Rarely has a rock song deceived its audience so successfully as Pearl Jam’s Alive. To the casual fan, thrilled by the stadium-rock riff and radio-tooled chorus hook upon its release in July 1991, this was a feel-good anthem with no strings attached. But to those in on the secret – not least the Seattle band’s frontman and lyric-writer Eddie Vedder – Alive was a defiant shout from the murkiest emotional depths, exorcising poisonous demons of childhood. “It was a work of fiction based on reality,” Vedder once explained. “In some ways, that song was a way to get it out.”
The music for Alive, originally titled Dollar Short, pre-dated Pearl Jam themselves: the song had already been played live at a show in Portland, Oregon by the band’s future lineup in their early group Mother Love Bone, but the band never got round to recording it. Guitarist Stone Gossard recalled that “it was exactly the same arrangement, but [singer] Andy Wood had a completely different set of lyrics”.
