6 reasons Pearl Jam are still Alive: how the Seattle band survived addiction, changing musical tastes, and tour fatigue
- Pearl Jam shot to fame in the 1990s as part of the Seattle grunge scene, and managed to stay relevant and retain their fan base in the following decades
- Steven Hyden, author of Long Road: Pearl Jam and the Soundtrack of a Generation, gives six reasons they still sell out concerts and thrill fans
After getting so big so fast, being a big part of a fleeting moment in trendy media hype and having so much self-destruction around them, Pearl Jam probably should not even still be here.
The band battled addictions early on, like seemingly every group out of Seattle in the early 1990s. They bucked critics and music snobs, who initially dismissed the group as a more corporate, less altruistic answer to Nirvana. They fought Ticketmaster, too, which wasn’t good for business at the time.
In more recent years, Pearl Jam have faced down maybe the biggest challenge of all: staying relevant as a rock band as they reach pensionable age.
“There aren’t a lot of bands that have hung around as long and as well as them – especially bands from their era and their scene,” says Steven Hyden, author of the 2022 book Long Road: Pearl Jam and the Soundtrack of a Generation.
Not only are the quintet of “Alive” fame still very much around, theirs are some of the most in-demand tickets for any rock tour this year.
Eddie Vedder and his mostly all-original bandmates – ex-Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron is the lone latecomer, and he’s been in the line-up since 1998 – kicked off the first stretch of their 2023 US dates at Xcel Energy Centre in Saint Paul, in the US state of Minnesota, on August 31.
