Eddie Vedder and Mike McCready say pulling back after the success of Ten is one of the reasons Pearl Jam is still around today.
Vedder and McCready spoke about the upcoming 30th anniversary of Ten with Classic Rock magazine, and Vedder says that once the album broke into the Top 10 in May of 1992, he was worried about what would happen to him and the band. He says, “I felt that with more popularity, we were going to be crushed, our heads were going to pop like grapes.”
The band started pulling back from doing any interviews or making videos. Vedder says, “I knew it wasn’t graceful, the way we were handling it. At the same time, it’s like being graceful in an alley fight. You’re just trying to get out of there alive. We held tight to each other and held tight to music.”
McCready adds, “I feel like we’re still around today maybe because of that first major decision to try to do it our own way. We made a lot of decisions that were counter to what the record label wanted us to do. So we were lucky, but it was our decision: pull back, five against one.”
Ten was released on August 27th, 1991 and went on to sell 13 million copies in the U.S.
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