Pearl Jam

Pearl Jam rose from a Seattle tragedy. Guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament had been in Mother Love Bone, whose frontman Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose in 1990, months before the band's debut album arrived. Regrouping with guitarist Mike McCready, they cut an instrumental demo that reached a singer named Eddie Vedder through drummer Jack Irons. The new band played its first show at Seattle's Off Ramp Café on October 22, 1990, under the name Mookie Blaylock — after the basketball player — and, upon signing to Epic, renamed itself Pearl Jam, titling its debut album Ten for Blaylock's jersey number.

Ten, released August 27, 1991, was slow to catch — then became one of the defining rock records of the decade, hitting number two on the Billboard 200 in 1992, staying on the chart for nearly five years, and eventually going 13× platinum on the strength of 'Alive,' 'Even Flow,' and 'Jeremy.' Nineteen ninety-two brought Saturday Night Live, MTV Unplugged, and Lollapalooza; 1993's Vs. sold 950,378 copies in its first week — more than the rest of that week's Billboard top ten combined, a record that stood until 1998.

Then the band spent its fame like ammunition. After 'Jeremy,' Pearl Jam simply stopped making music videos. In 1994 it went to war with Ticketmaster over service fees, filing a complaint that triggered a Justice Department investigation — Gossard and Ament testified before a congressional subcommittee that June — then canceled its summer tour and boycotted Ticketmaster venues for years, building its own stages in rural fields. Vitalogy still arrived in 1994 as the second-fastest-selling CD to date.

The refusals worked out to longevity: more than 100 million albums sold worldwide and a first-ballot Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2017. Vedder even admitted in 2006 that his origin story for the band's name — a great-grandmother Pearl and her peyote-laced jam — was, in his words, 'total bullshit.'