It was early October, 25 years ago. Just weeks after Nirvana’s debut. And many more bands were coming up through the grunge music pipeline. Alice in Chains. Temple of the Dog. And Mother Love Bone, who had lost their charismatic front man Andrew Wood, six months earlier to a heroin overdose. That was a major blow.
In walks Eddie Vedder. Hot off a plane from southern California, he left SeaTac and went right to rehearse with a new band in the basement of a Belltown art gallery. By the end of the week the band had written eleven songs — enough, they figured, to book their first gig together…
Here’s a somewhat polished version of “Alive,” the first song the band played together on that fateful October 6, 1990.
