While speaking to Rick Beato about Pearl Jam’s early days, Mike McCready and Jeff Ament revealed that Stone Gossard wasn’t sure if he wanted to let Ament – his former Mother Love Bone bandmate – join the band.
“We were playing in Stone’s parents’ attic… just me and Stone,” McCready said. “Stone was keeping everything very quiet… when we first started. I was like, ‘Dude, you want to start a band? What’s going on here?” And then he said, ‘Okay, yeah, let’s do that.’ And then we were going over those songs, and I was like, ‘Well we f***ing have to get Jeff in the band.’”
McCready continued, saying Stone seemed hesitant about asking Ament to join. “I think you guys were… There was some tension at that time… From what I recall” he told Ament. “Because I don’t know if he was into it initially… And I was like, ‘No, we have to get Jeff in the band.’ Because what you guys have done in this scene – I mean, I saw it all… You guys were perfect together… So, I knew that I wanted you to be part of that thing.”
Ament then chimed in, explaining that those tensions stemmed from their time in Mother Love Bone:
“I don’t know if he and I were as much at odds as – The last year that Mother Love Bone was around was a pretty dysfunctional time. You know, the first time that any of us had sort of felt the pressure of a major label… and there’s all this money – We made a $200,000 record, but we’re broke.
“It was a weird time, because everybody stopped thinking about the art and people started thinking about, like, how are we going to get paid?
“… It got really dysfunctional that last year. And I’m sure there was a part of Stone – And there was a part of me. I was like, ‘I don’t want to do that again. That wasn’t fun at all.’ Before that it was fun. We would just ride our bikes or take the bus, and play super loud, and have fun, and have a beer.
“The good thing is that Stone and I sat down a couple of times and we sort of laid all the stuff on the table… He had some things to say to me about, ‘Hey if we’re going to move forward together in this partnership you need to be more like this, or you can’t do this.’ And I was like, ‘And you can’t shut me out from writing songs, because I was writing songs before you were writing songs.’ Like, I was in a punk rock band that wrote half the songs, and somehow in this band I got shut out. So, it was mostly about just being open to anything. And, that was the predominant feeling at the beginning of Pearl Jam.”
(Transcribed by Alternative Nation)
