imagine why Pearl Jam was alternately loved and despised by genre gatekeepers. It’s a prototypical mainstream grunge record, which seems like an oxymoron, messy, huge, and frenetic. Still, it was more than just zeitgeist. Holding it all together, what has carried the record through into the present day, is the level of talent and energy behind each song, how surprisingly catchy they are, how sick their hooks remain. Cheesy as the song may be, “Release” stands as one of my favorite album closers of all time. And “Alive”, one of the first tracks to gain audience’s attention, stands as Ten’s centerpiece, an anthem of familial loss and regret that was written by Vedder after first hearing the band’s demo when they were searching for a singer. 

Ten remains Pearl Jam’s best-selling record, giving fuel to the proverbial fires of those who belittle the band by saying they peaked early. Honestly, I wouldn’t know, I’ve never listened to any of their subsequent albums in full. But sometimes, you care more about the journey you’re taken on by the music than where it ranks in any given hierarchy. “Cut to probably less than two years later,” Vedder tells Simmons. “We’re opening for the Chili Peppers...whatever the venue was, they did have a hoop on the back end...Jeff and I grab a basketball, we’re shooting hoops. The Red Hot Chili Peppers are soundchecking. They’re playing the same songs I used to listen to on cassette...It’s live! It’s fucking live.”

Nicholas Russell's work, fiction and non-fiction, has appeared in The Believer, Columbia Journal, Lumina, Reverse Shot, wildness, and Film Comment, among other publications. He is also part of the Writers Block, an independent bookstore and literary hub in Las Vegas.