When many individuals come together with a similar idea at hand, success will quickly follow, and that’s exactly what happened in 1990 in Seattle, Washington.
Temple of the Dog was an American grunge supergroup, headed by vocalist Chris Cornell of Soundgarden as a tribute to his great friend, the late Andrew Wood, lead singer of the bands Malfunkshun and Mother Love Bone. The album continues its tribute to Wood by naming the entire group after one of his lyrics of the Mother Love Bone song “Man of Golden Words,” “Wanna show you something, like joy inside my heart. Seems I been living in the temple of the dog.”
Wood died in March of 1990 well before the formation of Pearl Jam as Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard were still in Mother Love Bone. Cornell approached Wood’s former bandmates, who were still figuring out what to do after the death of their singer and lyricist.
Post-death, Stone and Ament were challenged with the duty of replacing Wood as a lead singer. Vedder wrote lyrics and added vocals to three songs, mailed the tape back, and earned an audition in Seattle. In October 1990, he found himself in the basement rehearsal area. When Cornell thought another song needed a duet, Vedder was enlisted, after hearing his background vocals on those three Temple songs, and the result was magic.
“Stone and Jeff saw talent in Eddie that no one else did,” Cross said in a Seattle Times article. “One part of the story that never, ever gets told, is they could have picked 20 other lead singers. There were other people in Seattle who certainly would have approached them.”
That duet Vedder and Cornell performed only became the tribute band’s most popular song during their tenure, “Hunger Strike.” That the song became an iconic duet between the two was purely coincidental, from Vedder being the one of many chosen to Chris Cornell’s dislike of odd numbers, and this record having nine, before this recording.
“When we started rehearsing the songs, I had pulled out “Hunger Strike” and I had this feeling it was just kind of going to be filler, it didn’t feel like a real song. Eddie was sitting there kind of waiting for a [Mookie Blaylock] rehearsal and I was singing parts, and he kind of humbly, but with some [bravado,] walked up to the mic and started singing the low parts for me because he saw it was kind of hard. We got through a couple choruses of him doing that and suddenly the light bulb came on in my head, this guy’s voice is amazing for these low parts. History wrote itself after that, that became the single,” according to genius.com
Vedder was an intriguing and young prospect behind Cornell, and it seemed Stone and Ament had found their next lead vocalist, along with lead guitarist Mike McCready following not too far behind, to form Mookie Blaylock, the band we know today as Pearl Jam.
Pearl Jam would quickly release their first studio album Ten in 1991, four months after the Temple of the Dog tribute, and both artists would take off from here, with hits such as “Black Hole Sun” and “Yellow Ledbetter” garnering critical acclaim and national attention.
