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Inside Pearl Jam's official concert bootleg truck

By Steve Morse, Globe Staff, 7/29/2003

MANSFIELD -- On the third and final night of Pearl Jam's recent Tweeter Center run, the band's sound mixer, Brett Eliason, was sitting at a 56-channel recording console in a backstage truck. Hippie tapestries adorned the walls. The air conditioning hummed overhead. And Eliason, who has worked with Pearl Jam for 13 years, had a video screen to see the band's onstage performance. He tweaked the dials to refine the mix that would later be converted into Pearl Jam's live CD of the show.

"It's akin to the way you do a live broadcast in a remote truck," said Eliason.

Sitting right behind him was the only other employee in the truck, John Burton, who manned a laptop computer. They were working on two stereo mixes -- one for MP3 use (downloadable the next morning for fans who purchased the live CD) and one for the eventual CD itself. That file would be sent to RFI CD Mastering, a Seattle-based firm that would then ship it to a Sony manufacturing plant in New Jersey; consumers would get the finished CD within the week.

Eliason had fun on this night because it was a special show; Pearl Jam did an acoustic set (its first in two years) followed by a hard-rocking electric set that had fans buzzing. No doubt word will spread and this will become a popular release: in essence a legal bootleg of the performance.

"You're going to see more and more bands do this, because it's a great way to relate to their audience," said Eliason. Plus, it gives the band more control over the sound quality, he said, which is not possible with pirated bootlegs.

STEVE MORSE