Pearl Jam

Pearl Jam came together in Seattle in 1990, in the wreckage of another band. Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament had played in Mother Love Bone until its singer died; what they built next needed a voice, and the voice arrived by tape from San Diego. Eddie Vedder mailed back lyrics to their instrumental demos, got on a journey north, and the lineup clicked into place around him. The debut, Ten, followed in 1991.

What set them apart, almost immediately, was a refusal to behave. As the band got enormous, they kept deciding against the things that make bands more enormous. They walked away from videos. They picked fights with the ticketing industry. They protected certain songs from the machinery of the music business with a stubbornness that cost them money and didn’t seem to bother them.

Musically they sit a little apart from the era they got filed under. Gossard and Mike McCready’s guitars owe as much to classic rock and blues as to anything happening around them in 1991, and Vedder’s writing tends toward the personal and the wounded rather than the slogan. The result is a band people don’t just like. They trust them. That’s rarer, and it lasts longer.