Pearl Jam

PEARL JAM

Formed: 1990, Seattle, Washington

Members: Jeff Ament, bass (born Big Sandy, Montana, 10 May 1963); Matt Cameron, drums (born San Diego, California, 28 November 1962); Stone Gossard, guitar (born Seattle, Washington, 20 July 1966); Mike McCready, guitar (born Seattle, Washington, 5 April 1965); Eddie Vedder, vocals (born Chicago, Illinois, 23 December 1964). Former members: Dave Abbruzzese, drums (born 17 May 1968); Jack Irons, drums; Dave Krusen, drums.

Genre: Rock

Best-selling album since 1990: Ten (1991)

Hit songs since 1990: "Alive," "Jeremy," "Better Man"

Pearl Jam is one of the most respected mainstream rock bands to have come out of the 1990s. Because the band was rooted in Seattle at the time grunge rock began to gel, Pearl Jam became known, after Nirvana, as the genre's most popular proponent. As the 1990s wore on the band evolved into a serious arena-rock act. Although their album sales dwindled over the years, nevertheless they retained a dedicated following and the esteem of their older rock peers.

Roots and Early Growth

Pearl Jam's roots date to the mid-1980s, when the bassist Jeff Ament and the guitarist Stone Gossard played in the Seattle band Green River. When Green River split in 1987, Ament and Gossard enlisted the singer Andrew Wood and formed Mother Love Bone. The group released their debut, Apple, on a major label in 1990. Wood died of a heroin overdose soon thereafter, and Ament and Gossard formed another band. This time they brought in the guitarist Mike McCready and the drummer Dave Krusen, and together they recorded a demo. Through a friend it wound up in the hands of the singer Eddie Vedder, who recorded his own lyrics and vocals over the tape and sent it from his home in San Diego back to Seattle. Vedder was quickly hired. In early 1991 the band (then named Mookie Blaylock, after a professional basketball player) began to tour and started recording a debut album Ten, which appeared later that year. During this time the group changed its name to Pearl Jam, reportedly in honor of a favorite recipe by Vedder's great-grandmother Pearl. (Vedder later said the band simply liked the word pearl. )

Spot Light: Pearl Jam Takes on Ticketmaster

A turning point in Pearl Jam's career came when it launched a legal battle against the ticketing giant Ticketmaster, which Time magazine ended up calling "rock 'n' roll's holy war." The band filed a memorandum with the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in May 1994. After buying Ticketron in 1991, Ticketmaster had become the largest distributor of tickets to major venues in cities nationwide. Pearl Jam charged that Ticketmaster was a monopoly and that the exorbitant service fees it tacked on to each ticket unnecessarily elevated concert prices. In defiance they canceled their 1994 summer tour to promote their album, Vs. Instead, Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard testified at hearings before the U.S. Congress in June. When touring commenced the following year, the band relied on smaller ticketing agencies, which forced them to play alternative venues not contracted with Ticket-master. The tour was limited to only twelve cities, and skipped some major markets. The venues it did play were too small to accommodate fan demand. By then the Justice Department had decided that Ticketmaster did not pose a threat to the concert industry and cited several small competitors that were on the rise to give consumers a choice. Time has borne out Pearl Jam's claims, however. As of 2003 Ticketmaster remained the dominant ticketing agency for all major concerts. The three- to six-dollar service fees that Pearl Jam had initially complained about had risen to eight- to eleven-dollars per ticket.

Pearl Jam ended up relying on Ticketmaster for subsequent tours, but the public battle marked the beginning of the band's self-regulated retreat from the promotional spotlight. The band never appeared to promote a new album or tour on MTV and, except for occasional appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman, avoided talk shows and award ceremonies.

Big Seller

Ten became Pearl Jam's biggest-selling album, and it defined what came to be labeled "grunge." The music's monstrous guitar riffs mirrored 1970s arena rock, and the alienation expressed in Vedder's lyrics was rooted in the postpunk of the 1980s. The antirock attitude and Everyman fashion (flannel and jeans, usually) helped usher in "alternative rock," a newly coined niche in commercial radio that distanced itself from the formulaic and glossy pop metal of the previous decade. Unlike the raw, dense sound of their Seattle peers Alice in Chains and Soundgarden, Pearl Jam's debut featured songs with big, memorable choruses, perfect for radio, like "Alive" and "Jeremy." Their accessibility and earnestness made them one of the most popular band of the grunge era.

Even though Ten was a huge hit and immediately put the band in the public eye, it was still the sound of a band just learning how to make music together. The songwriting credits were strictly divided between Vedder's lyrics and Gossard's music. The two follow-up albums—Vs. (1993) and Vitalogy (1994)—were stronger and more eclectic, the results of a band whose members had grown comfortable with one another. Vs. is a grunge hallmark for its monster riffs and heartfelt soul. It is stocked with psychologically ripe anthems like "Go" and "Glorified G." The ballad "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town" became a staple of their live shows.

Vitalogy was the band's first album to follow the suicide death of Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain. Battling manic depression and ill prepared to become spokesperson for a generation, Cobain retreated into heroin addiction. While his songs drowned in self-pity, Pearl Jam's were driven by romantic fury, which Cobain routinely mocked. A much darker album than the previous two, Vitalogy mocks the commodification of celebrity by the media, as in "Not for You." "If you hate something / Don't you do it too," Vedder bellows. "Nothingman" is a plaintive ballad about a lost soul, whereas "Immortal" hints at the pedestal Cobain refused to sit on. The album also features experiments with sound collage ("Hey Foxymophandle-mama, That's Me") and a paranoid rant accompanied by accordion ("Bugs"). The album's lasting power is thunderous rockers like "Corduroy," a bracing band mission statement, and "Whipping," which rails against the violence created by the prolife movement. By this time Vedder had become more than just another grunge howler. He was a steely singer who could convey complex emotions and subtlety. Vitalogy is Pearl Jam's epic statement, full of brooding beauty and blazing conviction.

Expanding Audience

As Pearl Jam continued to release albums, they started connecting with the baby-boom generation. Vedder was invited to sing at a concert honoring Bob Dylan, and he filled in for the late Jim Morrison when the Doors were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993. He toured with Pete Townshend of the Who and Neil Finn of Crowded House and appeared on their respective live albums. A few months after Vedder inducted Neil Young into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, Pearl Jam and Young headed into a Seattle studio and recorded Mirror Ball, a collection of new Young songs backed by the band. Even as late as 2002, Pearl Jam opened special club dates for the Who.

By the late 1990s Pearl Jam had created a prolific body of work. Grunge had vanished from the spotlight. The best-selling groups of that era either had broken up or had members fall victim to drug-related deaths. Pearl Jam itself was experiencing its share of diminishing sales—the band's 2000 album Binaural sold 715,000 copies whereas Ten had peaked with 8.9 million; despite this decline, the group showed no signs of falling apart. In fact, critics contended that the band had become more tightly knit. Unlike most bands they had undergone hardly any personnel changes except for a continually revolving drummer position, which rotated from Krusen to Matt Chamberlain to Dave Abbruzzese to Jack Irons to Matt Cameron.

No longer faced with the pressure of selling huge amounts of records, the band steadily released albums that were not experimental but were consistently strong collaborative efforts. Starting with Vitalogy in 1994 and continuing with Riot Act in 2002, Pearl Jam cemented its sound, which combined Vedder's abstract lyrics and dark vocal texture with Gossard's and McCready's compelling guitar arrangements, hooks, and monster grooves.

The band endured because they often took breathers for solo projects. In 1991 the entire band plus Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell recorded under the name Temple of the Dog for a tribute album memorializing Wood. Ament formed the band Three Fish and released two albums. McCready formed the Rockfords and released a single album; he also recorded with Layne Staley, the lead singer of Alice in Chains, under the name Mad Season. Vedder played drums on tour for Hovercraft, his wife's band, and also performed solo during political rallies for Ralph Nader, the Green Party presidential candidate in 2000. Gossard released his debut solo album, Bayleaf, in 2001.

Pearl Jam remained a top concert draw, routinely selling out tours in the United States and overseas. Bolstered by a loyal fan base, the band released seventy-two complete shows from its 2000 world tour. Each double- and triple-disc set documented a specific show and was sold at discount price. Fourteen of the shows ended up on the Billboard 200 charts. According to Billboard, the entire project sold 1.29 million copies. The band continued the practice for its 2003 world tour.

One major setback to their 2000 tour was the death of nine fans fatally crushed during a festival set in Roskilde, Denmark, on June 30, 2000. Pearl Jam was cleared of blame and later recorded the song "Love Boat Captain" to reach out to the families of the victims. The band vowed never to play festivals or to allow open floor seating at any of their shows.

Pearl Jam helped to define the grunge rock movement in the early 1990s and evolved into a tightly knit, successful arena rock group. Remaining together while other bands of their ilk fell apart, Pearl Jam took pains to sustain an audience and to demonstrate how a band with multi-platinum success can still put passion into its music.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Ten (Epic, 1991); Vs. (Epic, 1993); Vitalogy (Epic, 1994); No Code (Epic, 1996); Yield (Epic, 1998); On Two Legs (Epic, 1998); Binaural (Epic, 2000); Riot Act (Epic, 2002).

WEBSITE:

www.pearljam.com.

mark guarino