Has any band ever launched a campaign of commercial self-sabotage quite like Pearl Jam? In the annals of acts that faced giant success early on and decided to hightail it in the opposite direction, they’re legendary. Their downsizing operation began just as their 1991 debut, Ten, was on its way to 10 million in sales, and though it didn’t involve any dystopian concept albums or cross-dressing to scare off the frat boys, it was breathtakingly effective. They refused to shoot music videos. They boycotted Ticketmaster. They released No Code. It all started so well. In 1990, three Seattle-scene vets looking for a singer heard about a surfing gas-station attendant in San Diego with a wicked set of pipes. They sent him three instrumentals on a cassette, he bellowed all over them, and Pearl Jam was born. The band recorded 11 furious tracks and—whoosh!—next stop, the cover of Time. But aside from buffalo plaid, grunge-era Seattle’s biggest export was scowling sincerity, and the city’s freshly minted MTV gods had a rough time swallowing the indignities of mega-success. Imagine the wound Eddie Vedder must have suffered, then, when Kurt Cobain—better situated than anyone to sympathize—called Pearl Jam bandwagon-hopping corporate sell-outs.Cobain eventually made nice, but his early scorn for Pearl Jam does point up some of Ten’s most striking contradictions. In The Wrestler, Randy the Ram bemoans the shriveling effect “that pussy Cobain” had on good old stadium rock. Ten has something for the Rams and the pussies of the world. It’s an exhilarating punk howl set to fret-tickling, have-you-met-my-cock? riffage. It’s a batch of outsider’s tales coursing with beefy swagger, a misfit’s odyssey helmed by a wave-chasing stud with killer cheekbones and Hercules hair. Pearl Jam’s anguish was offset by their sex appeal—the throaty, virile belting; the Townshend-inspired guitar heroism; the strutting grooves. When, on the 1992 MTV Unplugged performance included here, the brooding Vedder doffs his baseball cap and carpets the stage with his curls, the female roar is ecstatic. But while there’s something of the alpha male about Vedder, his heroes on Ten are a strictly beta crowd. The album is full of maladjusted wimps beset by corrupt adults, from the girl on “Why Go” whose nonconformist streak is stifled by psychiatrists to the neglected classroom suicide on “Jeremy” to the boy on “Alive” whose mother lies to him about his dad’s identity, then invites him to bed. “Alive” is semi-autobiographical: The incest is fiction, but Vedder’s stepdad did masquerade as his real father for years. This early deception put the singer on his lifelong mission of defending the little guy, Ten’s Catcher in the Rye vision of kid-saving giving way to Kosovar-refugee benefits and songs about abused wives and police brutality. The band’s refusal to become massive rock stars stemmed, it seems, from Vedder’s constitutional refusal to become the enemy.There are four versions of this reissue, two worth exploring. For a smaller price tag, you get the Unplugged DVD, six unreleased bonus tracks and a full-album remix by longtime PJ fave Brendan O’Brien. His new take scythes through the original, revealing growls and guitars long obscured—sometimes it’s distracting, but often it lends the songs a newfound jolt. There’s also a $140 edition that adds four vinyl LPs, a reproduction of Vedder’s old notebook and a facsimile of his original demo cassette. It’s a relic and a shrine, commemorating a bygone time when music was something you caressed, dusted off and (good riddance) rewound.Ultimately, Pearl Jam’s plan worked. By the end of the ’90s they’d purged their fan base of everyone but diehards who argue about which bootleg performance of “Corduroy” is superior (“6/19/00 in Ljubljana, dude!”). Still, despite their best efforts, they could never quite make Ten go away. The album birthed many multi-platinum imitators, and, from Live to Creed, many of them made some very bad music. But that only highlights the virtuoso balance of indignation, heart and bluster that Pearl Jam pulled off here.

Download “Alive,” “Even Flow,” “Release”