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Pearl Jam is stoked after a decade on the fringe
On a typically blustery spring afternoon, Eddie Vedder sits in a blue vinyl booth at West Seattle's Easy Street Records and Cafe, catching up with the owner. The small shop is a favorite hangout, and Vedder is barely noticed. In this beachy district where many of the city's rockers — including the 41-year-old Pearl Jam singer — have settled and started families, everyone's equal. ''It gives us protection from being swallowed up by the world,'' Vedder says.
Vedder's been here for 16 years, and I was born here, but we're part of a generation that has benefited from the city's shift from isolated industrial port to New Economy hub. Like Pearl Jam, Seattle has grown with care, its Uptown condos and upscale urban malls never overwhelming the no-nonsense pioneers who own its soul. The sound I first heard at punk clubs like the Gorilla Room circa 1980 developed into the paradigm for the quality rock that Pearl Jam represents, and Microsoft millionaires belly up to its tavern bars next to the skippers who still fish its harbors. For all its 21st-century largesse, Seattle remains unpresumptuous. Like Vedder himself, it wants to be just folks.
It's been a while since Vedder has left this comfort zone. Fifteen years ago, Pearl Jam ruled rock, but its zealous high-mindedness — which led the band to abstain from music videos, to favor experimental jams over Top 40 fare and to take on big targets of the left, including Ticketmaster and the Bush administration — put the band in a strange category: celebrated, yet obscure. Its last four albums have gotten little radio attention and led to a sound that Vedder complained was too cerebral.
By keeping to itself and its subculture of fans, Pearl Jam lost momentum. Over the years, band members began bringing into the mix distinctive influences, reflected in outside projects, in a way that didn't always lend itself to coherence. Guitarist Mike McCready continued to play with some of his old bandmates in side groups such as the Rockford. Along the way, he fought, and overcame, various addictions. Now McCready battles Crohn's disease, and he has become focused on charity work to fight the intestinal disorder.
Bassist Jeff Ament, a bearded Montana native, went off to record with the world-music-tinged Three Fish and to check out skateboard parks nationwide. Guitarist Stone Gossard co-led the soulful, Seattle-based band Brad. Drummer Matt Cameron became active in his son's grade school. Vedder, meanwhile, stumped for Ralph Nader and other causes.
Then, after 15 years with Epic, Pearl Jam signed to Clive Davis' J Records label, though before he sealed the deal, Davis insisted on seeing the band. ''I wanted to see their hunger, their freshness, their magic again,'' he says. ''To see if in their songwriting they would come up with a vintage Pearl Jam album with its great storytelling that could put them on top again.'' The band passed the audition.
Known for creating comebacks for such stars as Carlos Santana and Rod Stewart, Davis saw those possibilities in Pearl Jam.
Vedder and his mates have answered with a self-titled J debut that's focused, furious and outward-looking. Like U2, Pearl Jam has made a conservative choice with liberating results — an act of remembering that's pushed them into a new phase. The proof is in the first single, the antiwar cry ''World Wide Suicide,'' the fastest-charting of the band's career.
Even before the album's release Tuesday, a fiery ''Saturday Night Live'' performance kicked off a media blitz. This year's tour will include headlining spots at England's huge Reading and Leeds festivals, a co-headlining American jaunt with Tom Petty and arena dates throughout the Western world.
Some of what's changed is the band itself, especially Vedder. The elusive, long-haired boy who captured the pain of youth in such hits as ''Jeremy'' has matured into a citizen activist who embraces his classic rock heritage. His politics have given purpose to the fame he once shunned, and the mentorship of his idols, including Pete Townshend and Neil Young, has helped him escape insecurity. Just as Gen-X has grown up to become the Sustainable Lifestyle Generation — especially in the eco-friendly, tech-savvy Northwest — Vedder and his bandmates have hit their 40s seemingly uncompromised.
''If someone says this new album is returning to the energy of the first couple of records, that's great for me, because those are the records people know, and it may make them more interested to hear it,'' says Vedder. ''Whether it's true or not, I don't know. I feel our whole recording lifespan is really one long album.''
Doing their homework
Ament is having a morning snack at an espresso bar close enough to his West Seattle house that his wife pops by to say she's taking their dogs for a walk. The bassist is worried about the loss of the relative calm that had come with being a band that attracted minimal attention.
''People in this neighborhood who haven't said jack to me for years, now they're saying, 'Oh, you have a hit record,''' says Ament, who also maintains a home in his native Montana. ''There's a part of me that thinks, 'God, it would be great if a song or two got played on the radio.' But part of me worries, especially for Ed. We're going to head into this storm; we have to be together and all be ready for it.''
The years leading to ''Pearl Jam,'' Ament says, required more patience than caution. ''All I wanted was to be out of our contract and have a big party to say we made it,'' Ament says of the final years on Epic, which concluded with 2002's ''Riot Act.''
Industry watchers wondered if Pearl Jam would become completely independent after leaving Epic. The band had released hundreds of ''bootleg'' live recordings through its fan service, Ten Club, and developed a thriving online music distribution system. The band has been quick to adjust to a changing pop landscape, in which singles-producing hip-hop, R&B and country stars dominate the mainstream while rock artists have had to invent new ways to reach listeners beyond the realm of ''American Idol.''
The deal with J offered the band artistic immunity. ''We can make an art record if we want to next year, we can make a punk record,'' says Ament.
The members of Pearl Jam began work on the album right after 2004's politically charged Vote for Change tour. ''We hadn't done that in 15 years — come off the road and tried to capture something,'' says Ament. Bush's presidential victory, which the band opposed, heightened the mood. But the sprint soon became a marathon.
''We thought we'd take some time on this record. Let's get together and write some songs, then go off and analyze them, re-record a bit, and then take more time,'' says guitarist McCready. ''Even wanting it to go quicker, we still held back and let Ed go where he wanted to go.'' Vedder, who co-writes separately with each of his bandmates, soon fell into a creative maze as he tried to satisfy both the band and his new family. The sessions came at a time when, like many aging Gen-Xers, Vedder was contemplating slowing down.
''Making this album was the first time I wanted a 9-to-5 routine,'' says the singer, whose daughter with girlfriend Jill McCormick, Olivia, is nearly 2. ''I felt that if my mind was occupied with melodies and lyric construction, my daughter was somehow getting ripped off. But I also had to stop fighting to get back into my pre-child life, where I could go to certain dark places and just live in my own head. I surrendered to the fact that things have changed.''
Unconventional synergy
Over dinner at Il Bistro, a duskily lighted date restaurant tucked into the lower levels of Pike Place Market, Gossard and McCready argue over the importance of lead versus rhythm guitar. ''Riffs versus leads, 10 seconds!'' McCready shouts, racing into a monologue about his own fireworks approach — ''Color! Intensity!''
''Riffs! Find one little thing and do it over and over and over again. Driving it in, making it work!'' Gossard yells.
They're still having the fun that generated their rule-breaking collaboration, when McCready was a teenage metalhead and Gossard was a baby punk.
McCready and Gossard's relationship epitomizes Pearl Jam's aesthetic. The group has developed a complex working process not unlike the ''no collar'' approach Internet moguls and snowboard designers employ.
Within the swirl of songs such as the new album's ''Marker in the Sand,'' McCready's lyrical leads and Gossard's insurgent licks form something distinctive. Ament brings in world-music rhythms; drummer Cameron, who joined in 1998 after his former band, Soundgarden, dissolved, adds an art-metal edge. It's Vedder, the others say, who makes sure none of this gets lost in the final product.
''If a song I write turns into a Pearl Jam song, it's because Ed's interested,'' says McCready. ''I'll bring something in, Stone might help arrange it, and when Ed gets behind it, it has the potential of happening. You have to let your ego down, be willing to take criticism, and explore different ways of writing a song.''
''Eddie knows where his strengths are, and they're in this band,'' says Cameron. ''He could easily go do a solo career … but his music will be more powerful played by Pearl Jam.'' Vedder agrees, and not only for artistic reasons. For him, Pearl Jam is political.
''Fifteen-thousand young people come to the concerts, so a socially conscious musician like Ed can reach a much larger audience than Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger ever did,'' notes Vedder's mentor, the radical historian Howard Zinn. ''Eddie represents millions of the young by what he is, by what he has become.''
What has Vedder become? Less alienated, for one thing. Refusing to leave Pearl Jam has taught him what real equality demands.
''We're fighting for the health of democracy here, yet we realize that just within our group it's very difficult,'' says Vedder. ''I'm sure I was stepping on toes all over the place making this record. And we're just making music, we're not trying to make sure there's money for highways and healthcare.'' That struggle for mutual respect defines the sound and the image of Pearl Jam. They're facing the central question for the fortysomething Gen-X — how to adapt without losing yourself — and it's led the band to a new place of strength.
''Thank God we remained friends and kept trying to do the same thing,'' says guitarist Gossard, who co-founded the group with McCready and Ament in 1990. ''We made some records that were frustrating, but we were still working out what we're capable of.
''I've looked at this whole thing as a huge experiment. What did my favorite bands do? Let's do that, but not break up.''
Ann Powers is a pop music critic for The Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Publishing newpaper.
