Pearl Jam Explain Ten (Part Three)

03/19/09 6:11pm

Here's the final installment of a mind-bogglingly long Q&A with grunge survivors Pearl Jam in honour of the reissue of Ten.

The band became hugely successful very quickly, and then, as a band, instead of grasping for every buck, you took a counter stance, stopped shooting videos and got into a battle with Ticketmaster. Was that entirely popular inside the group?
Mike McCready: The idea of pulling back at the height of our popularity was not exciting to me at the time. I wanted to continue to ride it and play the game, to do videos and go on tour, not throw away this great opportunity. In hindsight, it was the right idea.

It happened so fast for all of us out of the blue. It was kind of mind shattering. It was affecting us all in certain different ways, and we weren't talking to each other, we were partying too much, Ed [Vedder, vocals] was on the cover of Time magazine.

Everything blew up and had we not done that at the time... certainly the record label wanted us to not do that. The record company wanted us to do a video for "Black." They wanted us to play all the game shows, get on everything they could possibly get on and they fought us for a long time about that and were very pissed about it.

Jeff [Ament, bass], Stone [Gossard, guitar] and Ed specifically wanted to pull back and that saved us.

Jeff Ament: At the time, we thought that selling millions of records was the biggest curse ever. We saw the R.E.M. kind of slow success as being the right way to do it 'cause they came from that same kind of DIY background.

But in retrospect, that power actually allowed us a lot of freedom and allowed us to do things in a way that probably 99 per cent of the major label bands that were out there didn't get to do. We created our own method and our own handbook on how to do it and we're still figuring it out because of the way technology's changing now.

Eddie Vedder: In the end, I think we did OK. We certainly survived it and got through it. At the time, I don't think we knew how else to handle it except for be real about it and say, "This is uncomfortable right now." We couldn't have ever anticipated the enormity of it all, and the rapid increase in listeners.

JA: The process of making a video was a painstaking process for us. It wasn't something that we were comfortable with, making sure the editing process was going the right way and that it was going to be as edgy as we wanted it to be.

Those were battles that took weeks and sometimes months. Sometimes we'd spend $200,000 on this piece of art that nobody has ever seen, so it just seemed like a waste of our time when we would rather be playing shows or writing songs.

After we won the video of the year for "Jeremy," we were like, "Well, we've done this. We made the best video on the planet this year, so now let's do something else."

Over the years, Pearl Jam have been incredibly supportive of their fans. Was that always in your grand plan or did that evolve?
Stone Gossard: It was always in the plan in the sense that we saw right away that doin' stuff on your own is good. None of us waited for anything to happen. We just started playing, touring and making T-shirts, recording and making coloured singles on our own.

MM: Our fan base is very important to us. They are everything. They are the reason I am sitting here on this couch in our warehouse. We run a business out of here — it's very important. It keeps us alive as a band. Our fans are extremely important to us and they follow us around. People go and see hundreds of shows. It just blows me away.

JA: After we sold a bazillion records on Ten, we had a bit of power, so we decided to exert that power. What would a music fan want? We approached things from that standpoint. The way that Pink Floyd put out packages using Hipgnosis artwork, Led Zeppelin used real special packaging. It was mystical and super-creative, and a lot of times it was totally off-the-wall. I like to think that we used that little bit of power to make stuff that looked cooler.

EV: If I was in a room with 50 fans and 50 people who work in the industry, I'd probably feel much closer to the listeners than the businessmen. I think everybody in the band feels that way. We never really got separated from who we were growing up. Some bands have a different arc pre-success.

Pearl Jam was one of the first bands to release official bootlegs — and now internet downloads — of your concerts. Did you experience any record company objection when you started doing it?
SG: I'm sure there was somebody that said it was a bad idea, but we just pushed it through and I think in the end they said, "Oh, we sold thousands... so that's cool." I didn't get the memo (laughs) as to how much we had to make the record company let us do bootlegs.

MM: The driving force behind the bootleg series was Kelly Curtis, our manager, who had been talking about it with Jeff Ament and Eddie. We've always liked bootlegs as a band, but we would see our own bootlegs out there. We'd collect them and they would be inferior quality. So we decided, "Let's just put our own out and charge a little bit less for them, and make 'em sound as good as they possibly can."

Where are you favourite places to tour?
MM: I love England a lot. I love to walk around Hyde Park and hang out. I like to play in Rome, Milan. We've toured all over Italy. That's been interesting. Columbia River Gorge is a favourite place we play here in Seattle.

We played some shows with Neil Young and we subsequently did a record called Mirrorball with him and he asked us if we would be his touring band over in Europe. It was a dream come true. We got to play a bunch of Neil Young songs with Neil Young himself and got to go to Berlin, to Jerusalem, to the Red Sea.

JA: Europe is certainly on our radar right now, and we're still trying to figure out how to sanely tour there at some point in the next 18 months. A lot of it's gonna depend on how quickly we finish up our new record.

We've only been to South America once, but that was pretty phenomenal. The countries in Europe that have a real similar vibe to South America are Spain and Italy. We had a great tour of Canada in 2005 — incredible.

It's cool to know there are still places that we haven't played. We haven't played Alaska, we haven't played Iceland, and we really need to get back to Finland because we played a show there in '93 with Neil Young that was not the best.

Pearl Jam will be celebrating its 20th Anniversary in 2010. Do you see yourself going on indefinitely?
SG: It would be thrilling if it happened — if we all looked at each other 10-20 years from now and went, "How did we do this?" We'd have to play a crotchety "Evenflow" with disco brushes. (laughs) Our fans are gonna be so old they're not going to be able to hear us anyway, so... maybe we can be video transformed to look 30 years younger.

Matt Cameron: I just don't want to become The Rolling Stones.

MM: I don't think there's any way we thought our band would last 20 years. We're still talking. It's incredible.

JA: It's pretty insane that we've lasted 20 years. At the start, I guessed we might make three or four records, have a little bit of success and we would have gotten to play with some of our heroes. Probably the biggest fringe benefit is that we've shared stages with Iggy Pop, Henry Rollins, R.E.M., Neil Young, The Rolling Stones and Frank Black... the list goes on and on. That's the little kid dream come true being able to play with all those incredible bands and artists that we grew up loving and we still love.

What is the secret of your longevity?
MM: Pearl Jam has survived this long by luck, and because over the years the five of us have confronted each other on issues. We have open lines of communication and we'd call somebody on their shit if there's a problem. The reason why we've lasted so long is we write music, we get very intense, we go away from each other, do our own thing and then we get back together. We give each other space.

JA: That's the biggest reason why we're still around. There was a point about '93 or '94 where we sort of disbanded for six months, didn't really talk to one another, didn't really know where each other was at and went off to live life and refuel. It gave us a lot of energy creatively to get away from the bubble. Right around that time, everybody started doing side projects, started working on their own music, and that's been really important and satisfying individually.

EV: It's always been about protecting the ability to play music and to do it with these guys in this band. Whatever we've gone through relating to each other, it's always been small potatoes compared to the bigger picture of this band doing something worthwhile and achieving good things for others on the planet while we're at it.

There have been a couple of times in my personal life where I've felt ready to self-destruct and it was the band that helped me through. If I'm having a bad day (laughs) and it does happen (more laughing) — all I have to do is remind myself that I'm in a band with Matt Cameron and I feel a lot better.

Has Pearl Jam always been a democracy?
JA: I don't know if it's ever been a dictatorship... We started the band with the idea that it was gonna be a democracy, but there's been times in the last 15 years where Ed has had to take the reins because we were about to go off a cliff. At those times where we weren't sure what we were doing, he's been great at being able to steer the ship right. He has no problem telling any of us that he needs help.

Now we're pretty good at calling one another and saying things like, "How do you feel about this? I'd really love to take the reins on this project and work it through." It makes everyone feel a genuine part of the band. Pearl Jam is a real band.

SG: I'm the luckiest guy in the world 'cause I get to be in a band and write songs in a band with five songwriters. I get to learn from everybody's process of how a song structure changes, and how different people hear different rhythms and different melodies and different sequences. Ed can relate to all these sorts of different things. He always steps outside and keeps exploring new places. I get to play with Matt Cameron, I get to play with Eddie Vedder, come on! And I get to strum along.

What's your favourite Pearl Jam song?
SG: "Nothing Man." I didn't write it. Jeff Ament wrote it, Dave Abbruzzese plays great drums on it. Jeff had the chord changes; him and Ed maybe worked it out before. Real Jeff Ament style, his approach to strumming. It has his character trademarks but at the same time really super-simple; Ed connects so well with it that anyone who hears it will wanna sing along.

MC: I really like playing "Glorified G" a lot from the second record. That's a quintessential Pearl Jam song 'cause it's got the counterpoint guitars panned right and left hard and a really funky bass line.

SG: It's trying to be country and funky at the same time (laughs), which is really bizarre.

MM: "Alive" or "Evenflow," but mostly "Alive" 'cause it's our classic... a song that people identify with us. It's anthemic. I know the other guys probably wouldn't say that but that's what I think of it and that's what I've heard people tell me. "Alive" encapsulates the lyricism, the musicianship and the feeling of this band.

JA: I'm really fond of a handful of songs that we recorded for the Vitalogy record. "Last Exit," "Nothing Man" and "Tremor Christ" were recorded at Daniel Lanois' studio in New Orleans. There's something about the sound of those songs and how easily they came. I love playing "Last Exit" live and whenever I hear it, it just sounds like we did it right. It sounds natural like we captured what was coming out of us.

EV: We don't like to do the same kind of set twice so it always changes. In our first year and a half, we had about 14 songs to choose from, if that. Now, it's about 114. By the end of this record, it will be 130. I like the idea of being able to play four nights in one place and not playing the same song twice.

On the last album, many of the songs seemed inspired by this righteous anger, anger at the Bush administration. So what's driving this new record?
EV: It is different. The last number of years, there was so much to write against. The first time I started writing words for this record was about a week after Obama had been elected and it changed everything. There's no way to put it into proper context. It's a different place to write from. You're fighting for something rather than fighting against it. It's a whole different energy. This last administration didn't give us one or two big issues to deal with, rather one or two big issues a week! How could you focus it down into a three-minute song or a 45-minute record?

There's a Pete Townsend lyric off of The Who By Numbers: "There's no easy way to be free." (laughs). I'm certainly more at ease now — though I anticipate the condition to be temporary.

To read part one of this interview, click here. To read part two, click here.