Pearl Jam gets the show on the road ... and the Web

There are three signs that always indicate that a particular song or band are going to be forever immortalized in the decadent rock and roll annals: One -- the music, or artist, makes you feel all tingly in your bottom; two -- the music, or artist, makes the person that you like feel all tingly in their bottom; three -- during the course of all this tingliness, the words to the songs that you've been cooing back and forth to each other have been horribly mispronounced, if not downright butchered. Pearl Jam, for instance, is a band who easily fulfills the last two signs-- okay, all three signs, without nary a strain of effort on their already angst-ridden, haiku-writing-at-Starbucks pates.
Yet for a band burdened by the unwanted association as the MTV poster boys for grunge, Pearl Jam has continually managed to evolve both their music and their message into a sonic shot of salty goodness that appeals to both longtime listeners and first-time callers.

Pearl Jam fans like it when the Seattle rock band plays live. They like it even better when they can keep hearing the shows. As the quintet kicks off its first North American tour in nearly three years -- with back-to-back stops in Raleigh and Charlotte next Tuesday and Wednesday -- it's continuing the practice it began with its 2000 world tour of releasing soundboard recordings from each show. The 2000 series of 72 titles surprised the industry by selling more than one million copies. This year, Pearl Jam is making the recordings -- overseen by the band's live sound engineer Brett Eliason -- available online at pearljam.com. So far, the band has put out 15 albums from its shows in Australia and Japan, and the group members think they're even better now.

"I think all that stuff has gotten way better this time," says bassist Jeff Ament, who co-founded Pearl Jam with guitarist Stone Gossard in 1990. "There were some things about the last one, like the drum sound, that I thought could be improved, and we did." Guitarist Mike McCready, meanwhile, says he's still surprised at the appetite Pearl Jam's fans have for the live recordings. In 2000, he says, "I felt like, `Oh my God, we're putting out 72 records; is that completely self-indulgent or is it just total overkill?'

"I'm glad people liked them. It was nice to give them audio snapshots of the show. If they were in Cleveland and we put out a Cleveland one, or Seattle, wherever, they got to enjoy the show again."

Ament -- who so far recommends that fans buy the Feb. 23 show from Perth, Australia, and the March 1 show from Yokahama, Japan -- says that he's pleased with the way the band has been playing on this tour, in support of its 2002 studio album Riot Act. He's particularly happy that it didn't seem to take Pearl Jam long to get its act up to the vaunted standards the group set during the early 1990s. "It seems like historically we always take a week to 10 days," Ament said. "But this time ... the second show we played, in Brisbane, was really, really good. I remember feeling after the show `We're getting better at this. We're figuring it out quicker, kind of getting into that mode.'"

The 2003 tour has an interesting business sub-text for the band as well. The group's contract with Epic Records has reached an end, and Ament says he and his bandmates -- McCready, Gossard, frontman Eddie Vedder and drummer Matt Cameron -- are considering a number of options for their future. Pearl Jam, he says, is being openly courted by several major labels -- including Epic -- but the success of the live album series and other projects the group does through its active fan organization, the Ten Club, also has Pearl Jam considering taking matters more into its own hands.

"It's great to be at that point, after our seventh record, where we're free agents," Ament says. "Over the next year, we'll figure out how we kind of want to make records and put them out. I think we can do it however we want. I think we have a little bit of a new lease on life at this point. We feel like we can mess with things a little bit more, and I think that's given everybody a bunch of new energy."

So lace up those Doc Martens, wrap your over-washed flannel around your army fatigue shorts, and get ready for that tingly feeling as Pearl Jam and Sleater-Kinney show the world just how much North Carolina likes its rock and roll. Pearl Jam

(with Sleater-Kinney)

Tuesday, April 15

Alltel Pavilion

Raleigh

&

Wednesday, April 16

Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre

Charlotte