About
October 22, 2015 officially marked 25 years of Pearl Jam performing live. Ten studio albums, hundreds of unique live performances and hundreds of official live concert bootleg releases later, the band continue to be critically acclaimed and commercially successful -- with over 85 million albums sold worldwide.
Pearl Jam is an American rock band formed in 1990 in Seattle, Washington. The band's current lineup comprises founding members Eddie Vedder (lead vocals, guitar), Mike McCready (lead guitar), Stone Gossard (rhythm guitar) and Jeff Ament (bass) as well as drummer Matt Cameron, who joined in 1998. Keyboardist Boom Gaspar has also been a session/touring member with the band since 2002. Drummers Jack Irons, Dave Krusen, Matt Chamberlain and Dave Abbruzzese are former members of the band.
Formed after the demise of Gossard and Ament's previous band, Mother Love Bone, Pearl Jam broke into the mainstream with its debut album, Ten, in 1991. One of the key bands in the grunge movement of the early 1990s, its members often shunned popular music industry practices such as making music videos or giving interviews. The band also sued Ticketmaster, claiming it had monopolized the concert-ticket market. In 2006, Rolling Stone described the band as having "spent much of the past decade deliberately tearing apart their own fame."
The band had sold nearly 32 million albums in the United States by 2012, and by 2018, they had sold more than 85 million albums worldwide. Pearl Jam outsold many of its contemporary alternative rock bands from the early 1990s, and is considered one of the most influential bands of the decade. AllMusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine referred to Pearl Jam as "the most popular American rock & roll band of the '90s". Pearl Jam was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on April 7, 2017, in its first year of eligibility. They were ranked at no. 8 in a reader poll by Rolling Stone magazine in its "Top Ten Live Acts of All Time" issue.