![]() I was literally writing some of these words as I was going up against a wave.’ As soon as he left the water, he returned home and added his lyrics to three of Gossard’s songs: Footsteps, Agytian Crave, and Dollar Short, the latter two to be retitled Once and Alive, respectively. I was really getting focused on this one thing, and I had this music in my mind at the same time. He recalled the incident in 1991: ‘When you haven’t slept for days, you get so sensitive that it feels like every nerve is directly exposed… I went surfing in that sleep-deprived state and totally started dealing with a few things that I hadn’t dealt with. The morning after he first listened to the demo, Vedder went surfing, the music still in his head. Vedder was the lead vocalist for a local band called Bad Radio and worked at a gas station during the day. Irons passed on the invitation but sent the demo to a friend from San Diego named Eddie Vedder. They had given former Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Jack Irons the demo to see if he would be interested in joining the band, and to distribute the demo to anyone he felt might fit the lead vocal position. When they got the tape back from one singer, a young surfer from San Diego, they would have the song that would start their career: a version of Dollar Short that would be retitled Alive. The band then sent the cassette out in search of a singer and drummer. Gossard put five of these instrumental tracks – Dollar Short, Agytian Crave, Footsteps, Richard’s ‘E’ and ‘E’ Ballad – onto a tape, calling it Stone Gossard Demos ’91. It was totally cool because at that point, it was just kind of picking up the vibe and going with it.’ ‘They were just song ideas, jams and that sort of stuff. ‘There was no pressure, because they weren’t really songs,’ Ament has stated. Booking studios sessions with, separately, Soundgarden’s Matt Cameron and Green River’s Chris Friel providing drums, they recorded what they’d written so far. Not long after the three began playing together, they realized that the instrumentals they’d created were far from throwaways. I said, ‘We got to get Jeff, because you guys together are really great.’ Soon, Ament was on board as well. Jeff was playing with other people at the time. ‘He said, Do you want to jam?’ McCready remembers, ‘so we got together and we started playing upstairs in his parents’ attic. On a night in June, they saw McCready playing with a local psychedelic outfit called Love Chile, and soon after, Gossard gave the guitarist a call. ![]() Gossard had spent the summer after Wood’s death writing music on his own, while Ament was playing around town with several bands. ![]() ‘I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life,’ Ament said in 1991, ‘I felt like I’d spent a lot of time getting to that point, and … the rug got pulled out from underneath us.’ Tragedy struck when, despite an intervention by his bandmates in late 1989, Wood died from an accidental heroin overdose on March 19, 1990. His onstage presence was flamboyant and larger than life, leaping from the stage, cordless mic in hand, to roam through the crowd while he sang. McCready had previously played in a local metal band, Shadow, while Gossard and Ament had played with the band Green River, who split up in 1987, and then again in Mother Love Bone, whose singer Andy Wood had, at the age of 11, set himself the goal of becoming a rock star. Meanwhile, in the summer of that year, three young men – guitarists Stone Gossard and Mike McCready, plus bass player Jeff Ament – would congregate in Gossard’s parents’ attic, and jam on the instrumentals that within a year would be the basis for Pearl Jam’s Ten. 1990, and Seattle’s music scene is booming, the culmination of almost a decade’s worth of bands working as a community, putting out their own records, and they were starting to enjoy some sort of success: Soundgarden had just seen their album Ultramega OK get a Grammy nomination, and Nirvana’s debut, Bleach, had caused such a stir that Geffen had swooped in and signed the band away from local indie Sub Pop.
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