The bands Eddie Vedder said embodied New York: “Very intimidated”
The sudden global attention on Washington state’s tucked-away logging city didn’t surprise anybody more than the region’s alternative underground. Slowly continuing the punk tradition after its first wave had petered out, throwing in some 1960s classic rock and running parallel to the left-of-the-dial college rock that soundtracked the American 1980s campus, bands like Melvins and Green River had paved the foundations for what would be called grunge, the supposed new era of authentic down tuned rage that upended the pop world and killed hair metal overnight.
There’s a grain of truth to this otherwise hagiographical tale of Seattle’s cultural domination of the early 1990s. Nirvana’s unexpected Billboard number one did indeed hammer the final nail in Mötley Crüe’s and WASP’s spandex coffin and suddenly propelled the likes of Alice In Chains or Soundgarden to firm MTV fixtures rubbing shoulders with Madonna or Michael Jackson—Nevermind unwittingly knocking Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the top spot.
But the death of Poison superficiality and the yearning for the raw spirit of punk or Woodstock‘s counterculture of yesteryear was an unavoidable trajectory for whoever found themselves at its helm. By the time Pearl Jam bloomed from the joint ashes of Green River and Mother Love Bone, the band was already seasoned veterans of the Seattle music community and had helped set the stage for the 1990s domination. Recruiting frontman Eddie Vedder on the strength of a demo tape and offering a guest vocal on 1991’s Temple of the Dog side-project, their debut album Ten was charged with the combined efforts of a band who had cut their teeth a long time ago, leading the album with their defining single ‘Alive’.
Symbolically coming to a violent close following Kurt Cobain’s suicide in April 1994, grunge’s heyday came to a grim close, Alice In Chains conjuring their eponymous third LP the following as the scene’s last hurrah. Pearl Jam soldiered on, surviving rock’s rapidly shifting trends to becoming one of the biggest-selling bands of all time, selling out stadiums and releasing their 12th album with 2024’s Billboard-topping Dark Matter.
Back in 2003, Vedder offered an insight into his “life in music” with a selection of records for which he held deep affection. Reeling off LPs from The Beatles, The Who, and Fugazi, Vedder bestowed praise on the city that started it all, selecting Sonic Youth’s 1988 classic Daydream Nation as a formative moment.
“I definitely remember hearing ‘Teen Age Riot’ and I was just in,” Vedder told Spin in 2003. “Steve Shelley’s drumming had this momentum to it, and their approach to guitar–the way they created waves of sound and rhythm–I had never really heard that before. And the lyrics on the album felt like an adventure. I could relate to some stuff, but I also felt like I was looking in on something I hadn’t experienced yet. Same with the Ramones. To me, that’s what New York feels like. I was very intimidated by New York, and I still am”.
New York’s shaping of alternative music is seismic. The birth of punk, disco, and hip-hop, the city’s 1970s cultural scene and a plethora of cheap loft spaces proved the perfect petri dish for Lower Manhattan’s artistic melting pot that would continue into the 1980s. Ramones had donned their Perfecto jackets and blasted their bubblegum garage rock as far back as 1974, and Sonic Youth had emerged from the no wave scene after several years floating around the punk circuit in other groups. Both found themselves heralded as elder statespeople to grunge, Sonic Youth right at home amid a fuzzed-out noise climate they helped bring about.
All helped stir the alternative rock pot which shaped a grunge generation’s chart conquer, Pearl Jam no exception. “If you were somehow able to melt all these records together,” Vedder confessed, “it would be exactly our music”.
