Pearl Jam – Go

Do any of you, like me, have a misprint on the B side of the single Go (UK released 659795 6)? It seems that the label was printed over the side 2 label of the album Vs (European released 474 549 1)!

I don't really buying this. I know I bought Vs. on 12" because it came out a week or two before the CD was released. I bought this around that time I think. All I know is that if you own it, remove the cassette if you're storing it on a shelf and put the tape elsewhere. I put a nice warp (years ago, but eventually fixed) warp in another PJ album that was directly next to it because of the cassette.

This was not a protest towards the US Billboard charts as some have stated. It was a UK only release contrary to a few erroneous reports it was a Netherland release (reports stem from a well known second hand record store). In the UK, Radio One and the UK Charts would call their chart "The only chart that counts". Contrary to widespread reports that the single was expensive, upon its release in the UK it retailed at just £1.99 (at the time about $3.50). It was incredibly inexpensive.

This release was caught up in a protest by the band who had decided after an argument over "Black" and their refusal to make a promotional video for it. The band started to rebel against their success/fame, particularly about the attention unrelated to music which had started to garner around Vedder and was also par for the course for other frontmen at the time such as Kurt Cobain and Mike Patton.

The band had informed the record company that they were no longer going to release singles. They lost this in the UK against Sony Music Entertainment (UK) Ltd. but ensured that the release was shipped with the cassette shrink wrapped to the vinyl and the CD as a protest as the attachment of another music format made the release ineligible for the charts.

Import costs were high, shipping is not cheap particularly trans-atlantic shipping and so import copies were sold at a . Add to this the fact that most UK singles are deleted after 1 to 2 weeks meant the record was harder to obtain than other commercially released records. Pearl Jam started to cool down on their singles release boycott understanding that their fans were being effected adversely and released the single retrospectively with a sticker containing a barb aimed and meant to affect the importers and not the UK release itself stating "not to be confused with the identical, yet more expensive European version".

This protest was the second of three major protests they made around the time, the first was against music videos, citing they stifle the listeners imagination and the third was their infamous Ticketmaster war which they reluctantly backtracked on after the band almost self destructed.