Pearl Jam

Eddie Vedder was thirteen or fourteen and lonely when a record shop pointed him toward Quadrophenia. "It saved my life," he said, of an album whose songwriter felt like the only person alive who "knew everything that was going on in my life" — a stranger from London named Pete Townshend. Vedder later wrote a bylined Rolling Stone essay on the band and built a real friendship and stage partnership with Townshend that has lasted decades. Of every song by any other artist, Pearl Jam has released exactly one studio cover: Quadrophenia's closing hymn, "Love Reign O'er Me," cut for their 2006 Ten Club Christmas single.

listen: upstream & heresource: Rolling Stone — "The Immortals ↗share

1973

Love, Reign o'er MeThe Who

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2006

Love Reign O'er MePearl Jam

listen forTownshend's original builds Jimmy's shipwrecked despair out of thunder-machine effects and Roger Daltrey's air-raid wail, strings arriving like weather rolling in. Pearl Jam strip the effects away and let Vedder's baritone carry the same climb from a murmur to a scream, the band swelling behind him instead of an orchestra. "Eddie loves The Who, but he also gets The Who," Townshend said of him. "You can hear it in his Who cover versions..." Listen for how long Vedder holds back the belt before he finally lets it go — the same restraint Daltrey used first.

Mike McCready had quit playing guitar entirely until he dropped acid and watched Stevie Ray Vaughan play Washington's Gorge Amphitheatre; he came home vowing to start over. Not long after, at a friend's party, he sat in a bedroom playing along to Vaughan's "Couldn't Stand the Weather" when Stone Gossard walked in — the two had known each other since sixth grade, but Gossard was busy with Mother Love Bone. A year later, after singer Andrew Wood died, Gossard called out of the blue, remembering that party: "he couldn't do that stuff," McCready said, "and I could kind of do it." He got the job.

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1984

Couldn't Stand the WeatherStevie Ray Vaughan

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1991

Even FlowPearl Jam

listen forVaughan's "Couldn't Stand the Weather" rides a slow blues shuffle that keeps threatening to boil over, his tone thick and vocal, notes bent and held past where the ear expects them to stop. McCready chases that same tension on "Even Flow" — a wah-drenched solo that climbs and snarls rather than simply speeding up. "When he did Voodoo Child, it was so bad-ass," McCready said of watching Vaughan play. "He changed how I wanted to play, and if you listen to Even Flow, you can hear me trying to emulate his stuff."

Stone Gossard grew up on the heaviest records of the era — "I listened to a lot of Motörhead. I listened to a lot of Iron Maiden... I listened to a lot of Led Zeppelin," he said of his teenage years — and when he and bassist Jeff Ament began writing what became Ten, Ament heard the source material in Gossard's riffs. "Stone was always writing from kind of a Zeppelin angle," Ament said, "so seeing if the fretless could work in that realm was exciting." He answered by teaching himself fretless bass from scratch; by his own count, it carries more than half the record.

listen: upstream & hereshare

1975

KashmirLed Zeppelin

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1991

OncePearl Jam

listen for"Kashmir" builds its menace from one hypnotic, descending riff that never resolves, orchestration piling on top without the tempo ever climbing. "Once" works the same trick at album-opener scale: a single circling guitar figure that just gets heavier as drums and bass stack in, Vedder's vocal arriving almost as another layer of noise rather than a lead. Neither song hurries; both let repetition do the escalating. It's the "Zeppelin angle" Ament described — heaviness built from patience, not speed.