So when that got taken away, it was like, ‘Oh, man, I’ve got to start all over again.’” Making records is great, but I’d made a lot of records, and in all the years I’d been in bands, I’d never been out for three or four months, six months or a year. “I felt like I’d spent a lot of time getting to that point, and the fact that the rug got pulled out from underneath us right when we were about to go on the road was really depressing. “I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life,” Ament said in 1991, as Kim Neely recounts in her book Five Against One. When Gossard and Ament started jamming in the attic that summer, it was the first time they’d played together since Wood’s death neither had wanted to continue Mother Love Bone without him, and neither had known what to do next. So it was that Ten was born out of the pain of losing a friend, and as a means for the mourners to move on with their lives. It was just weeks before PolyGram Records was due to release Mother Love Bone’s first full-length, Apple. Despite an intervention by his bandmates in late 1989, and a period of sobriety on his part, Wood died from an accidental heroin overdose on March 19, 1990. His onstage presence was flamboyant and larger than life, whether he was dressing up in feather boas and platform shoes or leaping from the stage, cordless mic in hand, to roam through the crowd while he sang.īut such behavior was in many ways a mask for the low self-esteem that had long plagued him – just as the drugs he used, often secretly and in shame, were a way to combat it. Wood openly courted success, having set himself the goal of becoming a rock star at the age of 11. (After Green River’s dissolution, Arm, along with one-time Green River guitarist Steve Turner, would go on to form the staunchly anti-corporate, grunge-pioneering Mudhoney.) With Mother Love Bone, Gossard and Ament were able to exercise their arena-size ambitions to the fullest, having found a kindred spirit in Wood. Gossard and Ament’s aspirations for Green River had been clashing with that of their bandmates, in particular singer Mark Arm: while his model for the band was the DIY ethic of punk bands like Black Flag, Gossard and Ament drew their inspiration from commercially successful hard rock acts such as AC/DC and Kiss. They split up that band in 1987 to join singer Andy Wood in the band that was soon to be named Mother Love Bone. McCready had previously played in a flashy local metal band, now defunct, called Shadow Gossard and Ament had also played on the local scene, starting in the early '80s with the band Green River. It was totally cool, because at that point, it was just kind of picking up the vibe and going with it Jeff Ament on Pearl Jam's original demos They were just song ideas, jams and that sort of stuff. There was no pressure, because they weren’t really songs.
The three would congregate in Gossard’s parents’ attics, long used as a rehearsal space by the guitarist, and jam on the instrumentals that within a year would become Pearl Jam’s Ten. In the summer of that year, two guitarists, Stone Gossard and Mike McCready, and bassist Jeff Ament were starting down the long road that would lead to their own success. In effect, the Seattle hype was beginning. And Sub Pop itself – a stronghold of Seattle talent – was enjoying attention on a worldwide scale, having launched an aggressive marketing campaign that included flying over a British music journalist to write up a spread on its bands for the U.K.
Nirvana’s debut, Bleach, had caused such a stir that Geffen had swooped in and signed the band away from local indie Sub Pop. These bands were actually starting to enjoy some sort of success as well: Soundgarden had just seen their album Ultramega OK get a Grammy nomination and were about to put out Louder than Love, their first release for the major label A&M. Guns N’ Roses were the biggest band going hair metal was still the reigning sound.īut in Seattle, a mini-scene was coming together, the culmination of almost a decade’s worth of bands working as a community, putting out their own records and performing around town for the hell of it. In 1990, the “alternative” music scene was nothing more than a scattering of musicians operating independently of each other.
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