Happy 35th Anniversary to Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten, originally released August 27, 1991.
Most records are missing one of these elements: technical virtuosity, raw emotion, and balanced structure. When all three come together, you get classics like Songs in the Key of Life, Born to Run, or Blue. Most of these masterpieces are the cumulative effects of years of at-bats: live gigs spent honing the sound, earlier records that came close but didn’t get quite the right angle, or productive working relationships that yield good results. It’s especially rare, then, for a band to arrive in the world, fully formed, with no history or even relationships, and find all three.
Ten is that record. You can almost hear the album screaming, “I know, I can’t believe I’m doing this either!” as it careens through a rollercoaster of drum fills, nasty guitar lines, and Vedder roars. The exhilaration is a huge part of the point; a record aimed squarely at slackers and misfits reveals what happens when you find the exact right avenue for everything that’s pent up.
When the band Mother Love Bone broke up in the wake of singer Andrew Wood’s death, guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament put together a demo with guitarist Mike McCready. They shopped it around to vocalists and drummers, and Eddie Vedder got ahold of a copy. Within a month, he had auditioned and joined the band, along with drummer Dave Krusen. A week later, they had written the eleven songs that appear on the record. The first gig came a week later, recording started five months after that, and Pearl Jam’s Ten was tracked within two more months.
This is the timeline you’d expect in an article about a band’s shaggy, undercooked debut album before their sophomore masterpiece. But, miraculously, it’s for an album that’s tightly composed and performed, deep in its introspection, and carefully balanced. Some of these guys barely knew each other, but their sound and vision arrived fully formed.
The record’s first half is undeniable. “Once,” with its instrumentals rocketing from an anxious groove to a grunge breakdown to an arena rock chorus, offers a warning: “Once upon a time / I could control myself.” The implicit second part of the statement is: “What you’re about to hear is everything that happened since.”
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We then rocket through “Even Flow,” whose rapid-fire verses contrast with the enormous, powerful chorus, the rest of the band popping up with something different in each of the white spaces. “Alive,” a track that so masters the ambition and gravitas of bands like The Who and Led Zeppelin that it was a frequent presence on my local classic rock radio station growing up, rounds out the first quarter. There’s still so much more to go.
The next three tunes—“Why Go,” “Black,” and “Jeremy”—bring the technical mastery that’s obvious in the opening suite and channel it toward a more primal sensibility. While the band is still in full control, it feels like something is about to explode; find it in “Why Go” on Krusen’s breakneck drumming during McCready’s guitar solo. That track also features Vedder’s “she’s been diagnosed by some stupid fuck,” a lyric whose imprecision, when compared with the verbal finesse elsewhere on Ten, just confirms that the guy really is just some stupid fuck. There’s brilliance to that.
Speaking of lyrics: “Black” and “Jeremy” are Vedder’s finest hours on Ten. “Black” is haunting, melancholy, each line dripping with the breakup-induced depression. “Jeremy” is the opposite, taking a wider, social view of a school shooting, trying to understand its causes and legacy, all wrapped up in the haunting refrain: “Jeremy spoke in class today.”
If the record’s first half is one all-time classic after another, the back half eases up on the throttle. Ten is then delightfully balanced; the more exploratory second half is an excellent counterpoint to the hair-raising opening. “Oceans” brings down the temperature completely, and “Garden” waxes and wanes between understated verses and a thundering chorus. “Deep” and “Porch,” while intense, are in less of a hurry. The tight compositions like “Jeremy” and “Alive” give way to songs that are more searching, amorphous—because we’re going somewhere.
That somewhere is “Release,” a devastating (and largely improvised) album closer in which Vedder pleads for liberation. Much of the song is about his relationship with his stepfather, but all of the tension from the first ten songs is bound in his final plea for release. “Black,” “Jeremy,” “Once,” and all of the other tracks have been sitting in this pressure cooker of an album, and the band finally takes off the lid. The instrumental breaks down into a slow six-eight, offering Vedder an open platform to make his case.
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The start of the record is a threat: “Once upon a time, I could control myself.” We then got to see forty minutes of the anger that follows from this lack of control. But by “Release,” Vedder admits that holding on to that anger doesn’t put you in a position of power; it just makes you yearn for release. So, while Ten has some of the most ass-kicking rock songs you’ve ever heard, and they embrace anger and darkness, it does not glorify any of those feelings.
Lesser bands would not be wise enough to introduce that kind of nuance, nor would they be able to write songs that embody that anger as well as the ones on Ten do. That’s quite a thing to do when you’re basically making everything up as you go along and met the rest of the band less than a year ago. Still can’t believe they did it.
Listen:
