10 Legendary Rock Albums That Were Originally Very Different

Every single Pearl Jam record always has a certain nostalgic quality before the test of time starts. These guys are all still huge fans of the bands they loved when they were kids, and you can still hear everyone from Led Zeppelin to Cheap Trick to Jimi Hendrix in their work, whether it's the laid back grooves on Alive or Mike McCready's bluesy solo work on Yellow Ledbetter. By the time they got to making their self titled though, Eddie Vedder seemed to want to channel his heroes the Who a bit more.

Being around the time that the Bush regime was starting to send soldiers off to war in Iraq, there are a lot of pent up feelings in these songs, describing the sense of loss on Severed Hand and Inside Job or the rage about the war on World Wide Suicide. The songs seem to tell a bit of a story, but the thought of making a conceptual piece was the original idea, with the initial sketches being a concept album detailing a man's journey through the war and trying to deal with a country that hung him out to dry.

Since Green Day had pretty much beaten them to the punch on this though, it makes sense for them to not want to make another rock opera with a similar premise, electing to just release the album as a collection of songs and letting the fans make their own conclusions. Still, the building blocks for something a little more epic are all there, and it's any fan's choice whether they want to deliver the rock opera that Pete Townshend would have been proud of.