The Second Coming of Pearl Jam

Mike McCready stares through his orange-framed glasses at the high glass-and-metal ceiling of Cleveland's Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, where several graffiti-covered cars hang like two-ton mobiles. They're leftover props from U2's Zoo TV Tour. "We opened for U2 on that tour in Europe," McCready says. "The crowds hated us!" It's Saturday afternoon, and we're on line to buy tickets.

McCready, whose fluid, bluesy solos provide some of that Cobain-despised "cock rock," is a sweet-natured recovering alcoholic who used to run onstage naked. In his hard-partying days, his bandmates treated him like a younger brother, but his role has steadily expanded: McCready wrote the epic new song "Inside Job," and for the first time, Vedder sings his lyrics.

After entering the main exhibition hall, we find ourselves, without warning, facing a large display case devoted to the Seattle scene of the Nineties. Inside, among other artifacts, are the remnants of a smashed Stratocaster -- a plaque identifies it as having belonged to one Mike McCready. "I had no idea this was here," he says, looking a little dazed.

Within seconds, he becomes an unwilling part of the exhibit as fans line up to take pictures. Meanwhile, a taped narrator offers a history of the scene; we're informed that Andrew Wood, the flamboyant singer of the glam-influenced Seattle band Mother Love Bone, died on March 19th, 1990, of an overdose.

A security guard yells at us for taking pictures. On the way out, McCready picks up where the narrator left off, recalling his first jams with former Love Bone guitarist Gossard, shortly after Wood's death. It hardly seemed like Hall of Fame material at the time. "It was just Stone and I in his parents' house," he says. "He had these riffs. We were working on 'Alive' and 'Even Flow' and 'Black,' just the two of us, for a long time."

Gossard had sought out McCready after seeing him jam to Stevie Ray Vaughan's "Couldn't Stand the Weather" at a party. McCready, in turn, encouraged his new bandmate to reunite with Mother Love Bone bassist Jeff Ament. Ament, a guileless skater kid from rural Montana, had formed an unlikely friendship with Gossard in the band Green River. The group, which also included future Mudhoney leader Mark Arm, blurred the lines between punk and metal -- Gossard was a Van Halen fan, while Ament preferred Black Flag. Together the band helped create the heavy, murky sound that came to be known as grunge.

Two nights earlier, at a Chicago steakhouse, Ament, who is still a skater -- and still dresses like one, in a black T-shirt that displays a goat's head inside a pentagram -- settles into a leather booth. As we begin dinner, Ament traces the breakup of Green River to an opening stint for Jane's Addiction in L.A.: Gossard and Ament were awed by Perry Farrell's bombastic, tribal rock, while Arm -- who went on to define the grunge sound with the defiantly indie Mudhoney -- was disgusted by what he saw as arena pretension. "When we saw Jane's Addiction, we were like, 'That's what we want to fucking do,' " says Ament.

After Wood's death, Gossard wanted to start a "darker" band. Eventually, he entered a demo studio with McCready, Ament and the best drummer in town, the hard-hitting Matt Cameron. There they laid down instrumental versions of songs such as "Even Flow" and "Alive." The tape found its way to a San Diego surfer and gas-station attendant named Eddie Vedder -- he had recently split with his band, Bad Radio.

Legend has it that Vedder wrote the lyrics to the songs in one burst, while surfing. That particular story, he tells me in his Chicago hotel room, is "100 percent true." But he concedes that another oft-told tale is less accurate: that the name Pearl Jam came from Vedder's great-grandmother Pearl, who, he used to claim, was married to an American Indian and was in the habit of making preserves spiked with various hallucinogenics. His great-grandma really was named Pearl. The rest is, indeed, "total bulllshit."

Told of Vedder's admission, Ament and McCready seem relieved. They cough up the true -- if less romantic -- tale behind the band's name. Brainstorming in a Seattle restaurant to come up with something, anything, to replace their original name, Mookie Blaylock (inspired by the NBA star), Ament came up with "pearl." The band didn't settle on the second half of its name until a 1991 trip to New York to sign a deal with Epic Records. Gossard, Vedder and Ament drove out to see Neil Young play Nassau Coliseum. "He played, like, nine songs over three hours. Every song was like a fifteen- or twenty-minute jam," says Ament. "So that's how 'jam' got added on to the name. Or at least that's how I remember it."

The houselights in Grand Rapids' Van Andel Arena burst on like a sudden dawn as Gossard kicks into the winding riff of "Alive." Vedder assumes a familiar pose, clutching his mike stand with both hands as if it's in danger of flying off the stage, and begins to sing, "Son, she said, have I got a little story for you...."

"Alive" is, with a few alterations, Vedder's story. When he was seventeen years old, his mother told him that Peter Mueller, the man he knew as his father -- a man he hated -- was not his father at all. His real dad was his mother's first husband, Ed Severson, a sometime lounge musician who had died several years before of multiple sclerosis. Vedder, who has used his mother's maiden name since the revelation, was four months old when his mother and Severson were divorced; he grew up knowing him only as a family friend.

In one departure from reality, the narrator of "Alive" hints at an incestuous relationship with his mother (check out the verse that begins, "Oh, she walks slowly, across a young man's room"). "There was no incest in my situation," says Vedder. "But people who knew my dad -- women -- would come over and stare at me when I was a teenager like you wouldn't believe. They were looking at me because I have his face and he'd been dead for ten years at least. So they can't take their eyes off me. And I probably caught my mom -- you know, she'd just stare at me."

Vedder started singing when he was six -- he used to be able to hit all of Michael Jackson's high notes on old Jackson 5 records. "When my voice changed, I was like, 'Wow, all of the sudden I sound like James Taylor,' " Vedder remembers. He's since heard a tape of his real dad singing Gordon Lightfoot songs; the style is more polished, but Vedder hears something familiar in the voice.

Onstage in Grand Rapids, Vedder looks out at thousands of fist-pumping fans and adds a line to "Alive" not in the recorded version: "We're all, we're all still alive!" He finishes with a spoken aside as the band blasts behind him: "Let me tell you, it ain't easy."