Out of its shell
By Mark Brown, News Popular Music Critic
March 29, 2003

http://www.rockymountainn...95,00.html

For fans, this is what they've come to expect of Pearl Jam: a strong new album, a long tour following it, with tickets kept at a reasonable price.

What this really is, however, is the start of a new era for the Seattle band.

What do you do when you're one of the biggest bands in the world - and suddenly you don't need your record company anymore?

No one has ever been in this position before -- not with this much commercial clout, anyway - so Pearl Jam is heading off into uncharted territory. With an intensely loyal fan base, a creative resurgence, and a wide-open future, the band becomes free this year - no record company, no ties.

Kicking off their U.S. tour at the Pepsi Center on Tuesday is really the start of a liberation. Most bands at this point are burned out, hate each other, have run out of fuel or lost their enthusiasm and fans.

"I really do think we're going into a new era. We're writing the rules as we go along," bassist Jeff Ament says. "Ultimately, it's going to mean more music. That's the most important thing."

And the burnout isn't there.

"More than ever I love these guys as friends. I actually start to miss them after a certain period of time. Don't know if they feel that way about me, but that's the beauty of getting a little older, too. All those little ego trips that everyone has . . . that stuff has fallen away a little bit," Ament says from his hideaway in Missoula, Mont., his home state.

Prince broke away from Warner Bros. Records in the '90s, but his behavior afterward was so erratic that he alienated much of his fan base. While he's been successful putting out his own records, his legacy of canceled tours and canceled releases have left him with a flaky reputation.

Pearl Jam won't face that. They know what they're doing. From keeping ticket prices low to the battles with Ticketmaster to bootlegging their own concerts, Pearl Jam always has known exactly what it wanted to do with its business.

"We're pretty hands-on with it - unfortunately," Ament says with a resigned laugh.

"The great thing right now is we're out of our deal. We'll put out a B-side record, but technically we're not under contract anymore. It's a pretty exciting time to have that freedom."

That rarities disc will be two CDs with anywhere from 25 to 40 songs, Ament says, but after that, the band is free - free at a time when it is still vital, still writing hits, and with a fan base that just won't let go.

Peers with their idols

That's impressive for any band, but this comes more than a decade after Pearl Jam - Ament, singer Eddie Vedder, guitarists Mike McCready and Stone Gossard, with semi-new drummer Matt Cameron - burst out of the then-burgeoning Seattle scene. You could define the band by its big hits that get radio play - Jeremy, Better Man, Black, Daughter, Alive - enough songs to make the career of any band.

But Pearl Jam has even better songs tucked under the surface - Nothingman, Not For You, Yellow Ledbetter, Wishlist, Given to Fly, the defiant Indifference.

Along the way, they've spawned egregiously bad imitators such as Creed, but they've also gotten to be peers with their idols, collaborating with Neil Young, the Who and more, as well as a recent stint with former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr ("What a treat. Johnny is a legend").

"The guy that we really wanted to play with was actually going to tour with us," Ament says somberly, but a heart attack in December ended it. "Joe Strummer. That's just a total heartbreak. We were devastated. They were cranked; their record was going to be out. It was pretty devastating."

Tour starts here

The tour starts Tuesday in Denver because they wanted a city within a reasonable drive of Seattle, where their equipment is. A few itineraries got kicked around.

"The first real name I saw on the schedule was Colorado Springs. I said 'OK, if we're going to play Colorado Springs, we're going to tear Focus on the Family a new (orifice). If that's the way you wanna start off the tour . . . ' and somehow it got changed magically. Someone in the powers-that-be changed it to the Pepsi Center," Ament says with a laugh.

The band has always had a good vibe here, despite an incident at CU-Boulder where a summons was temporarily issued for Vedder after he got in a tussle with concert security over mosh-pit issues (how very '90s). The charges eventually were dropped.

There was concern about going out during a time of war, but not enough to deter the band.

"For us it's exciting to go out. We can share stories that we've been getting from Michael Moore and other guys," Ament says. "We can kinda hear other people's angles on it, even people who are pro-war. In situations like this, communicating is the most important thing."

The band just finished up a tour of Australia and Japan, where war tensions hung nearly as heavy as they do here.

"In Australia, they have a prime minister, John Howard, who's supporting Bush, with the public 90 percent against it," he says. "Three million people protested out of the 11 million people in the country."

The set list radically changes nightly, with the band having at least 60 songs ready to go at any time, and alternates being worked up at sound check every day.

"The short-term goal is to try to play most of everything. By the time the tour ends, we try to visit every (Pearl Jam song) at least once," Ament says. "That makes it interesting for us at sound check. 'Let's dig up Hard to Imagine; we haven't played it in two years' or whatever."

A few staples - including the hits Corduroy, Black and Daughter - have been in the set virtually every night. They're crowd-pleasers, but that's not why they're there.

"They're fun for different reasons. Daughter has a life of its own at the end; it provides a blueprint for anything Ed might want to say, or a jam we might go off on. Black, it's a chance for us to sit back and watch Mike (McCready) play guitar. He mixes his leads up on that song every night. It's a treat for us."

Everyone involved

The band still works as a semi-democracy, where anyone can take a hand in songwriting, arranging, artwork, T-shirts, whatever. Ament has had a hand in the band's album art, going so far as to shoot the cover of the new album, Riot Act, and much of its interior work.

The band always has been somewhat collaborative; Ament is co-writer on some of Pearl Jam's best songs, including Jeremy, Corduroy, Daughter and Nothingman. But the band used to leave most of the lyrics up to Vedder, thinking he wanted it that way. That changed during the recording of No Code in 1996.

"Up to that point it'd be Ed in there for the last month, finishing up the lyrics," Ament says. "It got to a point where he said 'Man, I can't do this anymore. I can't be the only guy in here.' I think all of us took that as 'OK, next record, everyone comes in with songs.' Everybody did. And much to Ed's credit, he welcomed our input. It has been a huge step for the band, just getting people motivated and psyched again about making the record."

The band goes in with a handful of songs that seem perfect for Pearl Jam - and a handful that seem totally wrong.

"A lot of the time, those are the songs that people gravitate toward - the ones outside of what you'd think are the boundaries of a Pearl Jam song," Ament says. "Help Help is a prime example of that. You Are, which is Matt's song, was something based around a guitar riff played through a drum machine. The things I get psyched about is where we're coloring outside the lines." On the band's first album, Ten, that included the songs Oceans and Release. They thought "that's as far as we can stretch right now. Those songs have to be on there, just so we can have someplace to go."

The ticket snub

To many, Pearl Jam will forever be synonymous with Ticketmaster, as the band led the charge challenging what they viewed as a ticketing monopoly in the mid-'90s. They learned lessons - primarily that being right doesn't mean you will win. The fact that the band is playing a Clear Channel-promoted show in the corporate-named Pepsi Center with tickets sold by Ticketmaster doesn't escape them.

But they were riled when they first made it to arenas and discovered that not only did they have to use Ticketmaster, but that the service charges were undermining their attempt to keep tickets cheap.

"When the Ticketmaster thing went down, what we were saying was 'Wait a minute; these guys are taking the same piece of the pie we're taking.' We were trying to keep our ticket prices low," Ament says. "To find out they're making four bucks a ticket - that's what we were making off the 20 bucks. We go 'Wait a minute, this is wrong.' This is our life, this is five guys putting their hearts and souls into something to make four bucks, and these guys just print out a ticket and make the same thing. We just couldn't believe the audacity of a ticket company saying 'Screw you, we have deals with every venue in the country.' We said 'That's a monopoly, and that's supposed to be illegal in this country.'"

"Supposed to be" are the key words for the band. After fighting all the way to Capitol Hill, the band - and other artists rallying around them - was dismissed by the Justice Department, which decided not to pursue the case.

"We took it as far as we could, until our pocketbooks couldn't pay for any more lawyers," Ament says. "Ultimately, we educated a lot of people."

And paid a price. The fight kept Pearl Jam off the road for a while, and kept them playing in out-of-the-way places where Ticketmaster didn't have contracts. The band would stubbornly construct concert venues from scratch, in the middle of nowhere, to keep from having to knuckle under to Ticketmaster. It did, Ament says, cost them some of their fanbase.

"Whenever you inconvenience your fans too much, it's like 'Well, (shoot), this is too much of a hassle, I'll go see U2 instead.' It got to a point where we started to listen to them," he says. "We were not only making it incredibly hard on ourselves, but also making it incredibly hard on our fans and our crew. We were building shows from the ground up. We were making it unsafe. We were killing ourselves over this pride issue of not wanting to deal with the devil." They realized, Ament says, that Ticketmaster "had us over a barrel. If you want to play shows, there's no choice."

They've still kept tickets at $35 lower than even fan-friendly bands such as Dave Matthews, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. Still, with facility fees and Ticketmaster charges, it comes out to a minimum of $47.95 for a single ticket.

On their own terms

That lengthy battle has them going into their new free-agency with eyes wide open.

"There's no way we wanna get in the distribution business or anything like that," says Ament. "We wanna work with a record company that's excited about technology and working with the technology - downloading, those sorts of things. That's what's screwing up the business - they don't know how to deal with it."

"Instead of fighting it, I think there's a way to turn it around," Ament says. "We can get (live) CDs into the hands of people three days after the show. Seems like all that worry about getting music on the Internet before you can sell it - that's ridiculous to me."

In fact, the record industry's delay in getting music out "has been a frustrating thing all along. Finishing your record, then taking three months to manufacture it, get the artwork done, all the crap that they say it takes month to do? Sometimes it kills the momentum - we finish a record and say 'Man, I can't wait to play these songs live.' Then they say 'Timing-wise, it would be better to tour six weeks after the record's release.' I think that's all hogwash. We look forward to making the next record on our own terms and following our gut on how quickly we want to turn it around and get out and play on top of it."