Pearl Jam walked into a Seattle studio in early 1993 with a problem most bands would envy. Their debut, Ten, had turned the American rock group into one of the biggest acts on the planet, and now every move they made was being watched. Instead of polishing their sound for a bigger audience, the five members of Pearl Jam locked themselves away and pushed in the opposite direction. The result was Vs., the second studio album by Pearl Jam, a record built from jam sessions, single-take intensity, and a deliberate refusal to play it safe. Pearl Jam released Vs. on October 11, 1993.
Recording at Potatohead and The Site
The sessions began at Potatohead studio in Seattle before the band moved to The Site in Nicasio, California. Working with producer Brendan O'Brien for the first time, Pearl Jam changed the way they worked. Rather than recording basic tracks and then layering overdubs, the group recorded one song at a time and mixed each one immediately after it was finished. Most of the songs grew out of jam sessions, and the first week alone produced four tracks: Go, Blood, Rats and Leash. The pace was fast, and the sound that emerged was rawer and more aggressive than anything on Ten.
Singer Eddie Vedder pushed himself hardest of all. To keep the intensity high during the months of recording, he slept in his car in San Francisco and in the sauna at the studio. He later admitted that Vs. was the album he least enjoyed making. That discomfort is audible. The album opens with the frantic rush of Go and rarely lets up, moving through the funk-edged Animal and Blood before settling into two acoustic ballads, Daughter and Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town. Daughter tells the story of a child abused by parents because of a learning difficulty, and it became the album's most successful single.
No videos and a sales record
Pearl Jam also made a decision that seemed designed to frustrate the music industry. After the success of the video for Jeremy, the band refused to make any clips for Vs. There would be no MTV rotation, no carefully styled images. The album would have to stand on its own. That gamble paid off immediately. In the United States, Vs. sold 950,378 copies in its first five days, setting a record for first-week sales since SoundScan began tracking them in 1991. The record stood for five years until Garth Brooks broke it with Double Live in 1998.
The album's commercial power was matched by its chart run. Vs. entered the Billboard 200 at the top and stayed there for five weeks, longer than any other Pearl Jam album. The cover image, photographed by bassist Jeff Ament, shows an angora goat behind a fence on a farm in Victor, Montana. Ament said the image reflected how the band felt at the time: they were slaves. That sense of being trapped by their own success runs through the record, from the personal fury of Rearviewmirror to the social anger of W.M.A., which Vedder wrote after defending a Black friend in a confrontation with police.
Not everything from the sessions made the final tracklist. Whipping and Better Man were left off Vs. and later appeared on Vitalogy, with Vedder unhappy about the quality of Better Man. A cover of Victoria Williams' Crazy Mary was also recorded during the sessions and later released on a tribute album, then added as a bonus track to the Vs. reissue in 2011. The album that did come out in October 1993 was lean, loud and unapologetic, a band refusing to soften its edges even as millions of new listeners were waiting to hear what came next.