Rewind to 35 years ago today and it’s safe to say that none of the members who would co-form the band that came to be known as Pearl Jam had any inkling what was about to hit them. They may have been excitement, and certainly an amount of trepidation, but there is no way that Eddie Vedder, Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament, Mike McCready and then-drummer Dave Krusen (the first in a long line of sticksmen for the band) could have known what was round the corner.
It was October 8, 1990, that the five-piece hunkered down in a basement at the Galleria Potatohead practice space in Seattle’s Belltown neighbourhood to rehearse for the first time and see if this thing would fly. Weeks earlier, Vedder had sent his future bandmates a cassette onto which he’d added vocals to three instrumental demos they’d made, songs he had now titled Once, Alive and Footsteps. They were immediately bowled over. “On first listen, I thought, ‘Wow, this is really good’,” bassist Ament recounted in the band tome Pearl Jam Twenty. “I called Stone and said, ‘I think you need to come over here and tell me for sure’.”
