Stone Gossard reminisces about the early days of Pearl Jam

Pearl Jam have come a long way since playing their first show ever at Seattle’s Off Ramp Cafe on October 22, 1990. To celebrate the momentous anniversary, the band unveiled a livestream of their iconic 2016 show in Philadelphia that included a full performance of Ten, and guitarist Stone Gossard reminisced about the olden days during a recent interview (via SPIN), revealing that there were "60, 70 people" at that first gig.

"And at that time, we were really trying to be as spontaneously pushing ourselves to kind of take chances," Gossard recalled. "And Ed [Vedder] came up to rehearse with us for the first time we’d written four, three songs.”

He also divulged why PJ decided to leave "Better Man" off of Ten. “None of us had any say in that,” Gossard said. “That was Ed’s thing. His ability to think that way has really been an important part, huge part of our long-term success because I just think that our fans have gotten used to the… There’s sort of the variety of our experiments, so we’re not waiting around for everything to line up perfectly.”

As for their 1992 MTV Unplugged session, Gossard admitted to feeling apprehensive. “I remember being nervous, but we also had played a lot, so we were pretty comfortable with our songs,” he recalled. “I think we were still at a phase where we were I lost confidence a little bit for a few years where I just wasn’t sure whether we were deserving of all this stuff.”

“I remember that we felt that it was pretty good, but we had played very little acoustically," he added. "We relied a lot on the noise and the wildness of our shows to generate energy.”

Pearl Jam recently released a new song, "Get It Back," which you can listen to above!

This article was first published on iheart.com and is republished here with permission