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Pearl Jam's New Day Rising

America’s most misunderstood rock band is back with the album of its career, a rockin’ gem called Yield. Rock critic Dave Marsh met up with all five bandmembers in Seattle to find out what makes these idiosyncratic rockers tick. Or something like that.

SEATTLE—On the flight from New York to Seattle, it was hard not to wonder why I’d agreed to spend a December day interviewing the five members of Pearl Jam. Interview assignments have made me apprehensive for 30 years, and I hadn’t tried to cram this many interviews into one day in a long time. But that wasn’t the real problem, nor was the fact that I’d agreed to develop the interview material for the band’s own use. (They’d distribute it on CD to radio and fans, and make a big chunk of the transcript available to journalists.)

What this was about, I guess, was how many years it had been since there was a rock band I’d really wanted to interview. The last one had been – what – Soul Asylum? The perfect irony, since Eddie Vedder was the most obvious target of Dave Pirner’s assault on grunge “drama queens” in Soul Asylum’s “Misery”.

But Pearl Jam – guitarists Stone Gossard and Mike McCready, bassist Jeff Ament, drummer Jack Irons and singer Eddie – never struck me as miserable (not that sounding miserable is any disqualification for making great rock ‘n’ roll). To me, Pearl Jam is more like the Who and the MC5, bands whose live shows were exciting, affirmative, joyous in particularly physical ways.

No denying that the band is moody and that its public life has been tumultuous from the moment of its first refusal of the star-making machinery: when it declined to do any videos after “Jeremy”.

Hell, if Pearl Jam had sold one-tenth as many albums – well, maybe one-hundredth as many – the group would be heroes for exposing the Ticketmaster stranglehold on concert venues, rather than being regarded as carping failures because the Clinton Justice Dept. refused to acknowledge Ticketmaster’s true role in blockading competition.

If Pearl Jam were performing in 500 seat clubs and its lead singer got food poisoning and a legend like Neil Young stepped in and took over the show, the gig might have been seen as a triumph. But, of course, that happened in front of 50,000 people (in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in the summer of ‘95), and rather than being excited over getting to see Neil Young with the band with whom he had just made Mirror Ball (in my opinion, Neil’s best album in almost a decade), the crowd and the media continued with its program of making Eddie the whole show, when in fact what’s so great about him is that he has found a way to be a part of a band, first among equals, rather than a star dragging some sidemen around. I guess they should have called themselves Smashing Assumptions.

“I think we were burned out,” bassist Jeff Ament said.

As far as I’m concerned, Pearl Jam has yet to make its first mediocre album, even if Vitalogy and No Code are, to say the least, quirky. Yield, the new one, is as good as anything the band has ever done. In certain ways—the spaciousness of its sound, the multiplicity of perspectives that come from Jeff and Stone making strong writing contributions as lyricists as well as riff inventors, the number of memorable tracks (“Do the Evolution,” “Wish List,” “Pilate,” “Brain of J,” “Given to Fly,” “Low Light”) – you could argue that it is the band’s very best. The Pearl Jam of Yield don’t sound moody or disaffected.They sound like a rock band raring to go, and judging from their “warm-up” dates opening for the Stones at the Oakland-Alameda County (California) Coliseum Complex in December, that’s just what they are.

Which is kinda strange, I gotta admit. After its 1996 U.S. tour disintegrated in the wake of the food poisoning show in San Francisco, I’d expected Pearl Jam either to break up or to become something like a contemporary Steely Dan (“Don’t ever say that,” Stone Gossard responded in mock horror), making records regularly, touring rarely – if ever. I love the records, but Pearl Jam’s true existence is where a rock band of this kind’s ought to be, onstage. I’ve traveled distances to see Pearl Jam – as a fan, not a pro – that I haven’t done for any band since the Who and the MC5. I know some of the guys in the band a little bit – Eddie from the time of the 1992 Lollapalooza show in New York, when he became the first rock star ever to call me “Mr.” (he now claims this was because I had written not just articles but books, but it still left me feeling like the 2,000-Year-Old Rock Critic), Stone and Jeff from the Congressional hearing on Ticketmaster, where I also testified against its “monopoly.” (Which is what the goddamn thing is, let’s face it, no matter what the Justice Dept. Anti-Trust Division says. If you don’t believe me, try booking a show of any size in New York or Los Angeles without going through them; Pearl Jam can’t.)

[EDITOR’S NOTE – Ticketmaster denies that it monopolizes the ticket-selling business.]

So maybe part of my apprehension, this time, was simply shock that the band has survived – like finding out that someone else’s rocky marriage has produced an uproarious new baby. You’d be delighted to know that it had worked out that way and still not ecessarily all that eager to go over for a chat.

“I think we were burned out, and we would hit those walls emotionally within the band, always,” Jeff said the next morning in my hotel room.

He arrived at the most un-rock-star-like hour of 10 a.m., but that’s not surprising. Jeff Ament, dressed perpetually in windbreaker and shorts (that’s what he wore to the Congressional hearing), is as much athlete as musician, a dedicated basketball player (he played for a while at the University of Montana) and snowboarder, as well as rock ‘n’ roll’s high-jumping champion, successor to the Who’s Pete Townshend.

“So I think we kinda decided that unless everybody really wanted to go out and play some shows and felt excited to [we wouldn’t]. I feel like I need to go out and play 20 or 25 shows. Somewhere after 10 shows, you start to get a rhythm and everybody starts to play really well together. That’s when it’s fun, that’s when it’s like you’re on a cloud.

“When we started making this record [Yield], the conversations about touring were pretty dismal,” Jeff continued. “I don’t think anybody wanted to tour. The more that we started to hang out with each, though, the more we started to realize that we liked each other. At that point, people started getting excited about the idea of getting together and going out and playing some shows”.

Throughout the day – talking with Jeff at the hotel, with Stone, Mike and Jack in the Curtis Management offices through the afternoon, and then that evening with Eddie in the band’s warehouse/clubhouse – that was the theme. The group seemed united on two issues: their reaffirmed affection for one another and that the first five years of recording and touring, of being stars and resisting the worst of what that meant, had burned them out.

BREAKING THE CODE

“I think the only way we could get to the place where we could … have a little bit of excitement about getting together and writing songs, was to say, ‘We can’t tour anymore; we can’t do any interviews; we can’t make five videos for this record,’ ” Ament said.

For people who believe that Pearl Jam is Eddie Vedder, this may come as a surprise. But to anyone who has really followed the band, or who has had the opportunity to get to know the members at all, it has been pretty clear that while Eddie may lead, he’s not taking any of these guys anyplace they don’t want to go. Jeff, in particular, is at least as singular and powerful a personality as Eddie. His disenchantment with all the things that typically go with being in a successful band, or at least the degree of them, was revealing to me.

Jeff sat comfortably in the overstuffed chair, and he talked readily but with great intensity. “I think our only way of getting through those times was to control it,” Jeff said straightforwardly.

He qualifies almost every statement with “I think,” but it’s clear that he is being polite, not timid, talking fact as much as opinion. “I think the only way we could get to the place where we could all go home and then not do anything for a little while and then have a little bit of excitement about getting together and writing songs, was to say, ‘We can’t tour anymore; we can’t do any interviews; we can’t make five videos for this record.’

“That’s all the stuff that just tries you”, he said. “It’s a lot of sitting around and waiting around and just being frustrated and maybe putting the creative control in other people’s hands and maybe feeling like you’re not being represented the way that you want to be. So the way that things happened for us and the way that initially everybody kind of wanted a piece of us, I think we had to say no a lot, initially. And that probably did come across as being control freaks.

“It was about being burned, too. About somebody saying, ‘Oh yeah, I’m your friend, and I’m gonna do all this,’ and then a year later, finding out that they’re collecting stories to write a book about you,” Jeff said, with more weariness than anger.

“That sort of stuff is kind of harsh. I read something a couple days ago, and they were talking about these books of photographs from the ‘60s. They were saying how it was so great to look at these pictures because the photographers were allowed total freedom; they could go into the dressing rooms and the homes of all these people. How, now, it’s so much more controlled, and there’s schedules, and the artist has complete control over what pictures end up coming out, or whatever. In this article, they were almost blaming the artists. I thought, man, the photojournalists have to take a little bit of responsibility for that, too. Because there’s nowhere to go to kind of get out of that when you’re in the light—when you’re in the limelight, the whole Princess Di thing, or whatever.

“And then there’s aspects of it that there’s no way you could be ready for,” Jeff said. “There’s no way that you could be ready for being in a grocery store at 10 in the morning and having a bunch of people run up to you and ask you for your autograph. Especially if you’ve been in this neighborhood for 10 years, and to have that happen all of a sudden one morning. You’re just like, ‘What was that? What happened over the last two months that changed? Was it all the magazine covers or videos or what?’”

COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN

Jeff left to begin his day, and I adjourned to the Curtis Management offices. Manager Kelly Curtis was in San Francisco, doing advance work for the band’s gig later that week, opening for the Rolling Stones, so I commandeered his office, located in one of those inevitably ramshackle buildings where all countercultural enterprises – rock band management companies, rock magazines, graphics companies – seem to locate.

I sat on a couch and, over the course of the afternoon, put the various band members behind Kelly’s desk. It was a little like an amateur-hour “60 Minutes” setup, not that I really meant to grill anybody—they had more surprises for me than I had for them.

In the early afternoon, Stone Gossard, musical hipster and master of the sardonic aside, took the chair. He has let his hair grow out a little bit and wears his eyeglasses more often now, but he’s still rail thin, superficially laid-back and, under any kind of questioning, immediately alert and intent.

Stone said he thought that the group’s united resistance to playing the media game had brought them together and facilitated their ability to communicate with one another (and if you’ve seen a few bands that can’t communicate internally, you know there’s no way such a group can speak coherently to the rest of the world).

The Pearl Jam of Yield don’t sound moody or disaffected. They sound like a rock band raring to go, and judging from their “warm-up” dates opening for the Stones in December, that’s just what they are.

“I think we all felt like we really wanted to get better [musically] and to feel like we deserved this sort of attention,” said Stone, trying to explain the initial impact of Ten’s enormous success (U.S. sales of 8.1 million, to date). “But at the same time, we weren’t really communicating very well. And I don’t know how much we really were enjoying being around each other. I don’t know whether it was just the pressure we’d kind of created around all this. I don’t know exactly what the causes and effects were. It felt like a real adolescent period of time in the band, in terms of the kinds of things that we were having disagreements about, or not communicating well with each other [about].

“But I feel like we went through the fire – especially after we stopped doing press and stopped doing videos – and things started to settle down. Everyone [started] feeling like, ‘God, we’re not doing that stuff, and everything’s still fine. We can still make records, and we might not be selling as many records, but everything seems fine.’

“We’re gonna go out for this next record, and we’ll probably tour a couple of months in the States – maybe 40 or 50 shows – and 20 or 30, maybe not even that much, 15, in Australia,” he said. “I’m not sure we’ll make it over to Europe this record. So in a lot of ways, we have decided that going on tour for a year is not what the band’s priority is. And that takes a lot of pressure off everyone, being able to say, ‘Good, let’s make another record.

”’Cause I know at the end of that record, I don’t necessarily have to go out and go on a media blitz and a year-and-a-half-long tour. Which is kind of standard fare for bands that are in our position in terms of record sales and sort of where they’re at. So in a way, we have kind of deprioritized touring compared to the first record, which was, you know, go out on the road for 200 dates the first year that the record came out. We definitely don’t exist in that head space anymore. I don’t think you’d be getting very good shows, after 40 or 50 shows.”

Somewhere in those numbers and plans, there’s a median that keeps everyone, if not happy, at least less … miserable. It’s typical that Jeff and Stone represent the polar positions – although they’ve played with each other for longer than anyone else in the band, they’re about as alike as a kumquat and a banana. Jeff is the plain-spoken kid from small-town Montana; Stone is the master urban ironist always at home in the world, even when he’s not in Seattle. “My first four or five years out here, Stone just completely confused me,” Jeff said. “I didn’t know if he was serious. And sometimes it would really piss me off. I’d be like, ‘You makin’ fun of me?’”

Stone isn’t entirely the distanced onlooker his persona suggests. Every summer he spends several weeks on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation near Rapid City, South Dakota, working with the Red Feather Development Group. “You go out and actually sleep in a tent in South Dakota, which is incredibly gorgeous country,” said Stone. “That whole area is just so beautiful. And you work your ass off, trying to learn how to roof or put up plasterboard or give somebody a hand in electrical wiring. So that’s cool. I enjoy that. When I get done with that, I usually feel pretty good.”

That may sound like typical West Coast do-gooder babble, but when pressed, Stone reveals a deeper grasp of the politics of the situation. “The guy that runs that thing, Robert Young, just kind of started it based on the fact that he had visited the Oglala reservation, which is one of the seven Dakota tribes, in South Dakota, which is a very significant tribe historically. I mean, they were basically the last holdouts in terms of submitting to the U.S. government, and Crazy Horse and a lot of big characters came out of that area.

“It’s one of the poorest places in the United States,” Stone explained. “It probably is the poorest place in the United States in terms of its levels of diabetes, levels of alcoholism. The average [age] of death is 40 years old or something like that. Plenty of people living in houses with no heat or electricity, with seven or eight people in one room, three of which might be alcoholics. Just really extreme conditions there in the winter, where a lotta people die every year of exposure.

“Robert Young’s theory was just basically to get out there and sort of get involved in the community. His way of doing that was by building houses for native elders, especially ones that still had retained some of the language and some of the cultural information. I think that cultural information will be important in the long run for the survival of those natives there. That somehow, by kinda finding out about your past, that’s gonna be the inspirational spark to motivate you.”

In the whole day of talking to the band, the closest anyone else comes to this kind of inspirational thing is Jeff telling me the story of going as a child to see the Harlem Globetrotters. “We actually lived in town; it was a town of 800 people. But 35 miles away, there was a little college town of 15,000 people. And that’s where the culture was; that’s where the Globetrotters came.

No denying that the band is moody and that its public life has been tumultuous from the moment of its first refusal of the star-making machinery.

“Somehow, I kind of got infected by that,” he said. “I just remember meeting Geese Osby and Curly Neal after the game, we got to go and get autographs. I just remember them shaking my hands, and it was like … I’d never seen an African-American before, in my entire life. So when I was 7 years old, to actually put a real African-American to the cartoons - the Harlem Globetrotters cartoons, the Jackson Five cartoons - and from that point on, I wanted to be a basketball player.

“Meeting Geese Osby was like, ‘OK, that’s what I’m gonna do. I want to be just like that guy.’ What they did was totally incredible to me. They were entertainers and amazing athletes, and it was more their personalities than anything, I think. Just completely infectious. Actually, Ed and I, one of the first few conversations we had, we talked about the Jackson Five, the spin moves, and watching the cartoons.”

The connection may not be clear to anyone less steeped in African-American culture – in fact, the Globetrotters’ on-court choreography bears a direct relationship to the Jackson Five’s Cholly Atkins-trained hoofing.

Jeff also is a guy who had to stop playing basketball in college because of the tension among the other jocks over his long hair and earring. He fell in with Stone a couple years later, when he had come to Seattle to pursue his twin passions for punk rock and the graphic arts. Mike, then in a metal band called Shadow, remembers Stone as “kind of the sarcastic kid that hung around” before Stone teamed up with Jeff, first in Green River, then in Mother Love Bone and finally in Pearl Jam, which was originally called Mookie Blaylock. [Mookie Blaylock is a New Jersey Nets basketball player.] (They’re all huge roundball fans, as far as I can tell.)

After all this time, Jeff acknowledges that he and Stone are extremely close, “but I think it’s the closeness of two brothers who are living in the same room. One brother likes to get up early in the morning and go running, and the other brother likes to stay out late and party. Their schedules are conflicting, and they’re constantly rubbing each other a little bit raw. There’s a competitive spirit there, too, or there was for a long time – there definitely still is, to some extent. It was like, ‘Oh, here’s this song I wrote,’ and I’d go, ‘Here’s this piece of art I did.’” (Jeff still works on all the Pearl Jam artwork, from album covers to T-shirts.)

“I think we pushed each other, and it drove us to be better at what we did,” Jeff continued. “That was really great for probably the first seven or eight years. After that, it probably wasn’t so great, but we were probably still doing it. Now I’m completely at a point, and I know he is, where we’re doing what we always wanted to do. We’re playing music together. We’re being artists together. Let’s get to know each other as friends, and let’s enjoy this. Let’s enjoy what we’ve worked for. So I’m excited about that. There’s something about just even saying that, that makes my shoulders drop. It feels like there’s just not that underlying tension in your life.”

This is the Jeff Ament who wrote the raging “Pilate” (with Eddie) and the doomy “Low Light.” What he makes of Stone and Eddie’s ironic rave-up on “(Do the) Evolution,” it’s hard to say.

GIVE THE DRUMMER SOME

The other members of Pearl Jam are even harder-core outsiders. Mike McCready is one of those pure musicians, a guy who lives to make music and is interested in damned little else. His contributions to Yield – all musical, meaning none lyrical – have a brightness and clarity that had been missing before. Mike probably had fewer problems with the band’s success than any of the other surviving members. “I like my job. I’m very glad I’ve got it,” Mike said. “A lot of the fame and all that is kinda silly at times, but I wouldn’t want to do anything else. This is what I’ve always wanted to do, so I guess I got pretty lucky.”

Either that, I offer, or you’re good. “Yeah, that, too,” Mike acknowledged, which is some kind of relief after having to walk the minefields of Stone’s insecurity an hour before.

“You know, when you sell that many records, I wanna be a great band,” Stone had said. “And some nights I think we’re pretty good, and some nights we may be better than that, and some nights we suck, and that’s all kinda stuff to keep in perspective. But I’m the first person to start complaining if everybody’s not like kinda working hard at trying to get better and feeling motivated about it.”

Eddie was the first rock star ever to call me “Mr.” (he now claims this was because I had written not just articles but books, but it still left me feeling like the 2,000-Year-Old Rock Critic).

Stone’s the taskmaster, he admits. Not that Mike is complacent, but he’s a rocker. He looks more like a rock musician of the old school than anybody else in the band; he has some size to him, and his hair drifts toward hair-band shag. Much more comfortable with music than words and troubled by a recent illness, he nevertheless answered questions with ready insight, although there were lots of issues in which he just wasn’t particularly interested.

For example, to Mike, the stress point in the band’s career was the Ticketmaster ruckus, because it distracted the band from being creative. We find a mutual area of agreement, however, while talking about AC/DC and other bands we like but are not supposed to – at least we’re not supposed to like them in the alterna-universe that I despise quite openly and Mike cordially ignores. “I was way into Kiss,” Mike said. “Not so much punk rock. I’m not a huge alternative fan, whatever that is. I like the old stuff, and that’s kinda where I go back to, to steal from. When we do records, I kinda listen to only the Stones and Zeppelin and stuff like that, to get ideas. Don’t listen to a lot of new stuff. It just seemed like a label to me, ‘alternative.’ It didn’t make a lotta sense to me. It seemed like some radio marketing gimmick. I didn’t really pay a whole lot of attention to it.”

Which is probably at the core both of Pearl Jam’s success – its lush meld of quasi-alternative ideas and metallic classic rock riffs – and of the disdain for it among alternatypes. To them, mingling with such low stuff as metal puts the band beyond the pale of “purity.” Yet if Pearl Jam stands a chance – a better chance than any of its brethren of the past decade, in my opinion, Nirvana having fallen by the wayside – of redefining rock, it’s because the group has that scope.

To the extent that rock still belongs to ordinary listeners rather than to princeling alterna-experts, Mike’s attitude is right on – don’t make no difference what the likes of Steve Albini want, anyhow; history will be written by the victors, for good or ill. One reason I don’t like the alternacrowd is that, like most entrenched hipster sets, they work off disdain for the popular and by browbeating those who disagree, as if they held some magic secret of “integrity,” which, when you peel back a couple of layers, usually winds up being exposed as just another way of asserting some kind of elitist privilege.

Thus, the members of Pearl Jam could have made Fugazi millionaires who get butt-kissed hourly on CNN, or converted the music industry as a whole to anarchy and not dissuaded a single snob of the fundamental worthlessness of their musical and cultural efforts, so long as metal noises remained near the center of the group’s sound. Not because that’s not good music – sometimes, it’s great fucking music, and it almost always has a store of energy missing from whatever’s hipper at the moment, and anyhow, what do snobs care about musical values? – but because it attracts low-class attention and in alternaworld, that is Just Not Done. (An attitude which, as I’ve pointed out before, can in many ways be thanked for the absence of Kurt Cobain from this sphere of existence.)

In my humble opinion, I should, of course, hasten to add – but instead will compound the insult by saying – that this makes Mike, instrumentally speaking, for me the heartbeat of the band. With him around, it’s never gonna sound like Stereolab, the group Eddie was touting that week. (I had to listen to the interview tape three times to make myself comprehend that he hadn’t said “Space Monkeys.” The Space Monkeys are pretty good; Stereolab are French, obtuse, a theory in search of music.)

Now that Jack Irons sits in Pearl Jam’s drummer’s chair, only a fool would bet against anything developing, no matter how radical. Jack’s public tenure in the group began when Pearl Jam played a Washington, D.C., abortion rights benefit with Neil Young in January 1995. They played about two numbers and stopped. “I don’t know what anybody out there thinks,” Eddie said defensively, concerned about a backlash in favor of the departed Dave Abbruzzese (who was asked to leave after the completion of Vitalogy ). “But let me tell you somethin’: Jack Irons saved the life of this band.”

Before the set was over, the statement was credible, and with the release of No Code, it became impossible to disagree.

I’ve never met a Pearl Jam fan who would have anticipated another change in drummers [Pearl Jam’s original drummer, Dave Krusen, left the group in 1991, shortly after the release of Ten, and was replaced that same year by Abbruzzese]; no one I knew thought the band had a rhythm section problem.

“Initially everybody kind of wanted a piece of us,” Ament said.”[Because of that] I think we had to say no a lot, initially. And that probably did come across as being control freaks.”

But Stone indicated that there were some musical problems. “Certainly, Dave Abbruzzese could play great drums,” Stone said. “Now, whether Dave and Jeff were really connected in a sense, like they really were loving each other and wanting to play together – that’s kind of where maybe some of the issues were, where there were certain problems. If your bass player and your drummer are not loving and trusting each other, then you’re having problems.”

That’s odd, anyway, because the story that has been told in the past was that Jack was added because he was friends with Eddie, who had known Jack while still living in San Diego. (In fact, Eddie was introduced to Jeff, Stone and Mike by Jack.) Not that either reason is mutually exclusive, but in most bands interested in talking up one angle and playing down the other, it would have been the story about musical compatibility—by which I do not mean competence; Abbruzzese is a great drummer, to my ear – that got told. The truth is, anyway, that Jack has delivered completely, freeing the band’s sound, letting the group swing a little bit, creating space where none before had existed.

Certainly, Jeff notices and has benefited: “I feel I’m approaching the new songs way differently, so it makes me excited to be playing bass again,” he said. “And then the old songs, I feel like Jack’s given some of the old songs a lot more space. So all of a sudden, a song like ‘Evenflow’ – which I knew was a great song all along, and I felt on the first record that it was the best song on the record, that we got the worst take of. I mean, we beat that thing; there was a hundred takes of that song, and we just never nailed it. And all of a sudden, Jack starts playing it, and it’s like, Wow! That’s how it was supposed to be played. Like, leaving a big space there and a little space here, and all of a sudden the song opens up and it swings.”

And if Jack came because, in some sense, he had Eddie’s back, it’s also true that he had been the group’s first choice as a drummer anyway. In 1990, Stone and Jeff traveled to Los Angeles to talk to him in the months when they were rehearsing at Stone’s parents’ house. (Jack, a veteran of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, had already put together a band of his own, called Eleven.) At the end of that meeting, they gave Jack a tape of the songs they’d been working on and said they were looking for a lyricist and lead singer. Jack sent Eddie the tape, and you know the rest of that story.

As a member of Pearl Jam, Jack has played a crucial role in keeping the band together. “He’s a powerhouse,” said Mike. “Even more so than musically, communicationwise; we all have opened up and started talking a lot more than I think we ever have before. Confronting each other on issues, having arguments, whatever. If there’s a problem, Jack will bring that up. Whereas before, we might have iced over a situation and just kinda walked on eggshells. Jack won’t let that happen.”

Jack, who is the band’s consummate loner, not even living in Seattle but remaining in California with his wife and two kids, shrugs most of this off. Or at least I think he does. He had a cold the day I spoke with him (Eddie and Mike were also under the weather), and anyway, Irons tends to speak obliquely on all subjects.

Asked how the band had changed since he joined, the slight, almost elfin drummer answered somewhat cryptically, “You know, it’s certainly different, but it’s kind of been an evolutionary matter in a sense, over a few years, so it’s hard for me. In other words, if I had the same perspective I have now when I first joined the band, then I might be able to understand it. When I first joined the band, I had whatever perspective I had then, so I can’t. Now, it just seems like we grew to this record. The first record together was the first record together. And this one just seems to be more gelled.”

Asked about the perception held by myself and others that No Code was more or less built around what he had brought to the group, Jack said, “I might have had a point of view, like I was trying to do something. That’s why this record’s better, because I don’t think anyone was totally trying to do something. We just are what we are together. In the beginning, I might have had some notions about what a drummer ought to be or do, or stuff like that. That was just my immaturity, so to speak. I’ve learned a lot more since then.”

Well, sure, and you’ve just passed the audition to serve as Bob Dylan’s translator, too.

YOUNG MAN BLUES

The first time I met Eddie Vedder was in early 1992, when I went to Seattle at the request of the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union to make a speech about censorship. Pearl Jam had asked for a permit to play in a local park, in order to do a free concert celebrating the success of Ten. That very day, the city fathers announced that the permit was denied on the grounds that too many people would probably show up (which is about as gross a violation of the First Amendment as you could find).

At my lecture, a lengthy discussion ensued, with some very intelligent questions being asked by a young woman sitting with an equally young man halfway back in the auditorium. As the session drew to a close, the guy spoke for the first time. “I’m Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam,” he said in his resonant baritone and thanked us all for thinking about the problem. He promised that the band would find a way to play the show (and it did take place, on Sept. 20, 1992, at Warren G. Magnuson Park in Seattle).

“I feel like we went through the fire – especially after we stopped doing press and stopped doing videos – and things started to settle down,” guitarist Stone Gossard said.

The woman, of course, was Eddie’s girlfriend, now wife, Beth Liebling, then working as a journalist, now in the band Hovercraft.

We ran into each other again that summer, backstage at a Bruce Springsteen show in New Jersey. My daughter and her boyfriend were with me when Eddie walked into the dressing room. They had seen him the day before at Lollapalooza, the famous show at which he climbed the band’s speaker column and sung from 50 feet up in the air while the heart of every onlooker sat in their throat. That was the day Eddie left me feeling like the 2,000-Year-Old Rock Critic, but, in fact, we had a good discussion among the four of us, and manager Kelly Curtis, about Lollapalooza, Pearl Jam, Bruce and our shared passion for the Who.

What impressed me most, though, was what happened the next day: Eddie knew that my daughter’s boyfriend worked as a secretary at Epic and sought him out while he was in the company’s offices, not to impress anyone, just to say hello.

Eddie wasn’t around for the Ticketmaster hearing (that was Jeff and Stone’s show, mainly Jeff’s, though Eddie and Stone were also militant on the issue), but we bumped into each other a few more times. We had planned to take a bus ride through the Southwest during the ‘95 tour, but for various reasons, that didn’t happen. And now here we were.

It was a classic Seattle night, cold and a little misty after a bright, warm day, and Eddie walked into the band’s warehouse so bundled up that I at first didn’t recognize him. I think I was still taking in the room, a cavernous space with wooden floors and stacks of equipment (though it had been largely cleared out for the Oakland Stones shows), a couple of sitting areas with couches and chairs, refrigerator and pantry, a couple of desks and business machines for the fan club. It was more like a clubhouse than a place of business, a reminder that rock bands are, to the end, the product of the dreams of young boys.

Probably Eddie wasn’t all that recognizable because, like most people with charisma, he can switch it off when he needs to. He’d been out in the car, he had the sniffles, as I recall he hadn’t shaved in a day or three, he wore what he always wears, which is basic thrift shop gear, not even thrift shop deluxe. Plus Eddie’s a small man with a large presence, which means that at every encounter, you’re reminded of this again, because he looms larger in mind and memory. I knew who it was, finally, when he opened his mouth. You can’t mistake that voice.

Soon enough, we were seated for our interview, back in the fan club area, a perfectly pleasant place if you could ignore the harsh fluorescent light.

Eddie slouched in a stuffed chair; I spread my stuff out on the coffee table and sat on the couch. We had our feet up, which seemed ideal, my idea of these things being that they should proceed as much as possible like conversations. Of course, there is typically machinery (a tape recorder) around that can inhibit that, and I do have some kind of agenda in the way of a list of questions. But such sessions are not Watergate interrogations, and shouldn’t and needn’t be treated that way. If you’re nosy enough to be a journalist, you ought to be shrewd or sensitive enough to figure out that making your subject comfortable is the first step in finding out the things you need to know.

“It was about being burned, too,” Ament said. “About somebody saying, ‘Oh yeah, I’m your friend and I’m gonna do all this,’ and then a year later, find out that they’re collecting stories to write a book about you.”

I don’t know if Eddie had an agenda of his own, really, other than maybe to get the record company and management to stop bugging him about doing some press for the new album. “I think I’m gonna make you work. Because I’m not good at this kind of thing,” he said at the outset. “I’ve been through a lot, I’ve remembered everything I’ve seen, I’ve got opinions on it all. If you just help me get it out in some kind of decent fashion.”

Well, agenda or not, no one sits down to talk with another human being without expectations, and the funny thing is, I expect that ours were rather mutual. Eddie is a huge Pete Townshend fan, and in my checkered past is a rather notorious series of psychodrama sessions with Pete. This started out to be a little like that.

But Eddie is American, not English, and though he’s committedly skittish about the press, he dives deeper, quicker. I actually tried to talk about Yield, in particular, the song “Wish List,” which I love: the trembling opening riff, the self assured rhythm, the choked-up vocal, the way the verses build to a fully emotive yelp, the beautiful psychedelic guitar that serves as a bridge between verses, and especially the lyrics, a series of wishful aphorisms. “I wish I was a messenger and all the news was good,” Eddie sings. “I wish I was a sacrifice and somehow still lived on … I wish I was as fortunate, as fortunate as me … I wish I was the full moon shining off your Camaro’s hood. ” The song ends (I swear you can hear this just as the tune fades), “I wish I was a radio song, the one that you turn on …”

But that wasn’t really what Eddie wanted to talk about, and I’ll never know whether that was because those wishes cut too close to his heart – a lot of them seem to be vows that speak directly to his marriage – or to mine.

I do know this: When you’re interviewing someone who wants the conversation to go in a certain direction, or, for that matter, doesn’t want it to go there, you’re a fool to try to steer.

The next thing I knew, Eddie and I were talking about the very stuff I figured he’d be most reluctant to deal with – his tempestuous relations with the press and all the other apparatus of stardom, the pressure, the drive for control, the constant exploitation. All this in perhaps five minutes (it takes up only five pages of transcript). He spoke openly, without a shred of bitterness and only a smidgen of the frustration I imagined he must have felt as his behavior was misinterpreted, mocked, maligned.

“I think people don’t understand – ‘Well, what’s he so upset about’ – because I kind of shy away from being out in the public,” Eddie said. “Or I’ve heard a younger band or something say, ‘I don’t know what that guy’s problem is, ‘cause we’re up and coming, and I’m just diggin’ it. This is the best thing, and we just love it all, and I’ll do every interview, and I’ll be on TV as many times as you want. Give it to me, I’m ready.’ And the second someone threatens your own personal well-being, that kind of changes.

“It probably doesn’t have everything to do with being in people’s living rooms. But that changes everything,” Eddie said. “Everything that you’ve ever worked for, really hard, and put everything into, now all of a sudden it’s changed. You’ve been honest with these emotions, and now people who are not all together threaten your well-being, and it really changes you. I don’t know if it’s the right use of the word ‘ironic,’ but it seems really strange that by being so open, you’re having to build walls.”

Not that Eddie never hesitated as he spoke. In fact, he sometimes fumbled for just the right expression: “I just knew that some of the people that get things from you – the more they get from you, the better it is for them, and there’s a lot … I’m not saying … I’m just saying it’s natural. People that you like ask you for things, and you want to give them to them.

“But you’re asked for a lot. And … and … and you really wanna do right by everyone and really wanna be the realest person, prove that nothing’s gone to your head. I didn’t understand it then, but there’s no real need to prove that. And I was always the same person.”

He even confessed to having read the famous 1997 Rolling Stone cover story in which all his supposed dear friends from high school were interviewed and dutifully painted him as a careerist.

I do many foolish things with my time, but reading hatchet jobs (about people other than myself) is not one of them, so I have to take Ed’s word for it that “it was good because I was actually thinking that it was worse. But anything they said that made it seem that hard work was …”

“Well, are you against hard work?” I asked. I asked it lightly, but I meant it seriously. Eddie got the point.

“Man, I think hard work is the … There’s a great other end to hard work. You know?” he said, almost cheerfully. “And if you’re not gonna work hard when you’re 16 to 26 or 36, or whatever it takes, when are ya? It’s just great to get on the other end of it and feel pretty secure.”

We talked then about the crisis in the band – the fact that it had been a bandwide crisis, that Jeff and Stone and even Mike had felt the tensions, too. “It was a Pearl Jam crisis, it was a Nirvana crisis, it was the whole city,” he said. “It was a SubPop crisis, people workin’ in the office there. It got weird for a lotta people. It got really weird there for everybody … Something had to give.

“I just thought that you didn’t have to do that. You didn’t have to be so extreme,” he said. “That when you made a record, you didn’t have to tour the whole world. And then take another year off, because you’ve spent a year and a half with these people and you can’t stand another minute, you know, with the guitar player’s voice in your ear or something.

“We’re gonna go out for this next record and we’ll probably tour a couple of months in the States,” Gossard said.

“Because records are important. Records are there for everyone, any time, whenever they want, in whatever mood, whoever wants them, whoever doesn’t. It’s all in their control; it’s an offering.

“Live, you really have to be there,” he explained. “You know, you are there. It takes a lot to get there. The playing is great. It’s just getting there and the … the lists. But paring down tours to where you’ve made a record, you’ve played some shows, in this country, in another country – a reasonable amount, maybe two blocks of five weeks at a time. None of this – what Henry Rollins and Mike Watt do, and I’ve done it with ‘em. It’s admirable and it’s somethin’ else, and it makes for a great story. In our case, where we were and what we were dealin’ with, [if we had toured nonstop] somethin’ woulda happened, somethin’ really bad woulda happened, you know.”

Maybe, I supposed, the best thing that could have happened, then, would have been the breakup of the band. “That’s true,” said Eddie. “And I don’t think we would’ve broken up the band. So it would have been up to someone’s departing the earth or something like that. Or departing their … mind.”

This was great stuff – touching, revealing. But having heard Yield enough to love it and to know that it was the result of conquering such problems – and having been around long enough to appreciate the utter rarity of such conquests on the part of one person, let alone a whole band—I pushed to move on, to talk about the present and the future, not so much about the past.

But for Eddie, the story of his art is, for now, burdened heavily by a past that still requires a great deal of examination and, perhaps, explanation. If he were not an essentially shy person, he could probably get a lot of this out of his system by doing more interviews. But as forthcoming as he is when you finally wrestle him down to sit for an interview, Eddie is shy – or maybe that’s the wrong word for someone who spends a fair portion of his time communicating with the great anonymous wad of us out here in the non-MTV version of the Real World. Let’s say, instead, that Eddie Vedder is exceptionally private.

In a lot of ways, what troubles him is what troubles the others. “When it [Ten] got to be a double-digit platinum-selling record, there’s serious guilt involved there,” he said. “Because you’re seeing [another] band that made a better record than you did, or for whatever taste, you liked theirs better: Like, ‘Wow, I can really rock out to this.’ You’d see them in a club, and they’d had their record out for a year, and they’d sold 15,000 copies or something.

“I was way into Kiss,” guitarist Mike McCready said. “Not so much punk rock … I’m not a huge alternative fan, whatever that is. I like the old stuff and that’s kinda where I go back to, to steal from.”

“The disparity’s too huge. And you’re not responsible for it, completely, but so … I don’t know, you do things. You start radio stations and do a radio broadcast and invite them on. You do things. And not out of guilt. Not out of guilt in this sense, doing these types of things. Just saying, Look, if we have the attention, let’s use it, and like, wave to everybody and then pull back. Here’s a great band. Here’s another great band. Here’s a better band.”

Before I flew to Seattle, two people close to the band had told me, in almost identical language, that Pearl Jam was now free to tour again, maybe to even make more-accessible music, because with No Code, the scale of their success had become much more manageable. Eddie said the same: “No Code was regular. It was heard, it was out there, and it was a record, and it wasn’t ‘Independence Day II.’ It just wasn’t the thing. And that was great. That was real.

“The fact is you can only hear from so many people in a day, or so many people that you meet in a year,” he said. “So I heard about that record as many times as I heard about Ten probably. So it was a good record, and I heard as many good things, and it affected people in certain ways. I enjoyed playing the songs live. I played it recently in a car, on a drive – just by myself. I thought it could have been a little more up-tempo, for me.”

Still, he remains vastly interested in the things that have gone wrong, the things that he and his bandmates have failed to perfect, or maybe failed to control. “I think I was fine with the pace of things for the most part,” he said. “But I don’t know. The exploitation factor of it just gets a little weird. Or when people start – when they start making jokes, or it’s all parody. I would have handled it better if it was parody of something that I didn’t take seriously. Maybe that was my problem or something.

‘Cause I took what I did seriously, I meant it, and this shit comin’ out of my throat every night, I meant it, every night, I really did.”

It is not just the heavy metal-descended riffs that make hipsters mistrust Pearl Jam, then. It’s this: Eddie Vedder means every syllable he sings. He is committed to the foolish – the undeniably foolish – pursuit of rock ‘n’ roll as dream and vision. Such an attitude has never been very fashionable, although it has sometimes been respectable; and it has never been less fashionable, or respectable, than it is right now, when cool and cynical (and their boon companions, dull and boring) rule the day.

I asked if any of that had changed. “No,” Eddie said. Paused. Perhaps he gulped. “Well, it doesn’t … I can’t.” He laughed a little.

No one who gets into this part of the rock ‘n’ roll game – the part That is embarrassingly sincere, that reveals that, once upon a time, you were a lost and lonely kid who didn’t think that survival was very likely and then you heard this … stuff … floating in the air and were, let’s face it, redeemed – can seem to escape a sense of yearning and sadness.

It’s there in so many of Eddie’s vocals, from “Hunger Strike” to “Daughter,” and it’s all over the new album, in “Wish List” and in “Given to Fly,” with its tremendous last verse that beautifully sums up what I can only call the surprise of existence, and in “Pilate.”

And the sheer exultation of “(Do the) Evolution,” a dance song that is almost a ritual invocation of some desperate last hope for the future. I think that’s what it is, anyhow. It’s one of the few songs from the new album Eddie mentioned in the course of our talk, and it connected up to his one attempt to summarize his recent path.

“There’s some big questions out there, so when I’m at my saddest, yeah, that’s ‘cause I’m thinking more about … this whole thing,” he said. “And even if you’ve found an answer for yourself, that doesn’t mean you’re no longer gonna be sad, because now you have this thing where you’re thinking, ‘No one will ever believe this as a collective conscious.’

“Things have changed so much in the last 30 years. And even in the last five, with technology. And what’s gonna happen in the next 20, I don’t think we can quite grasp. So I’m nervous, and I think, I’m getting into some kind of spiritual path here, but … This Daniel Quinn book, Ishmael… I’ve never recommended a book before, but I would actually, in an interview, recommend it to everyone. I think recommending books is a little pretentious, because they take time to read, and this one is maybe two or three days or something. It’s a little more of an investment than a candy bar.

“But this book, it’s kind of the book of my … My whole year has been kind of with these thoughts in mind. And on an evolutionary level, that man has been on this planet for 3 million years, so that you have this number line that goes like this [hands wide apart]. And that we’re about to celebrate the year 2000, which is this [holds hands less than one inch apart].

“So here’s this number line; here’s what we know and celebrate. This book is a conversation with a man and an ape. And the ape really has it all together. He kinda knows the differences between him and the man, and points out how slight they are, and it creates an easy analogy for what man has done, thinking that they were the end-all. That man is the end-all thing on this earth. That the earth was around even so much longer before the 3 million years. Fifty million years of sharks and all these living things. Then man comes out of the muck, and 3 million years later he’s standing, and now he’s controlling everything and killing it. Just in the last hundred! Which is just a speck on this line. So what are we doin’ here?

“This is just a good reminder,” he added. “And I’m anxious to see what happens. You know, I’ve got a good seat for whatever happens next. It’ll be interesting.”

So we talked all over the place – I talked too much – and never really boiled it down, though I got Eddie to give it one try. “How would you characterize what this record’s about?” I asked at one point.

“The second someone threatens your own personal well-being, that kind of changes [everything],” Eddie Vedder said.

“Now it’s just movin’ on and just bein’ a band and just doin’ what we do,” Eddie said. “We’ve kind of established what we do. And we’re not gonna defend what we do. If someone doesn’t like it, fuck off. I really don’t have time to hear it. I’m doin’ somethin’ pretty good with my life, and I challenge them to do the same.”

“Now it’s just movin’ on and just bein’ a band and just doin’ what we do,” Eddie said. “We’ve kind of established what we do. And we’re not gonna defend what we do. If someone doesn’t like it, fuck off.”

The challenge is out there, as well, I think, for those of us who do love and admire what Pearl Jam does. That challenge is to do what great bands that preceded them have done—you have your list, I have mine, and their intersection is the history rock ‘n’ roll has made. I often have thought that the best rock ‘n’ roll bands and singers of each generation move the story forward just a little, figure out a fraction more of how to survive this crazy world with a patch of dignity and some sense of human connection.

There was nothing about that day in December that made me rethink Pearl Jam’s place in that story. Nothing at all. And, of course, the real payoff came after the tape recorder was turned off, when we went out into the parking lot and talked a few minutes, shivering, before splitting up.

It was not a moonlit night, but there were enough arc lights in the parking lot to bounce some beams. Eddie started to get into an old, fairly nondescript vehicle. Then he stopped and said, “Oh yeah. This is it. That Camaro.” Remembering my passion for “Wish List.” It’s Beth’s car.

He didn’t fly away, though. He drove.