Pearl Jam InterviewOn March 24, 2009, Pearl Jam's debut album, Ten, will be reissued in four editions, featuring such extras as a remastering and remix of the entire album by Brendan O'Brien, a DVD of the band's 1992 appearance on MTV Unplugged, and an LP of its September 20, 1992 concert at Magnuson Park in Seattle.
It will be the first reissue in a planned re-release of Pearl Jam's entire catalogue that will lead up to the band's 20th anniversary in 2011. With this in mind, we caught up with the musical legends for a bit of a brain picking...
Seattle has always been out of the mainstream America rock circuit, so how did the scene develop in the 1980s?Stone Gossard: Everyone just got in bands. There wasn’t a lot of trying to do anything other than that nobody was getting signed. A lot of us couldn’t play! Whatever we had we tried to bring to the table and that made some weird combinations of people playing together so everybody was going for broke in the sense of what have you got to lose?
Matt Cameron: Seattle was isolated so a lot of national known big time rock acts wouldn’t necessarily come up to Seattle and Portland. That forced the North West music scene to look inward and create stuff on our own turf, play our own clubs. At the time the 80s underground in the US was definitely getting a lot more organised with bands like Black Flag and Husker Du, Minor Threat, Butthole Surfers – they were able to create a circuit that had nothing to do with major labels and the known music industry at that time. What our music scene really plugged into was that do it yourself spirit.
Jeff and Stone you started playing together in Green River back in 1984. What were your early influences?Stone: my influences were a lot of FM rock and pop on the radio. Simon and Garfunkel and disco. You couldn’t help but be affected by disco. Even if you weren’t at the time in love with disco it was everywhere. I missed British punk I never really understood it until I started listening to the Sex Pistols in 84 and I went ‘whoa, this is a rock band’. Heavy Metal was huge too. Motorhead was the ultimate Seattle band, the lynchpin memories of how much you loved Black Sabbath when you were 8 years old.
It is sometimes claimed that Green River invented grunge.Jeff Ament: (chuckles) In the last year we’ve played four shows with Green River and while it’s been great to go back we’ve come to the conclusion that we were really just ripping off Black Flag and Motorhead and The Stooges. I guess that’s what ended up being grunge so we probably owe Iggy and Lemmy and Greg Ginn some royalties from that era. They haven’t asked yet!
In early 1990 the future of the Seattle rock scene appeared to be Mother Love Bone, in which Stone and Jeff wrote many of the songs. The band was fronted by the charismatic Andrew Wood and was signed to a major label. Days before the release of the band’s debut album, Apple, Wood took a heroin overdose. He died a few days later from a cerebral haemorrhage. When Andrew died did you feel your chance was gone?Jeff: I felt like maybe that was my one shot. I hung out with Stone a little right after Andy died. We’d go on long bike rides, sit around, have coffee and talk about anything other than being in a band together. I tried to make some sort of sense about what I was gonna do and if Stone and I were ever going to do anything together again. A friend of mine, Richard Stuverud, was in a band called War Babies. Their bass player had just quit and he said ‘we have a show in 3 days can you learn these songs and play the show with us?’ I did and I had such a great time, better than the last days in Mother Love Bone. Right around the same time Stone said that he and Mike [McCready] had been playing some new songs that he’d written and did I want to play on the demos that they were gonna cut.
suite de l'interview partie 1 +
partie 2
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" What a shit album it was "
enfin, on va pas se plaindre !!!!
