Pearl Jam

Pearl Jam formed in Seattle Washington in 1990. Since its inception, the band's line-up has included Eddie Vedder (lead vocals, guitar), Jeff Ament (bass guitar), Stone Gossard (rhythm guitar), and Mike McCready (lead guitar). The band's current drummer is Matt Cameron, formerly of Soundgarden, who has been with the band since 1998. Just as their classic album 'Ten' is reissued we caught up with Pearl Jam to find out more about it.


Seattle has always been out of the mainstream American 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.


What are your favourite songs on Ten?


Stone Gossard: I love Oceans. That probably sums up why I get excited about song writing. It’s like open detuning where the first chord’s just straight across and it’s just 2 fingers that come on and off to create the whole thing and then it moves down one position and it moves back up. It has a tiny little change in it but it’s also got 3 big movements. What I love about music is aesthetic chords; the simpler the better and then another set that does something to those original chords. It’s a really simple arrangement.
We wrote it, we played it and Ed sang it, which is another thing that he does. I’d never seen anyone engage with song writing the same way. Here’s the song, let me play it for you. It goes like this. Ok there’s a change here, let’s do it – and he would sing it. I’d hear the melodies and I’d think OK he’s gonna write words or whatever and then I realised later that he actually had written the words right there. I couldn’t understand how somebody could do that. Since then I’ve met a lot of people that can do it so it was an eye opener but he does it better than anyone I’ve ever seen do it.

Matt Cameron: When I was in Soundgarden and we were making Badmotorfinger Eddie brought up the mixes to Ten and I distinctly remember hearing the chorus for Evenflow and thinking that’s HUGE. So hooky, it’s got a really rad Zeppelin huge rock feel to it. Although we’ve played it a couple of thousand times since I’ve been in the group I think that’s the quintessential Pearl Jam song. Even though it gets played out, the nuts and bolts of that song are just amazing. Oceans is also a fantastic song. Super fun to play.

Mike McCready: I really like Alive a lot –I look at it as a live song that we’ve done over the years and that people respond to very well and have an emotional attachment to. And I get to do a fun solo on it!

Jeff Ament: At the time it was Oceans and it’s still my favourite track. When we recorded it I thought we were pushing the envelope and that there was a lot of other places that we could take the music that we made. I also like the intro and outro music, which was a kind of art, project that we did on a day where somebody was sick. That’s what I get most excited about, the stuff that’s just a little bit outside of our comfort zone. Every record we made has had a little art project index. Somebody would come in with a vision for something crazy or a different way to approach recording or writing or switching instruments. Sometimes they’ve failed but every once in a while something really good happens which creates a new way to make music together. If we felt like we were pushing out and people responded to that that is success to me.


Ten sold 12 million copies and has become a seminal 90s album. What do you think of it now?


Stone Gossard: I think Ten’s still good but I don’t put it on (laughs). The new mix of the record is great. That’s one of the things I’m most excited about is Brendan doing another mix on it – it sounds a little bit more like our subsequent records sounded so it gives it a different treatment.

Matt Cameron: It’s definitely stood the test of time. To me it sounds like a band playing in the studio.

Jeff Ament: A little bit of hindsight but not necessarily the 17 years that it’s taken to get to this point! Ever since we made our 2nd record we’ve been thinking about remixing Ten. The original version has a little bit more of an 80s production. When Brendan mixed Vs., I asked him 'can you remix Ten just for me so I can listen to a drier more direct version of those songs?’


In the early days Ten was a slow seller and the band toured for months promoting it. During his first shows Eddie Vedder was a restrained front man. By the end he was an inspired performer. What caused that change?


Mike McCready: What made Ed change from being stoic and being introspective was when Chris Cornell from Soundgarden took him out drinking and gave him an idea of maybe loosening up. I don’t know what he did but after he hung out with Chris he started to open up a little bit more. Then we went on tour, we went to Europe a few times and he became this guy who would climb everywhere during the middle of the songs. I was worried every time he did it.
We were in San Diego – it was us, Nirvana and the Chilli Peppers. He jumped up on this scaffolding bar, threw his microphone cord over it, climbed up it maybe 40 feet up, while we were doing the solo for Alive. I’m thinking this guy’s gonna fall and kill himself and our career’s over.

Stone Gossard: Ed didn’t perform the way he was to subsequently till he’d played 40 or 50 shows. Maybe not that many. All of a sudden he figured out how to exchange energy with the crowd in a way that he’d never done before so that’s when it went pheeeeeew. Ed knows how to inhabit a song and people can see it in his eyes and they hear it in his voice and they just fall into that.
I knew everything had gelled on the road where we had transcendent shows. The next record was probably where it felt better recording wise. I saw how it could change and evolve which gave me a lot of inspiration to go 'we can do ballads, we can do fast stuff, we can do slow stuff, we can do punk stuff.' That was where I realised there were gonna be a lot of places to go with Ed. To have Ed sing on anything, the way he writes lyrics and the way he approaches your material is fantastic. He really loves getting into it, the challenges of all of our songs and the different ways they’re brought into 'em. He hears things and once he’s onto it he’ll give you such incredible variety in terms of vocal approaches and rhythm and story. He’s so great with different points of view that it’s like going to Disneyland.


Where are you favourite places to tour?


Mike McCready: I love England a lot. I love to walk around Hyde Park and hang out. I like to play in Rome, Milan; we’ve toured all over Italy that’s been interesting. Columbia River Gorge is a favourite place we play here in Seattle. We played some shows with Neil Young and we subsequently did a record called Mirrorball with him and he asked us if we would be his touring band over in Europe. It was a dream come true. We got to play a bunch of Neil Young songs with Neil Young himself and got to go to Berlin, to Jerusalem, to the Red Sea.

Jeff Ament: Europe is certainly on our radar right now and we’re still trying to figure out how to sanely tour there at some point in the next 18 months. A lot of it’s gonna depend on how quickly we finish up our new record.
We’ve only been to South America once but that was pretty phenomenal. The countries in Europe that have a real similar vibe to South America are Spain and Italy. We had a great tour of Canada in 2005 – incredible. It’s cool to know there are still places that we haven’t played. We haven’t played Alaska, we haven’t played Iceland, and we really need to get back to Finland because we played a show there in 93 with Neil Young that was not the best.


Pearl Jam will be celebrating your 20th Anniversary in 2010. Do you see yourself going on indefinitely?


Stone Gossard: It would be thrilling if it happened – if we all looked at each other 10-20 years from now and went how did we do this. We’d have to play a crotchety Evenflow with disco brushes. (Laughs) Our fans are gonna be so old they’re not going to be able to hear us anyway so, maybe we can be video transformed to look 30 years younger

Matt Cameron: I just don’t want to become the Rolling Stones

Mike McCready: I don’t think there’s any way we thought our band would last 20 years. We’re still talking. It’s incredible.

Jeff Ament: It’s pretty insane that we’ve lasted 20 years. At the start I guessed we might make 3 or 4 records, have a little bit of success and we would have gotten to play with some of our heroes. Probably the biggest fringe benefit is that we’ve shared stages with Iggy Pop, Henry Rollins, REM, Neil Young, the Rolling Stones and Frank Black , the list goes on and on. That’s the little kid dream come true being able to play with all those incredible bands and artists that we grew up loving and we still love.


What’s your favourite Pearl Jam song?


Stone Gossard: Nothing Man. I didn’t write it. Jeff Ament wrote it, Dave Abbruzzese plays great drums on it. Jeff had the chord changes; him and Ed maybe worked it out before. Real Jeff Ament style, his approach to strumming. It has his character trademarks but at the same time really super simple, Ed connects so well with it that anyone who hears it will wanna sing along.

Matt Cameron: I really like playing Glorified G a lot from the 2nd record. That’s a really great quintessential Pearl Jam song 'cos it’s got the counterpoint guitars panned right and left hard and a really funky bass line.

Stone Gossard: It’s trying to be country and funky at the same time (laughs), which is really bizarre.

Mike McCready: Alive or Evenflow but mostly Alive 'cos it’s our classic,. a song that people identify with us. It’s anthemic. I know the other guys probably wouldn’t say that but that’s’ what I think of it and that’s what I’ve heard people tell me. Alive encapsulates the lyricism, the musicianship and the feeling of this band.

Jeff Ament: I’m really fond of a handful of songs that we recorded for the Vitalogy record. Last Exit, Nothing Man and Tremor Christ were recorded at Daniel Lanois’ studio in New Orleans. There’s something about the sound of those songs and how easily they came. I love playing Last Exit live and whenever I hear it, it just sounds like we did it right, it sounds natural like we captured what was coming out of us.