10 Rock Bands That Ripped Off Their Own Songs

When Pearl Jam were first getting together, both Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament were still reeling from the fallout behind Mother Love Bone. Getting over the loss of someone like Andy Wood was never going to be easy, and Temple of the Dog was a good way to heal from that pain, with Stone, Jeff, and Chris Cornell coming together to honor their fallen friend, along with Mike McCready and a token appearance from Eddie Vedder on Hunger Strike. Once Pearl Jam started to hone their craft though, some spare riffs did squeak by twice.

While most of the original demos that Stone had sent Eddie had been comprised of songs that he had been working on during the last days of Mother Love Bone, Footsteps was something much more tattered and broken, built around one acoustic guitar lick that tapped into something a lot darker in Vedder's subconscious. Being on the original cassette, Eddie turned the guitar lick into Footsteps, serving as the final piece of the MamaSon rock opera, where the character from Alive and Once is put on death row for his crimes.

It was released as the B-side to Jeremy, but most Seattle fans had already heard the song once, being one of the deep cuts from the Temple of the Dog record on the song Times of Trouble. If anything though, this is more of a study in what could be done when you give two different songwriters the same riff. You might get something Zeppelin esque when you give it to Chris Cornell, but Eddie turned it into a disturbing account of a man as he's being read his last rights.