YEAR
2017
INDUCTED BY
David Letterman
CATEGORY
Performers
When they released their debut album, Ten, in August, 1991, Pearl Jam were a band of young unknowns to anyone not from Seattle, Washington.
At home, Pearl Jam were practically a supergroup-founded in 1990 at a crossroads of classic rock, Seventies heavy metal and hardcore punk, just as that city’s underground scene was about to go worldwide.
Dave Krusen
Eddie Vedder
Jeff Ament
Matt Cameron
Mike McCready
Stone Gossard
HALL OF FAME
ESSAY
By David Fricke
In the late summer of 1990, Eddie Vedder was a singer without a band and a songwriter in limbo.
He was working the night shift at a gas station in San Diego when his friend Jack Irons, the founding drummer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, handed him a cassette tape. It was a demo of instrumentals by two pals of Irons’ in Seattle, guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament, founding members of the proto-grunge band Mother Love Bone who wanted Irons to join their new group.
Instead, Irons gave the tape to Vedder.
