“Red Mosquito” by Pearl Jam

"Red Mosquito" sits eighth on No Code, Pearl Jam's fourth album, from 1996, and it's the record's scruffy garage-rock lurch, all five members sharing the credit, Jack Irons on drums, Eddie Vedder on lead vocals, guitar and harmonica, and Brendan O'Brien sitting in on piano while he produced it with the band.

The secret weapon is Mike McCready's lead guitar, which he played in the studio with an old Zippo lighter that had belonged to Vedder's grandfather. McCready asked to keep it afterwards and Vedder turned him down; years later, at a 2006 show in San Francisco, Vedder told the crowd he'd finally found the lighter again and might just hand it over. It never got a proper single release, yet it still crawled onto the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart, which says plenty about how rock radio took to it.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.