Pearl Jam Explain Ten (Part Two)

03/18/09 2:26pm

Here's part two of a mind-bogglingly long Q&A with grunge survivors Pearl Jam in honour of the re-issue of their Ten album. Check CHARTattack tomorrow for part three.

The band were originally working as "Mookie Blaylock," the name of a pro basketball player. After they signed to Epic Records it became clear they would have to find another name for legal reasons. How did you settle on Pearl Jam?
Mike McCready: Jeff [Ament, bass], Ed [Vedder, vocals] and Stone [Gossard, guitar] saw Neil Young jamming for a long time, so the word "jam" was there. I remember this list of names and we were sitting around the B&O coffee shop on Broadway. Pearl was up here and Jam was there amongst all these other words and we were putting them together. Jeff put those two together and we were, like, "That's it."

How did the recording sessions for Ten go?
MM: We'd done a few demos prior in our studio, the Galleria Potato Head. When we recorded Ten was we brought in those ideas that Stone and I had been working on, that Jeff, Stone and I had been working on and what Ed had sung on over the period of a week — "Alive," "Once," "Jeremy" and a couple of others that didn't make the record. We were up in London Bridge Studios in North Seattle and we would go in and record takes daily, and then overdub them later or the next day.

We did "Evenflow" about 50 – 70 times. I swear to God, it was a nightmare. We played that thing over and over until we hated each other. I still don't think Stone is satisfied with how it came out. That was maybe the most arduous thing, but it was also very exciting to be in a big major recording studio for the first time.

What are your favourite songs on Ten?
Eddie Vedder: Any of 'em with good momentum. "Why Go" moves along real well. It's never work playing those songs. I like the noise stuff — "Master Slave" was an art project song Jeff and I would work on in the middle of the night — just approaching blank tape like a blank canvas. The silence was like a blank canvas. Splattering paint and splattering sound. It wasn't just a straight song.

"Alive" has changed for me. A healing happened, and now I think about it more from how other people are approaching the lyrics, though once in awhile I'll still go dark with it. I always thought that chorus was a burden, but others have it as an affirmation... so I'm going the affirmation route now, too.

Stone Gossard: I love "Oceans." That probably sums up what I get excited about songwriting. It's like open D tuning where the first chorus just straight across, and it's just two fingers that come on and off to create the whole thing and then it moves down one position and it moves back up. It has a tiny little change in it, but it's also got three big movements.

What I love about music is aesthetic chords; the simpler the better, and then another set that does something to those original chords. It's a really simple arrangement.

We wrote it, we played it and Ed sang it, which is another thing that he does. I'd never seen anyone engage with songwriting the same way. Here's the song, let me play it for you. It goes like this. "OK, there's a change here, let's do it"... and he would sing it.

I'd hear the melodies and I'd think, "OK, he's gonna write words or whatever," and then I realised later that he actually had written the words right there. I couldn't understand how somebody could do that. Since then, I've met a lot of people that can do it, so it was an eye-opener, but he does it better than anyone I've ever seen do it.

Matt Cameron: When I was in Soundgarden and we were making Badmotorfinger, Eddie brought up the mixes to Ten and I distinctly remember hearing the chorus for "Evenflow" and thinking that's huge. So hooky, it's got a really rad Zeppelin huge rock feel to it.

Although we've played it a couple of thousand times since I've been in the group, I think that's the quintessential Pearl Jam song. Even though it gets played out, the nuts and bolts of that song are just amazing. "Oceans" is also a fantastic song. Super-fun to play.

MM: I really like "Alive" a lot. I look at it as a live song that we've done over the years and that people respond to very well and have an emotional attachment to. And I get to do a fun solo on it!

Jeff Ament: At the time, it was "Oceans," and it's still my favourite track. When we recorded it, I thought we were pushing the envelope and that there was a lot of other places that we could take the music that we made. I also like the intro and outro music, which was a kind of art project that we did on a day where somebody was sick. That's what I get most excited about, the stuff that's just a little bit outside of our comfort zone.

Every record we made has had a little art project index. Somebody would come in with a vision for something crazy or a different way to approach recording or writing or switching instruments. Sometimes they've failed, but every once in a while something really good happens which creates a new way to make music together. If we felt like we were pushing out and people responded to that that is success to me.

Ten sold 12 million copies and has become a seminal '90s album. What do you think of it now?
SG: I think Ten's still good, but I don't put it on (laughs). The new mix of the record is great. That's one of the things I'm most excited about is Brendan [O'Brien, producer] doing another mix on it. It sounds a little bit more like our subsequent records sounded, so it gives it a different treatment.

MC: It's definitely stood the test of time. To me, it sounds like a band playing in the studio.

JA: A little bit of hindsight, but not necessarily the 17 years that it's taken to get to this point! Ever since we made our second record, we've been thinking about remixing Ten. The original version has a little bit more of an '80s production. When Brendan mixed Vs., I asked him, "Can you remix Ten just for me so I can listen to a drier, more direct version of those songs?"

EV: It was our first record, so there were certain things to fight for — lyrical content, arrangements. I had never made a record before, so I thought some of the production values — reverbs and sounds — were how you did it.

Now we certainly know better. In the end it's nice to hear it stripped away, to hear the performance a little better. I've been hearing these songs live on a weekly basis for the last 17 years, so obviously it's gonna sound more present for to me to hear them in a raw form.

The super-deluxe Ten reissue package includes the legendary original demo tape. How does that sound to you today?
EV: It's a bit overwhelming in that I'm so grateful that Stone and Jeff had the courage to let me get behind the wheel. Especially considering it was their vehicle. A nice car, you know? If that tape was a driving test I think I passed it, but I definitely came close to hitting a couple of pedestrians (laughs).

One part in particular left me in hysterics. The middle of "Once." Something I did in the writing to tell the story — it's insane listening back to that, but they gave me the benefit of the doubt on that one. The other two songs are almost exactly the same. The exact imprint of how we play it this day, so there's something interesting there, too. Nothing ever got reworked. It just was what it was.

The super-deluxe Ten reissue package also includes a DVD of your MTV Unplugged session, a new remix of Ten by Brendan O'Brien, notebooks and vinyl versions. How did it come about?
JA: Sony's been asking us to do it for a long time, but Kelly, our manager, has had the idea to do a 20-year anniversary retrospective movie, so he's been on board with [film director] Cameron Crowe for the last few years. He presented the idea to us of reissuing some of these records leading up to that, and I was really excited about doing Ten. I wasn't happy with the way the original package came out.

We had pretty severe restrictions in terms of what we could do. They didn't let us put it out on vinyl and that was a rough blow to us at the time 'cause I don't think I even had a CD player. I was one of the last people that I knew that got a CD player.

Early on, I found out it was better to make bad art yourself than to have somebody else create what they thought would represent you. Ed and I have always been super-hands-on with all our art, and Ten was the one time in Pearl Jam where the finished product really wasn't 100 per cent what we intended.

There was a bit of headbutting going on with the Sony art department at that time. The version that everybody go to know as the Ten album cover was pink, and it was originally intended to be more of a burgundy colour and the picture of the band was supposed to be black and white. I felt this reissue was an opportunity to go back and finish what we started.

We had a hard time actually finding original photographs, so all we had to work with was black and white photographs, so we have a slightly different version of what the original colour was. We gave it a sepia tone finish. Ed and I dug through boxes and boxes of memorabilia and journals that we kept during the tours and the making of that first record and we created a journal with a lot of those artefacts and it was super-fun. I think it was the first time that either one of us had dug through that stuff for 17 years, and it filled in some memory loss that we had from that time. I think it has turned into a really cool package, a real "fans" package.

MM: When we did MTV Unplugged, we had flown in that day from Germany, so we were all tired, jet-lagged and hungover. We rented some guitars that were OK and we didn't feel that comfortable about it, but we knew it was something that was good for us to do.

Nobody in the band has ever been that excited about that performance, but MTV Unplugged has been very exciting to many fans over the years — "Like, dude, when are you going to release that?" So we are finally gonna release that because of the fan demand.

EV: A lot of this project was about revisiting who we were. When I'm asked about those days the context of the question is usually, "How did you survive?" or "Were you truly as miserable as you sounded?" It was nice to go back 'cause now I end up remembering that there was magic happening musically and some life-changing moments that were all very positive.

In the early days, Ten was a slow seller and the band toured for months promoting it. During his first shows Eddie Vedder was a restrained frontman. By the end he was an inspired performer. What caused that change?
MM: What made Ed change from being stoic and being introspective was when Chris Cornell from Soundgarden took him out drinking and gave him an idea of maybe loosening up. I don't know what he did, but after he hung out with Chris he started to open up a little bit more.

Then we went on tour, we went to Europe a few times and he became this guy who would climb everywhere during the middle of the songs. I was worried every time he did it.

We were in San Diego — it was us, Nirvana and the Chilli Peppers. He jumped up on this scaffolding bar, threw his microphone cord over it, climbed up it maybe 40 feet up, while we were doing the solo for "Alive." I'm thinking "This guy's gonna fall and kill himself and our career's over."

EV: When we got in front of a crowd, it was hard not to push things to make sure that it was gonna be a gig to remember. Of course, you should be able to do it just with chord changes and the way you deliver a song. But suddenly the Evel Knievel part of me took over and I felt the urge to push the audience to the edge and pay attention.

SG: Ed didn't perform the way he was to subsequently 'til he'd played 40 or 50 shows. Maybe not that many. All of a sudden he figured out how to exchange energy with the crowd in a way that he'd never done before so that's when it went "pheeeeeew." Ed knows how to inhabit a song, and people can see it in his eyes and they hear it in his voice and they just fall into that.

I knew everything had gelled on the road where we had transcendent shows. The next record was probably where it felt better recording-wise. I saw how it could change and evolve which gave me a lot of inspiration to go, "We can do ballads, we can do fast stuff, we can do slow stuff, we can do punk stuff."

That was where I realised there were gonna be a lot of places to go with Ed. To have Ed sing on anything, the way he writes lyrics and the way he approaches your material is fantastic. He really loves getting into it, the challenges of all of our songs and the different ways they're brought into 'em.

He hears things, and once he's onto it he'll give you such incredible variety in terms of vocal approaches and rhythm and story. He's so great with different points of view that it's like going to Disneyland.

You can read part one of this interview here.