(Credits: Alamy)
Sun 1 March 2026 21:30, UK
When talking about the grunge movement, it gets more than a little bit complicated talking about the relationship between Nirvana and Pearl Jam.
They were both among the greatest rock and roll bands of their time, but whenever Cobain talked about them in interviews, you would have sworn that he was one of their biggest critics when he said that he always hated the band from the very beginning. But while MTV made a big fuss about them being sworn enemies, not everything was that black and white.
If anything, Cobain usually had more vitriol for people like Axl Rose making a mockery of what rock and roll was supposed to be. At least Pearl Jam had the common decency to look the part whenever they played, but there was a lot more about them that put them in the same conversation as bands like Bad Company and The Who rather than anything remotely associated with the alternative rock scene.
But that’s not where Pearl Jam started, though. A lot of people have fond memories of listening to Eddie Vedder’s croon coming over the airwaves for the first time, but in a perfect world, there’s a good chance that Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament would have spent the rest of their days trying to make it work in Mother Love Bone. Andy Wood was bound to be a star, but when he passed away in the early 1990s, it was up to them to build everything back up all over again.
Then again, that leaves out a lot of contention about what happened with Green River. Ament and Gossard had already begun putting together the makings of a great band with Mark Arm from Mudhoney, but when looking at how they operated, it was never going to work. Arm had no intention of being in one of the biggest bands in the world, and when Ament started to have greater career aspirations, their breakup left a lot more hard feelings when Gossard and Ament left Sub Pop Records.
And as far as Gossard could tell, Cobain seemed to think that Pearl Jam was a classic case of Gossard and Ament selling out after trying to get Green River off the ground, with Gossard recalling, “When Jeff and I were at Sub Pop, we left in our wake a rift. That rift was what Kurt attached himself to, and it was perceived in the media as this huge line in the sand. I remember feeling blindsided by that, particularly because when I heard his record, it sounded so good and so immediate, I wanted him to like our band. That stressed everybody out. He crystallized a negative viewpoint of the band.”
But Cobain was already going to have reservations with anyone that sounded vaguely commercial in the rock and roll sphere. He had already rid himself of listening to bands like Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin because of their sexist lyrics, so to have a band that sounded exactly like them with a bit more of an alternative edge might as well have been the corporate version of what grunge was supposed to be.
That’s not to say that Pearl Jam didn’t have a punk spirit about them, but since Cobain was serving as their judge and jury on most things, Vedder was the one trying to hold onto their credentials. He was the one trying to play down their sense of celebrity, and even when he was gracing the cover of every magazine, he was considering leaving a label and selling music outside of his house at the time.
In the end, Pearl Jam couldn’t really outrun their sense of celebrity, but everything that they did afterwards would at least be indebted to what Cobain did. He was the one still looking at the big picture all the way up until the day he died, and there wasn’t a day that went by that Pearl Jam didn’t think of why they were still in the business because of the criticism that Cobain gave them back in the day.