Day After Day #260: Leash

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Leash (1993)

Pearl Jam can provoke a lot of different reactions from rock fans, depending on who you talk to. There are indie/alternative fans who never really dug them or got sick of them after they got really big. And then there are those who never wavered in their fervor for the band. I'm closer to the latter, but I wouldn't call myself a fanatic; I've always liked them, but I liked them more in the early days.

Along with Foo Fighters and Green Day, Pearl Jam managed to transcend the "'90s rock" pigeonhole and maintain their popularity after all these years, even if it's not what it once was. For all the TIME magazine covers and "savior of rock" articles that followed them in the early days, PJ never pretended to be more than just a rock band. They didn't pretend to be punk, even though they had punk-inspired songs in their repertoire, and they certainly appreciated their influences like Neil Young and the Who. They caught a lot of heat early on for not being underground or alternative enough, and maybe that's why they stopped doing press for a while.

Formed in 1990, the band was formed by guitarist Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament, who had previously played in Seattle bands Green River (with Mark Arm and Steve Turner, who went on to form Mudhoney) and Mother Love Bone (with the late Andrew Wood). After Wood's death from a heroin overdose, Gossard and Ament teamed with Chris Cornell and Matt Cameron of Soundgarden and Gossard's childhood friend Mike McCready to record a tribute album to Wood. The group was called Temple of the Dog after a line from a Mother Love Bone song. 

At the same time, Gossard, Ament and McCready were starting a new band called Mookie Blaylock (after the basketball player) and had flown in a singer from San Diego named Eddie Vedder to audition. Vedder came to one of the Temple of the Dog rehearsals and contributed backing vocals to a few songs, including "Hunger Strike," which turned into a duet with Cornell. The resulting album came out in April 1991 on A&M and sold a modest 70,000 copies in the U.S., but it didn't chart.

Vedder ended up getting the gig with Mookie Blaylock, which added drummer Dave Krusen, playing their first show in Seattle in October 1990 and later opening some shows for Alice in Chains. They later renamed the band Pearl Jam and went into the studio to record their debut album Ten (which was Blaylock's uniform number). Krusen left the band after the sessions to go into rehab for alcoholism and Matt Chamberlin joined them; he only played a few shows before joining the Saturday Night Live band and was replaced by Dave Abbruzzese. 

The album was released in August 1991, around the same time as Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger, Nirvana's Nevermind and the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik. The other three albums started off strong, but Ten was a slow grower, a classic rock-inspired collection of dark tales. But as Pearl Jam began touring heavily and got more exposure on MTV with the video for "Alive," they started to grow in popularity. Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" exploded out of the gate and led to headlines and constant coverage of what the music press started calling grunge music and the "Seattle sound"; soon, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains were swept up in the hysteria, even though the four bands didn't sound like each other at all. 

By April 1992, Pearl Jam was still playing small clubs but those dates were selling out. One of them was on April 8 at Axis in Boston, where my brother and I were in attendance. It was packed to the gills and the band put on a typically energetic and fun show. Three nights later, they played Saturday Night Live, where they played "Alive" and "Porch" and a few months later, they were in the middle of the bill on the second Lollapalooza tour and stardom ensued.

The last song of that Axis show was an unreleased track called "Leash," which would turn up on the band's 1993 album Vs. It was a furious ripper of a song that nobody really knew, but it was pretty easy to get behind the message and attitude.

"Troubled souls unite, we got ourselves tonight/I am fuel, you are friends, we got the means to make amends/I am lost, I'm no guide, but I'm by your side/I am right by your side/Young lover I stand/It was their idea, I proved to be a man/Take my fucking hand/It was their idea, I proved to be a man/Will myself to find a home, a home within myself/We will find a way, we will find our place/Drop the leash, drop the leash/Get outta my fuckin' face."

When you're in your 20s, "Drop the leash, get outta my fuckin' face" is a relatable sentiment, and the song was certainly memorable. It was 32 years ago, but I remember that tiny club vibrating as the band pummeled through that song. It almost seemed like a goodbye in some ways, that we'd never see them in a venue that small again. 

It was good to hear the song again on Vs. Reportedly the song was about the same girl who was the subject of the Ten song "Why Go," which Vedder said he wrote about a teenage girl in Chicago whose parents had her institutionalized for two years. 

"Drop the leash, we are young/Drop the leash, we are young/Get outta my fuckin' face/Drop the leash, drop the leash/Get outta my.../Delight, delight, delight in our youth/Get outta my fuckin' face..."

By the time Vs. came out in October 1993, Pearl Jam was huge. They did MTV Unplugged in '92, contributed to the soundtrack of (and appeared in) the Cameron Crowe movie Singles and won MTV Video Music Awards for their controversial video for "Jeremy." After that, the band refused to make videos for a while and consciously tried to scale back their press efforts. All that did was build up demand and Vs. sold over 950,000 copies in its first week. 

I saw them again at the Orpheum in Boston in April 1994. Not long afterward, the band started fighting against Ticketmaster's price gouging and tried to create their own tour of non-TM venues. Gossard and Ament even testified before a Congressional subcommittee investigating Ticketmaster's monopolistic practices. Pearl Jam canceled their 1994 summer tour in protest. They released Vitalogy in late '94 and continued to avoid Ticketmaster venues, which meant they barely played any U.S. dates in 1995-96. Abbruzzese was fired after Vitalogy was recorded over political differences; Jack Irons took his place. They also backed up Neil Young on his 1995 album Mirror Ball.

Pearl Jam released a quieter album, No Code, in 1996 and then a more mainstream rocker, Yield, in 1998. They also finally relented and began playing Ticketmaster venues again on the Yield tour. That year also marked the departure of Irons, who was replaced by Matt Cameron, who was free after Soundgarden broke up a year earlier. 

Since 2000, the band has released seven albums with the same lineup, including this year's Dark Matter. They're not topping the charts anymore, but no rock bands are these days. But they're still filling arenas and baseball stadiums every few years, with a pretty solid body of work for a 34-year-old band. I saw them last in 2006 at the Boston Garden, where they played "Leash" for the first time in 12 years. I had a chance to see them two weekends ago but had to go to a work conference and missed it. They're not the angry young men they once were, but they can still deliver the goods, and that definitely counts for something.