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McCready suggested Gossard should start playing with Love Bone bassist Jeff Ament again. McCready told him, “We’ve got to get Jeff, because you guys together are really great.” This night, the guitarists ducked back into the Oxford Tavern and talked music for a while. McCready’s hairband Shadow had failed to get a record deal in LA in the 1980s, but Gossard had seen McCready play a blazing cover of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Couldn’t Stand the Weather” in his little Seattle band Love Chile, and Gossard loved it. He and Gossard had known each other since middle school, when they’d traded photos of rock bands they liked with each other. “He said he was doing a little writing,” Stewart remembered, “just noodling around.” When they went outside to hit another bar, they ran into local guitarist Mike McCready.
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Stewart hosted the “New Music Hour” show and asked Gossard what he was up to. One night, Gossard and KISW disc jockey Damon Stewart were having beers at the Oxford Tavern near Pike Place Market. “I had the personality type that said ‘Let’s just keep going,’” Gossard said. Wood’s friends like Chris Cornell and Love Bone guitarist Stone Gossard grieved by playing music. PolyGram had invested a lot of money and hope in Love Bone’s success. Of course, the record company was disappointed, too. Their story is this: After Mother Love Bone’s singer Andrew Wood died in March 1990, his friends wondered what to do. But it was as cool as a band’s presence made it, and Nirvana was the coolest band in the fall of ’91.Īt the time, I didn’t know Pearl Jam’s story. ASU Activity Center was a big cavernous sports venue located on a university campus. It wasn’t the gorgeous Moore Theater in Pearl Jam’s “Even Flow” video, which would appear in 1992, where singer Eddie Vedder drops from the balcony onto the crowds’ outstretched like a fallen angel. ASU Activity Center wasn’t the intimate club setting that Sub Pop’s highly curated photography had started marketing as the face of the new rock ‘n’ roll. But as the first song on Ten, “Once” was many listeners’ introduction, so for me, “Once” was this band.Īpparently we’d missed Pearl Jam two months earlier on their first tour, when they played Phoenix’s tiny metal venue The Mason Jar. It’s easy to think Pearl Jam’s first single “Alive” as the song that launched their career. It was more aggressive vocally than Andrew Wood’s Love Bone, less playful, but also less corny than Wood’s occasionally cringe-worthy metal lines like “I need your smooth dog lovin’, oh yeah.” The two guitarists wove together their solos and pounded out powerful riffs like the one on my instant favorite song, “Deep.” Ten was rocking, catchy, angry, and fresh. The front-man sang with the kind of seductive urgency that appeals to raging teenagers. Song after memorable song hammered us like that. “I admit it,” the singer snarled, “what’s to say?” At the time, fluff like Michael Bolton poured out of mall and car stereo speakers everywhere you went. Then the drums and bass locked the band into a raucous jam. First came the guitar riff-just by itself. After the weird, almost New Agey intro music, the song “Once” blasted through her mother’s speakers.
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We’d grown up listening to the Chili Peppers, whose whole “me and my friends” deep brotherly love thing resonated with our tight male friend group, although their spazztic brand of sexist, white boy funk-rap quickly ruined the band for me. We already loved Nirvana’s Bleach and had just started digging their new catchy one Nevermind. Bright Arizona sunlight flooded Jessica’s living room, and she explained how in December, Love Bone’s new band was opening for Nirvana and the Red Hot Chili Peppers at ASU Activity Center.
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It stood near the string of public parks that we’d been riding our bikes through for years, first just to play as kids, later as teenagers riding to record stores and video arcades. My friends and I went over to her mom’s apartment one day. The promotional machinery had clued her into about Pearl Jam’s major label debut, Ten, before it even came out, and it clued her in about their supporting tour. Jessica had joined Mother Love Bone’s badly named Earth Affair fan club, but after the band dissolved in 1990, she signed onto their new band’s fan club, called the Pearl Jam Ten Club. Beaded necklaces, Fresh Jive, and a 7-11 vest I bought from an employee for some reason.Īs usual, it was a person, not MTV or Rolling Stone, who tipped us off to my next favorite band: Pearl Jam.