On October 8, 1990, Eddie Vedder arrived in Seattle to play music with four men he'd never met before. One month earlier, a mutual friend had given the 25-year-old singer a cassette tape featuring five instrumental tracks by the band, and Vedder had recorded vocals for three of the songs, dubbed the songs over a copy of Merle Haggard’s Best of the ’80s compilation, and posted it to the bassist's Emerald City address.
When Jeff Ament opened the envelope he saw that three of the songs he'd recorded with his former Mother Love Bone bandmate Stone Gossard, ex-Shadow guitarist Mike McCready and drummer Matt Cameron, on loan from Soundgarden, had been given new names by the singer. Dollar Short was now retitled Alive, Agyptian Crave was now titled Once, and Troubled Times now bore the name Footsteps.
"I listened to it and thought, Man, that’s really good," Ament recalled. "And then I listened to it a couple more times, and by the third time I was like, This is the guy I think I’ve wanted to be in a band with my whole life."
Ament wasn't at all sure how, or indeed if, his musical career would continue following the tragic early death, on March 19, 1990, of his friend and Mother Love Bone bandmate Andrew Wood. But despite the band's acclaimed debut album Apple only reaching record stores two month, the bassist knew they had no future without their talismanic frontman.
"Mother Love Bone as a band is history," he told Metal Hammer. "Us going out and using the name, pretending in a sense that Andy's still there, was never even a consideration... Getting out on the road as a band and promoting [Apple] with a singer pretending to be Andy, would be a terrible waste. It would be just total prostitution. None of us got into music to be the next New Kids On The Block."
Ament also mentioned that he and Gossard were continuing to write together, but insisted "we aren't trying to force the next step." But hearing Vedder's voice on the three-act mini-opera he'd titled Momma-Son made Ament excited to bring the cassette to Gossard.
"My initial impression was, well, he can sing and it sounds cool,” Stone Gossard told me in 2016. “The only other things that I’d heard were from singers trying to be Andy, who were really into Mother Love Bone, so hearing Eddie was like, Thank God! I was like, Low and clear… that’s pretty interesting. It was the first thing we heard that worked at all musically. So if you have a guy that sounded pretty good and he was into it, don’t screw around, just start making music. We were pretty quick to go, Let’s just do it.”
“We wrote Release and a couple of other songs pretty quickly right when Eddie got there. So we were excited. It felt comfortable and it was so different from anything we’d ever done. I think that was the thing that made us the most excited: no-one wanted to go back to make something like Mother Love Bone again. It was time for something different.”
