The first thing the producer reached for at Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey, when the song called "Oceans" needed something the kit could not give it, was a fire extinguisher off the wall. Tim Palmer hit it with a drumstick, recorded the result onto the same tape that was carrying Eddie Vedder's vocal, and the take stuck. Twenty miles down the road from London, in a converted seventeenth-century farmhouse where Robert Plant and the Cure had cut records, a band that had existed for six months and a singer who had been in their company for five was finishing the album that would, in due course, outsell Nevermind in the United States.
Pearl Jam started Ten as Mookie Blaylock, named after a New Jersey Nets point guard, with a drummer who would be in rehab before the year was out and a frontman whose first eleven songs for the project had been written in a single week the previous October. They tracked the record in four weeks at London Bridge Studio in Seattle. They sold practically nothing for nine months. Then the rest of the city's bands broke and dragged Ten with them, and by February 1993 a debut that nobody at Epic had been sure how to market was the biggest rock record in America. The band has spent the thirty years since complaining about how it sounded.
Album Facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Pearl Jam |
| Album | Ten |
| Release Date | 27 August 1991 |
| Label | Epic Records (Sony Music) |
| Producers | Rick Parashar and Pearl Jam |
| Studios | London Bridge Studio, Seattle (recording); Ridge Farm Studio, Dorking, Surrey (mixing); Masterdisk, New York (mastering) |
| Genre / Subgenre | Grunge, alternative rock, hard rock |
| Track Count | 11 |
| Total Runtime | 53:20 |
| Billboard 200 Peak | 2 (four non-consecutive weeks; 264 weeks on chart) |
| UK Albums Chart Peak | 18 |
| Other Notable Chart Peaks | Canada 2, Australia 14, New Zealand 3, US Top Pop Catalog 1 |
| Certifications | 13x Platinum US (RIAA), 2x Platinum UK (BPI), 8x Platinum Australia (ARIA), 7x Platinum Canada (Music Canada), 6x Platinum New Zealand (RMNZ) |
| Estimated Sales | 13 million US (Nielsen SoundScan, 2013); over 20 million worldwide |
| Key Singles | "Alive", "Even Flow", "Jeremy", "Oceans" |
Cultural Context
The week Ten reached American shops, Boris Yeltsin was clambering onto a tank in Moscow and the Soviet Union had four months to live. Tim Berners-Lee had quietly published the world's first web page eighteen days earlier. The Gulf War had ended in February. The dominant rock records in the racks that summer were Metallica's black album, Guns N' Roses' twin Use Your Illusion volumes, the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Skid Row's Slave to the Grind; the most talked-about debut a fortnight away was a Geffen release called Nevermind. None of these had broken yet in the way they would. The pop charts, in the days before Nirvana, still belonged to Bryan Adams, Mariah Carey and Michael Bolton.
What had broken in Seattle was a small private grief. On 19 March 1990, the singer Andrew Wood had died of a heroin overdose three days before his band Mother Love Bone were due to release their debut album. Wood's bandmates Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament suddenly had a record deal with no band and no singer. The label was content to wait. Gossard and Ament were not. By the autumn they had a tape, a guitarist, a drummer and a name borrowed from a basketball player, and they were looking for a voice.
The Band's Story Up to This Point
Gossard and Ament had played together in Green River, the band conventionally credited with putting the first concrete blocks down for what would become grunge. When Green River fractured in 1987 over the question of whether to sign with a major label, the two of them and the singer Andrew Wood went on to form Mother Love Bone, a glam-leaning hard-rock outfit who signed with PolyGram and were finishing their debut Apple when Wood overdosed.
The shock of Wood's death produced two responses that would shape Ten. The first was Temple of the Dog, the tribute project that Soundgarden's Chris Cornell, Gossard, Ament and the drummer Matt Cameron recorded at London Bridge Studio in November 1990 with a young guitarist Cornell had taken a shine to, Mike McCready. The second was a five-song instrumental tape Gossard had been demoing with McCready and the Red Hot Chili Peppers' former drummer Jack Irons. Irons declined to join the project but agreed to pass the tape to anybody he thought might suit it. He sent it to a San Diego surfer and petrol-station attendant named Eddie Vedder.
Vedder listened to the tape after a surfing session, and over a single night in October 1990 wrote lyrics and vocal melodies for three of its tracks, taping his vocals over the instrumentals on a borrowed four-track. He titled the trilogy Momma-Son and it told the story of a boy who learns the man he believed to be his father is in fact his stepfather, kills the real father in revenge, and waits in a cell for the consequences. The three songs were "Alive", "Once" and "Footsteps". Vedder posted the cassette back to Seattle the next morning. By the time it landed, Gossard and Ament were on the phone asking him to fly up.
Vedder arrived in Seattle on 13 October 1990 and met the band at a converted ironworks called Galleria Potatohead. Within a week he had written lyrics for eleven songs. The drummer Dave Krusen, an acquaintance of McCready's from Tacoma, came in to fill the empty seat. The five of them played their first show at the Off Ramp Cafe on 22 October 1990, billed as Mookie Blaylock, in front of a sparse Tuesday-night crowd that included a handful of Sub Pop staff. They had been a band for nine days.
"We knew we were still a long way from being a real band at that point. The fact that there was a record deal involved put a kind of pressure on it that none of us were ready for."
Jeff Ament, Pearl Jam Twenty, 2011
The basketball player whose number ten the album would borrow politely declined to license his name long-term, and the Mookie Blaylock christening was retired in early 1991 in favour of Pearl Jam, a phrase whose origin Vedder has variously attributed to a hallucinogenic preserve made by his great-grandmother and to a story he later admitted he had embellished. Epic Records, who had inherited Mother Love Bone's deal through a corporate reshuffle, had a band again.
Pre-production and Demos
The band booked a first block of time at London Bridge Studio in January 1991, partly to demo the new songs and partly to see whether the studio's house engineer Rick Parashar was the producer they wanted. Of the songs tracked in those January sessions only one would survive onto Ten: "Alive". The rest were either retracked from scratch in March or set aside for B-sides and the cutting-room floor.
Pre-production proper happened at the Galleria Potatohead loft, a rehearsal space the band shared with Soundgarden, the Walkabouts and a half dozen other Seattle outfits. Vedder's Momma-Son cassette was the spine. Gossard's instrumental sketches, several of which dated back to the unreleased Mother Love Bone sessions, became the bodies of "Black", "Once" and what would later be released as "Footsteps". McCready brought the riff and the eventual solo for "Alive", a Stevie Ray Vaughan-meets-Hendrix figure that he had been kicking around in the band Shadow earlier in the decade.
- "Alive" was the only January 1991 demo to survive, with a fresh vocal but the original backing track largely intact.
- "Footsteps" used the same Gossard backing track that Cornell had sung over for Temple of the Dog's "Times of Trouble" three months earlier.
- "Master/Slave" was a fretless-bass figure of Ament's, written as a tribute to Japan's Mick Karn, that Parashar later helped flesh out with percussion and ambient overlay.
- An early run-through of "Black" survives on bootleg as an instrumental titled "E Ballad", with Gossard humming the eventual vocal melody.
Creating the Album
Tracking moved to London Bridge in late March 1991 and ran for roughly four weeks. Rick Parashar produced and engineered, with Dave Hillis as assistant. The band cut the basics live in the room: Krusen on drums, Ament on a Spector fretless or one of two custom 8- and 12-string basses, Gossard on rhythm guitar, McCready overdubbing leads. Vedder cut his vocals last, often after the studio had cleared, sometimes while sitting on a couch with the lights off.
Parashar was not a hands-off producer. He played piano on "Black" and on the Master/Slave bookends, organ on several tracks, and he co-wrote the layered vocal harmonies that thickened the choruses of "Black" and "Garden". He brought the cellist Walter Gray in to play the long figure under "Oceans". Krusen, who has spoken openly about being deep in alcoholism at the time, finished the album and then checked into rehab; he never played another show with the band.
What gave Ten its sonic character, for better and worse, happened later. In June 1991 the tapes flew to Ridge Farm Studio in Dorking, Surrey, where the English engineer Tim Palmer was hired to mix. Palmer had a reputation for big, ambient rock records (Tin Machine, Mission UK, Robert Plant) and he leaned that way on Ten. He had McCready re-record the central solo of "Alive". He retooled the percussion of "Oceans" with a pepper shaker, the body of an acoustic guitar and the fire extinguisher. He compressed and reverbed the drums until they sat slightly behind the mix.
"It was kind of mixed in a way that was, you know, kind of produced. It still sounded like us, just bigger than we sounded in a room. By the time it came out, the way bands wanted to sound had changed and we were on the wrong side of it."
Eddie Vedder, KNDD interview, 2006
Bob Ludwig mastered at Masterdisk in New York. The whole process, from the first January demos to the lacquer, took five months. The recording budget came in under the Mother Love Bone advance Sony was still good for, somewhere in the region of $130,000.
Personnel and Credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Pearl Jam | ||
| Lead vocals | Eddie Vedder | Wrote all lyrics; co-wrote the music for "Why Go", "Black" and "Jeremy" |
| Rhythm guitar | Stone Gossard | Primary music writer; lead guitar on the verses of "Alive" |
| Lead guitar | Mike McCready | Solo on "Alive" was re-cut at Ridge Farm during mixing |
| Bass | Jeff Ament | Fretless on "Master/Slave" and "Oceans"; 12-string on "Why Go", "Jeremy" and "Deep" |
| Drums and percussion | Dave Krusen | Timpani on "Oceans"; left for rehab on completion |
| Additional musicians | ||
| Piano, organ, percussion | Rick Parashar | Co-wrote vocal harmonies and the ambient Master/Slave passages |
| Cello | Walter Gray | Sustained line under "Oceans" |
| Hand percussion | Tim Palmer | Pepper shaker, acoustic guitar body and fire extinguisher on "Oceans" |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Producer | Rick Parashar and Pearl Jam | Recorded at London Bridge Studio, Seattle, March-April 1991 |
| Engineer | Rick Parashar | With Dave Hillis, Don Gilmore and Adrian Moore as additional engineers |
| Mixer | Tim Palmer | At Ridge Farm Studio, Dorking, Surrey, June 1991 |
| Mastering | Bob Ludwig | Masterdisk, New York |
| Artwork | ||
| Art direction and concept | Jeff Ament | Hand-built the wooden "Pearl Jam" cut-out used on the cover |
| Design | Risa Zaitschek and Lisa Sparagano | Layout and typography |
| Photography | Lance Mercer | Cover and sleeve photography |
| Additional art | Steve Pitstick and Eddie Vedder | Inner-sleeve collage and lyric panels |
The Songs
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "Once" | Gossard, Vedder | 3:51 | Opens after the Master/Slave intro; second part of the Momma-Son trilogy | |
| 2 | "Even Flow" | Gossard, Vedder | 4:53 | Second single | Re-recorded multiple times; the band has rarely been satisfied with the album take |
| 3 | "Alive" | Gossard, Vedder | 5:41 | First single | First part of the Momma-Son trilogy; only January 1991 demo to survive |
| 4 | "Why Go" | Ament, Vedder | 3:19 | Lyric drawn from a real account of a teenager institutionalised by her parents | |
| 5 | "Black" | Gossard, Vedder | 5:43 | Promo only | Mainstream Rock peak 3; Vedder refused all label requests for a commercial single |
| 6 | "Jeremy" | Ament, Vedder | 5:18 | Third single | Lyric inspired by a 1991 Texas school shooting; won four MTV Video Music Awards |
| 7 | "Oceans" | Ament, Gossard, Vedder | 2:41 | Fourth single (video only outside US) | Tim Palmer's fire-extinguisher percussion is the high-frequency tick |
| 8 | "Porch" | Vedder | 3:30 | Vedder's only solo writing credit on the album | |
| 9 | "Garden" | Ament, Gossard, Vedder | 4:58 | Originally a Mother Love Bone-era Gossard sketch titled "Don't Be Like That" | |
| 10 | "Deep" | Ament, Gossard, Vedder | 4:18 | One of the last lyrics Vedder wrote for the album | |
| 11 | "Release" | Pearl Jam, Vedder | 9:05 | Closes the album; the Master/Slave outro fades the record into silence |
The Master/Slave bookends are the first and last things you hear, but they are not listed as a track. They were Ament's, written as a tribute to Mick Karn of Japan, and they begin and end the record on the same low fretless figure, like an album-length parenthesis. The first proper song, "Once", arrives like a freight train and announces a record that is more about voice than about riff: Vedder is already at full throat thirty seconds in, and the Stevie Ray Vaughan-by-way-of-Seattle solo McCready will reprise five times across the album begins here.
"Even Flow" was one of those songs the band could not crack. They cut it once in March, did not like it, cut it again, did not like that either; the version that ended up on the album was the second take and the band has, in the years since, rerecorded it for B-sides, MTV Unplugged and live releases more times than they can count. Brendan O'Brien's first job for Pearl Jam, on the 1993 single edit, was to remix it from the original tape into something with a less reverbed snare.
"Alive" is the song that did everything. Its provenance is the strangest of all: McCready's riff is from a band he played in at school; Gossard's chord changes were originally written as an instrumental called "Dollar Short"; Vedder, on the original cassette, sang it over the existing demo tape with no overdubs. The album version is largely the same January arrangement with a fresh, full McCready solo overdubbed in Surrey. It was always going to be the first single. It is not, however, the song that broke the record.
"Black" is. Vedder refused to allow it to be released as a commercial single, and Epic resented him for it for years; in the absence of a 7-inch, the song reached number three on the Mainstream Rock chart on album-track airplay alone, and at Pearl Jam shows it became, and remains, the moment the room sings the loudest. "Jeremy" is the song Mark Pellington's video made into a phenomenon, lifting the lyric (inspired by a school shooting in Richardson, Texas in January 1991) into a grunge-era cultural touchstone that returned, uncomfortably, every time American school violence did. "Oceans" is the lull at the centre, two minutes forty-one seconds of fretless and timpani and pepper shaker. "Release" closes the album by addressing the dead father whose absence runs through it.
"Ten was mostly Stone and Jeff. Me and Eddie were along for the ride at that time. The arrangements were already there before the singer was. We just played them."
Mike McCready, Guitar World, 2011
B-sides, Outtakes and Lost Songs
Pearl Jam left more on the cutting-room floor for Ten than for any record they would make again. Some of it has emerged in pieces; some of it is still in the vault.
- "Wash" was the B-side of "Alive", a Gossard sketch with a Vedder lyric written that same first week in Seattle. It is now a fan setlist staple.
- "Yellow Ledbetter" was tracked during the Ten sessions and held back as the B-side of the "Jeremy" single in 1992. American radio picked it up regardless and it became a Top 30 modern-rock hit despite never being released as an A-side.
- "Brother" was cut for the album, then dropped at Vedder's insistence; Ament threatened to quit over it. The instrumental was finally given vocals by Vedder for the 2009 reissue, where it became, eighteen years late, a Mainstream Rock number-one single.
- "Footsteps" was the third part of the Momma-Son trilogy. The instrumental backing was the same Gossard track Cornell had used for Temple of the Dog's "Times of Trouble". Pearl Jam's vocal version was held back, then released as a B-side and later collected on Lost Dogs.
- "Breath" and "State of Love and Trust" were both cut during the Ten sessions, then re-recorded in 1992 for the Singles soundtrack and shelved in their original form.
- "Alone" was dropped as too mid-tempo. It surfaced as a B-side later in the decade.
- "Just a Girl", "2,000 Mile Blues" and "Evil Little Goat" were three further Ten-era sketches added to the 2009 deluxe reissue.
Album Artwork and Packaging
Jeff Ament directed the artwork, sketched the concept and physically built the prop. The wooden cut-out of the band name on the front cover, three feet high and propped up in a Seattle photographer's studio, was a piece of carpentry Ament hand-tooled himself. Lance Mercer shot the band in front of it, arms above their heads with hands joined to form a circle. The five-figure unity image was deliberate; for a band that had been together six months, it was also slightly aspirational.
The original concept Ament submitted was a deep burgundy. Sony, after seeing test prints, asked for it to be lifted to a brighter purple-pink that would stand out in record-shop browser bins. The European gatefold version cropped the image so only the joined hands appeared above the title, lending it a stranger, more abstract quality. The inner sleeve carried a Steve Pitstick collage of band imagery and Vedder lyrics in his own handwriting, including the dedication to Andrew Wood that opens "Release".
Release and Reception
Epic released Ten on 27 August 1991. For nine months, very little happened. The "Alive" single charted briefly on Mainstream Rock and then receded; the album sat outside the Billboard 200 top 100 for the first three months of its life. It was Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger in October, then Nirvana's Nevermind in November, and most of all the gradual MTV Buzz Bin rotation of the "Even Flow" video in March 1992 that began to pull Ten upwards. By 30 May 1992 it was at number eight on the Billboard 200. By December it was at number two, kept off the top by Billy Ray Cyrus's Some Gave All, and it would stay in the top hundred for 264 weeks.
The reviews, when they came, split. The retrospective consensus is reverent; the contemporary consensus was suspicious.
| Publication | Reviewer | Score | Quote |
|---|---|---|---|
| AllMusic (retrospective) | Steve Huey | 5/5 | "One of the most rewarding mainstream rock records of the 90s" |
| Rolling Stone | David Fricke | 4/5 | "Hurtles into the mystic at warp speed" |
| Q | Paul Henderson | 4/5 | "May well be the face of the 90s metal" |
| Kerrang! | Don Kaye | 4/5 | "Introspective and charged with a quiet emotional force" |
| NME | Angela Lewis | 5/10 | "Trying to steal money from young alternative kids' pockets" |
| Entertainment Weekly | David Browne | B- | "Their hand-me-down riffs are stranded in the past" |
| Chicago Tribune | Greg Kot | 3/5 | "Earnest and intermittently exciting" |
| Robert Christgau | B- | "More for the moment than for the long haul" (a verdict he would later revise) |
The retrospective accolades, accumulated since, are easier to list. Rolling Stone placed Ten at number 160 on its 500 Greatest Albums list in both 2020 and 2023. Kerrang! ranked it 15 on its 100 Greatest Heavy Metal Albums of All Time. Q placed it at 42 on its 100 Greatest British Albums Ever, despite the obvious geographical objection. Guitar World ranked it at 15 on its readers' poll of the 100 Greatest Guitar Albums of All Time. The Recording Academy inducted Ten into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2021. Pitchfork's 2023 list of the 25 Best Grunge Albums put it inside its top ten.
Singles and Music Videos
| Single | Release Date | B-side | Director | Notable Chart Peak |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| "Alive" | 7 July 1991 | "Wash" | Josh Taft | US Mainstream Rock 16 |
| "Even Flow" | 30 March 1992 | "Dirty Frank" | Josh Taft (live) | US Mainstream Rock 3 |
| "Jeremy" | 17 August 1992 | "Yellow Ledbetter" / "Footsteps" | Mark Pellington | US Mainstream Rock 5; UK 15 |
| "Oceans" | 7 December 1992 (video only outside US) | "State of Love and Trust" / "Why Go" (live) | Josh Taft | UK 30 |
Mark Pellington's video for "Jeremy" is the one that mattered. Pellington, fresh off short-form work for MTV and Public Enemy, built the clip around Trevor Wilkinson playing the title character, intercut with text from the news report that had inspired the song. MTV ran it in heavy rotation through the autumn of 1992. At the 1993 Video Music Awards it was nominated in five categories and won four, including Video of the Year and Best Group Video. The video was later edited for syndication after the Columbine shootings in 1999.
The "Alive" video, directed by Josh Taft, was a black-and-white live performance shot at the Moore Theatre in Seattle on 22 December 1991. It earned a nomination for Best Alternative Video at the 1992 VMAs. "Even Flow" was a similar Taft live capture, this time taken from a Seattle Off Ramp show. "Oceans" was a low-budget Hawaii-shot beach video designed for international markets where the song was a single but no commercial release was available; in the US it played mostly on MTV's specialty programming.
Touring and Live
The first show was at the Off Ramp Cafe on 22 October 1990, advertised as Mookie Blaylock. The first show as Pearl Jam was at the Off Ramp again on 22 February 1991, four weeks before tracking on Ten began. By the time the album was released in August they were already on the road, opening sets at Seattle clubs and short legs in California.
Krusen had left for rehab by the autumn of 1991. Matt Chamberlain stepped in for a two-month run that included an MTV taping of "Alive" before deciding the road was not for him; he recommended Dave Abbruzzese, who joined in late 1991 and would drum for the band for the next three and a half years. The first major tour was as opener for the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik run in November 1991, on a bill that for parts of its length included Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana, three then-unbroken bands on the cusp of more or less simultaneous breakthroughs.
- March 13, 1992 - Nachtwerk, Munich: the band played Ten in its entirety for the first time, an off-the-cuff set sometimes cited as the first full-album performance of any debut on its own tour.
- April 16, 1992 - Saturday Night Live: the band's first national television appearance, performing "Alive" and "Porch" with a then-still-shaggy Vedder.
- June 1992 - Pinkpop and Roskilde: the festivals at which European audiences started turning up in numbers; Vedder climbed Pinkpop's stage scaffolding and surfed the crowd from the lighting rig, an iconic Anton Corbijn photograph.
- August 1992 - Lollapalooza II: co-headlining with Soundgarden, Ministry, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Ice Cube and the Red Hot Chili Peppers; Pearl Jam closed half the dates.
- September 20, 1992 - Drop in the Park, Seattle: a free concert at Magnuson Park played to a crowd of 75,000, recorded and later released on the 2009 deluxe reissue.
The end of the Ten touring cycle, more or less, came at the close of 1992. The band had played around 250 shows in eighteen months, broken three bands' worth of musicians and one drummer, and was already four songs deep into Vs. by the time the last European dates ended.
In TV, Film and Media
Cameron Crowe's Singles, filmed in Seattle in 1991 with several Pearl Jam members appearing as the fictional band Citizen Dick, became the cinematic frame in which most of America first encountered the city's bands. Two re-recorded outtakes from Ten, "Breath" and "State of Love and Trust", appeared on its September 1992 soundtrack. The album's songs have soundtracked television rather than film: "Jeremy" in the seventh episode of CNN's The Nineties in 2017, and in Stumptown and Eastbound and Down; "Black" closing a 2009 episode of Cold Case; "Even Flow" in Only the Brave in 2017 and Apple's Super Pumped in 2022. The band has historically been restrictive about advertising syncs and almost no Ten material has appeared in commercial brand campaigns.
Controversy and the Grunge Debate
The dominant controversy around Ten, in its first eighteen months, was a question of authenticity. Kurt Cobain, in interviews through 1992 and 1993, repeatedly described Pearl Jam as a corporate version of grunge made by ex-glam musicians, and Christgau, Browne and the NME's Angela Lewis all wrote contemporary reviews that took some version of the same line. The two bands eventually reconciled in 1994, slow-dancing on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards that September, weeks before Cobain's death the previous April had ended the conversation in the bluntest possible way.
The other long-running controversy was internal. The band did not like the mix. Gossard told MTV in 2002 that Ten had been "over-rocked" and "very reverbed". Vedder, in 2006, said he could listen to all the early Pearl Jam records except the first one. The eventual answer, eighteen years on, was to ask Brendan O'Brien to remix it from the original multitracks.
"They wanted a drier, more in-your-face mix that sounded more like the way they'd been hearing it in their heads at the time. The original is great. The remix is what the record sounds like if you imagine the band playing it in the room with you."
Brendan O'Brien, Sound on Sound, 2009
Covers, Samples and Tributes
The band's restrictive licensing has kept Ten's songs out of most commercial sample beds, but the album's afterlife in covers is enormous. "Black" is the most-covered song in modern American open-mic and acoustic-night repertoire, often to the band's bemusement; "Yellow Ledbetter", though technically a B-side, has been covered by everyone from John Mayer to Brandi Carlile. Pearl Jam themselves rerecorded "Brother" with vocals in 2009 and have, on numerous live tours, played Ten in its entirety. The country-rock outfit Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit covered "Black" at the Newport Folk Festival in 2017 with Vedder watching from the wings.
Reissues, Remasters and Anniversaries
The 24 March 2009 reissue arrived in four formats. The Legacy edition was a single CD pairing the original mix with O'Brien's remix on a second disc. The Deluxe edition added six unreleased tracks: vocal versions of "Brother" and "Just a Girl", along with "Alone", "Hold On", "Evil Little Goat" and "2,000 Mile Blues". The vinyl edition spread the original and the remix across four LPs. The Super Deluxe boxed all of the above with a DVD of the 16 March 1992 MTV Unplugged session, an LP of the 20 September 1992 Drop in the Park free concert, a cassette replica of Vedder's original Momma-Son demo, and a bound facsimile of his lyric notebook.
The Super Deluxe shipped 60,000 units in its first week. "Brother", the vocal version with Vedder's 1991-tracked guide vocal newly polished, reached number one on Mainstream Rock in May 2009, eighteen years after its parent album. The MTV Unplugged set was officially released on vinyl for Record Store Day 2019.
Legacy and Influence
The cleanest way to see Ten's legacy is in what came after it. The arena-grunge sound of the mid-1990s, the lineage that runs from Stone Temple Pilots' Core through Bush's Sixteen Stone, Live's Throwing Copper, Silverchair's Frogstomp, Creed's Human Clay and ultimately Nickelback, is essentially Tim Palmer's mix of Ten reimagined by a thousand other bands. Mike McCready almost single-handedly rehabilitated the Stratocaster as a serious rock instrument in the 1990s. The melodic, bridge-driven songwriting Vedder and Gossard pulled out of the Mother Love Bone debris was the template that made FM rock radio possible again.
Pearl Jam themselves, having spent the second and third albums sharply pulling away from Ten's sound, made peace with it slowly. By the time they released Vitalogy, Binaural and the long, mid-career trio of Riot Act, the self-titled album and Backspacer, the band was its own cottage industry; by Dark Matter in 2024 it was on its eleventh studio album with the same singer, the same rhythm section and three quarters of the original guitar pairing, the longest-unbroken run of any band that came out of Seattle. Ten's commercial peak was Pearl Jam's first record. None of the ten that followed have outsold it.
"It is the album that made the second half of the 1990s sound the way it did. Everything that came along behind it borrowed something, and the band have been trying to get out from under it ever since."
David Fricke, Rolling Stone, 2009
Things You Might Not Know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| The Mookie Blaylock connection | The album is named Ten after the basketball player's jersey number with the New Jersey Nets. The band performed under the name Mookie Blaylock until Blaylock himself politely declined a long-term licence. |
| Vedder's surfing audition | Eddie Vedder wrote his first lyrics for the band on a single overnight cassette in San Diego after an early-morning surfing session, posting the tape back to Seattle the following day. |
| 11 songs in 7 days | Once he arrived in Seattle on 13 October 1990, Vedder wrote lyrics and vocal melodies for eleven songs in his first week. Five of those songs ended up on the finished album. |
| The fire extinguisher | The high-frequency tick on "Oceans" is a fire extinguisher pulled off the wall at Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey by mixer Tim Palmer and hit with a drumstick during a percussion overdub session. |
| Tim Palmer's farm | Mixing was done at Ridge Farm in Dorking, a converted seventeenth-century farmhouse studio that had previously hosted Robert Plant, the Cure and Tin Machine. Palmer drove out from London each morning. |
| Krusen's last session | Drummer Dave Krusen finished tracking Ten and immediately checked into rehabilitation; he never played another show with the band, and his entire Pearl Jam discography is the album. |
| The Singles soundtrack switch | "Breath" and "State of Love and Trust" were both fully tracked during the Ten sessions, then re-recorded the following year for Cameron Crowe's Singles film soundtrack rather than released on the album. |
| Brother's near-quit | Jeff Ament threatened to leave the band when Vedder vetoed releasing "Brother" with a vocal on Ten. The vocal version was finally issued on the 2009 reissue, where it spent a week at number one on Mainstream Rock. |
| The pink that wasn't burgundy | Jeff Ament's original cover concept was a deep burgundy. Sony asked for it to be lifted to a brighter purple-pink to stand out in record-shop browser bins. |
| Footsteps' double life | The same Stone Gossard instrumental backing track was used for two finished songs: Pearl Jam's "Footsteps" with a Vedder vocal and Temple of the Dog's "Times of Trouble" with a Chris Cornell vocal, recorded three months apart. |
| The Munich one-off | Pearl Jam played Ten in full for the first time at the Nachtwerk in Munich on 13 March 1992, a small-club show that was not advertised as a full-album performance. |
| Drop in the Park | The 20 September 1992 free Seattle concert at Magnuson Park drew a crowd of around 75,000 people and was officially released for the first time on the 2009 deluxe reissue, seventeen years later. |
| Pellington's Jeremy | The "Jeremy" video, which won four MTV Video Music Awards in 1993 including Video of the Year, was Mark Pellington's first major commercial commission after a run of short-form work for Public Enemy and MTV. |
| Held off the top spot | Ten peaked at number two on the Billboard 200 for four non-consecutive weeks, kept off the top by Billy Ray Cyrus's Some Gave All. It spent 264 weeks on the chart in total. |
| O'Brien's 18-year wait | Brendan O'Brien produced or mixed every Pearl Jam studio album from 1993's Vs. onwards. He did not get to remix Ten, the band's main long-running source of mix dissatisfaction, until the 2009 reissue, sixteen years and seven albums later. |
The Podcast
The Riffology podcast covered Ten in episode 44, walking through the songs in the order they were tracked, the Mother Love Bone genealogy that produced half of them, the Tim Palmer mix the band has spent thirty years arguing with, and the long-tail commercial life of an album that took nine months to start selling and never really stopped. The episode is available wherever you get your podcasts: Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Overcast, Pocket Casts and on the Riffology site itself.
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