Watch Pearl Jam Perform ‘Hunger Strike’ for the First Time Since Chris Cornell’s Death

Pearl Jam wrapped up their 2024 world tour Saturday evening at ENGIE Stadium in Sydney, Australia. The 27-song set touched on all eras of their career, including six selections from their 1991 debut Ten and four songs from the new LP Dark Matter. They also covered the Who’s Baba O’Riley and Bruce Springsteen’s “No Surrender,” which they dedicated to Springsteen in the aftermath of a fairly disappointing election back home in America.

Near the end of the main set, Vedder thanked the crowd. “You have great voices here,” he said. “We’d like to have you use them with us now.” The band then kicked into the 1991 Temple of the Dog classic “Hunger Strike,” which they last played on October 26, 2014, at Neil Young’s Bridge School Benefit in Mountain View, California. Soundgarden were also on the bill that night, and Chris Cornell joined the band for it. It was the final time Cornell and Vedder performed together.

In the aftermath of Cornell’s tragic death in 2017, it was easy to imagine Pearl Jam simply leaving that song off to the side even though they’d played it with many guest singers over the years, including Wolfmother’s Andrew Stockdale, Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker, and Band of Horses’ Ben Bridwell. The group weren’t joined by any guests in Sydney. Vedder simply handled the Cornell vocal parts on his own, with a little help from the crowd.

In a 2016 oral history of Temple of the Dog, Cornell told Rolling Stone about the origins of the song. “‘Hunger Strike’ came about because of an existential crisis that Soundgarden faced at that moment,” he said. “We were sort of the first band [from Seattle] that had attention from labels in a meaningful way. There was a bidding war, which was unusual for any band from Seattle. We were living our dream, but there was also this mistrust over what that meant. Does this make us a commercial rock band? Does it change our motivation when we’re writing a song and making a record? ‘Hunger Strike’ is a statement that I’m staying true to what I’m doing regardless of what comes of it, but I will never change what I’m doing for the purposes of success or money.”

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Temple of the Dog were nearly finished with their album, a tribute to the late Andy Wood, when Cornell thought back to the song. He only had a single verse at that point, but a new singer from San Diego named Eddie had just come up to Seattle to form a new band with Wood’s former Mother Love Bone bandmates.

“[The song] was just one verse,” Cornell remembered. “I was singing the chorus in the rehearsal space and Eddie just kind of shyly walked up to the mic and started singing the low ‘going hungry’ and I started singing the high one. When I heard him sing, the whole thing came together in my brain. I just felt like, ‘Wow, his voice is so great in this low register. He should sing on it. I’ll sing the first verse and then he’ll come in. Even though it’s the same lyrics, it’s a different singer and it’ll feel like two verses.'”

“Hunger Strike” became one of the defining songs of the grunge era. But it’s only popped up at 24 Pearl Jam concerts since the group’s formation. The band played 37 shows this year, marking their most active year on the road since 2006. They haven’t announced any plans for 2025, but they have talked about returning to the studio with Andrew Watt to craft a follow-up to Dark Matter.