“All five horizons revolved around her soul,” croons Vedder, but now she’s gone, and even the sound of children playing only causes him agony. Ten even had a power ballad of sorts: the yearning Black, which told the sorry tale of a man’s agony on losing the love of his life. More subtle and complex than Mother Love Bone, it was nevertheless deeply influenced by rock’s classic era, and certainly showed little evidence of interest in the noisy punk brinkmanship served up by grunge’s flagship label, Sub Pop.
Gossard and Ament might have served time with Green River, the Seattle punk band whose 1985 debut EP, Come On Down, is often touted as grunge’s patient zero, but the duo were always ambitious to move beyond the scuzzy milieu of Seattle’s abundant punk clubs. Pearl Jam never called themselves “grunge”, but soon had that tag thrust upon them.
Ten sold slowly until the breakthrough of Nirvana, whose Nevermind, released only a couple of weeks after, went on to become a surprise smash hit.
And while the dark backstory of Vedder’s lyrics lends the track a frisson of complexity, Alive’s true charm lies in its uplifting power, Vedder’s impassioned delivery (within a year countless rock frontmen would be mimicking his hearty burr) and that solo, which could move a corpse to play along on air guitar. However, delivered in Vedder’s heroic baritone over Gossard’s incandescent riff, and gifted one of the most unabashedly classic-rock guitar solos in recent memory (courtesy of Mike McCready), Alive was interpreted as an inspirational message by the thousands of fans who sent Pearl Jam’s debut single into the US top 20. Its lyric suggests an incestuous affair between the hero and his mother, while its hookline, “I’m still alive”, was intended as a rueful statement of fact from the homicidal/suicidal teen. Alive is the first chapter in this trilogy ( Once, off Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten, and the early B-side Footsteps tell the rest of the story). A lifelong fan of Pete Townshend, he concocted a song-cycle, Mamasan, telling the story of a troubled young man whose traumatic discovery that his supposed birth father was actually his stepfather (a Tommy-esque drama drawn from Vedder’s own life) sends him on a killing spree, for which he is ultimately executed. A serious-minded, humble surfer dude – in many ways Wood’s antithesis – Vedder’s first contribution to this new project was to write lyrics for a demo tape of Gossard riffs.
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