Copyright 1998 Toronto Star, All Rights Reserved.

Band returns to the rock game with first major tour in years

POP MUSIC CRITIC

When Jeff Ament says Pearl Jam is in a different "head space" these days, it's hard to doubt him.

Indeed, the evidence is staring you right in the face. After several years of steadfastly refusing to play the rock 'n' roll game - dodging the press, avoiding music videos and engaging in a fierce battle with Ticketmaster that severely scaled back their touring activities - Seattle's favourite sons have done a swift about-face.

They're chatting amiably with reporters (well, moody frontman Eddie Vedder isn't, but the rest of the band seems game). They've conscripted Calgary-born comic-book magnate Todd McFarlane, creator of Spawn, to put together an animated video for their new single, "Do the Evolution." They've released the first Pearl Jam home video, Single Video Theory. And - although they're still sidestepping Ticketmaster wherever they can - they're on their first, full-scale international tour since the early '90s.

That road jaunt brings Pearl Jam to Barrie this Saturday for a sold-out stop in Molson Park.

"We've toured a little bit every record," says Ament. Pearl Jam's bassist is calling from Montana as a John Coltrane record plays in the background. "We just haven't put together a string of, like, 60 dates for, like, three records. And our record (Yield) came out about five months before the summer, so it kind of worked out timing- wise for us to do a comprehensive North American tour, which we hadn't done in a long time . . .

"It's just our head space, too. It got to the point where we were having a good time making the record and we thought, 'You know, maybe it would be fun to go out and play.' We've been doing it for eight years, so we've been doing it long enough to do it with the least amount of stress possible."

A little pre-tour stress did rear its head when drummer Jack Irons announced he wouldn't be joining the band on the road because of an illness (he later intimated to one magazine that he was struggling with manic depression). But Pearl Jam is thrilled to have found a stellar replacement in former Soundgarden skin-basher Matt Cameron, says Ament.

"It's been great having Matt out," he says. "He definitely injects a lot of excitement into playing and touring in general."

The word "fun" surfaces several times during Ament's conversation, suggesting the members Pearl Jam - long a leading light among the angst set - might actually be enjoying themselves on the road this time out.

Although he never gets too specific about what transpired to drain the fun from playing in the band years ago, Ament does hint that the oft-rumoured troubles said to have plagued Pearl Jam during its prolonged period of isolation are gone.

After 13 or 14 years of playing with Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard in various bands - most of which survived no more than three or four years (Pearl Jam's been together for eight) - Ament says he's noticed a pattern develop when the "third- or fourth-year itch" hits.

"Things always start to get a little bit weird in there," he says, "in terms of egos and just confusion about what your roles are and where you fit in, and wanting to challenge yourself . . .

"It's the way it is in every relationship. It's a power struggle, with people trying to be heard and people trying to articulate their feelings and people trying to listen to and understand each other.

"I think we're a lot better at that than we were three years ago, four years ago. I think at that point a lot of issues had built up, and they're all out now. If somebody needs to take a few months off to chill out or make a record with other people, we're pretty easy on that."

Indeed, Pearl Jam has been a breeding ground for low-profile side projects in recent years. Ament's side trio, Three Fish, toured the U.S. and Canada last year and just did some recording last spring. Gossard has his funk-psychedelia outfit Brad, and second guitarist Mike McCready has released an album with Mad Season.

None of those projects have been subjected to the intense scrutiny that's levelled at Pearl Jam every time it makes a move.

When Yield came out early in 1998, for instance, it was touted as the music industry's saviour after a year in which most superstar albums royally tanked, sales-wise. It was also a rocky "return to form" after the band's rootsier, more experimental turn on 1996's No Code album (which sold about an eighth of what Pearl Jam's mega- million-selling debut, Ten, did).

Hardly a spent commercial force, the band has shipped some three million copies of the defiantly un-Ten-ish Yield (200,000 in Canada). But the disparity with past sales heights still has industry watchers mumbling "disappointment," regardless of the album's obvious artistic achievements.

"I think, for us, as long as we've sat around together and listened to the record and felt like we've made a better record than the previous one, and felt that we've grown, that's success," says Ament. "We do get a little affected by some of the reviews and that sort of stuff, but you just go back to that time in the room together where everybody's smiling and saying 'Yeah, we made a cool record.' That's exciting . . .

"Even with No Code, there were some moments that I felt like we were making huge strides and like we were taking chances. Maybe we weren't making it the way we wanted to, but we were delving into new things and creating new things.

"That's a huge part of being an artist - putting yourself out on a limb."

Even if some Ten-era fans aren't willing to follow Pearl Jam on its ever-evolving musical journey, one can mount a convincing argument against bands rehashing past successes. There's still a large contingent of groups out there - from Seven Mary Three through Creed and Days of the New - doing just that.

"If that's really what they're doing, then I kind of feel bad for them," says Ament, "because, for me, the rush of playing music is creating something with the other four people you play with - creating a sound, taking some chances and feeling good about it."

Still, he admits, being a musical reference point is definitely "flattering."

"I think that's the great thing, too, about having been around for the last eight years: You can kind of see the mountains and the valleys. I think we kind of came through a valley, and now we're heading down a road on flat ground. Nobody really, really hates you, but at the same time you're not the flavour of the month, or the flavour of the year."

After the Yield tour wraps up in Miami on Sept. 23, Pearl Jam will likely take some time off before regrouping early in the new year to start writing a new album, says Ament (in the meantime, fans can seek out "Hard to Imagine," a previously unreleased track dating from the 1993 Vs. sessions, on the sound track to the upcoming movie Chicago Cab). What musical direction that record takes will largely depend on who plays drums for the band, what each individual member has been listening to and ultimately, one supposes, what head space Pearl Jam finds itself in at that time.

"At this point, we've sort of realized so much is out of your control," says Ament. "But I do think we're a really great band."

"When we get together and play and we're all happening, there's times I feel like we're the best band I've ever been in, the only band I'd ever want to be in."

Copyright 1998 Toronto Star, All Rights Reserved.

Songs from new
CD handled
impressively
POP MUSIC CRITIC

BARRIE - Ah, yes, the air over the Barrie countryside was rife with metaphoric meaning prior to yesterday's Pearl Jam show at Molson Park.
Kind of fitting that the first words to greet a traffic-addled rock fan staggering out on to the scorched pavement of the parking lot came from Cracker frontman David Lowery's Generation X indictment "I Hate My Generation." They pretty much encapsulate the whole Pearl Jam predicament. No other surviving band (Nirvana no longer counts) better personifies the curiously antagonistic relationship the first wave generation of "alternative rock" superstars has with fame.

Five musicians (recent addition and former Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron included) who came out of a "grunge" scene that became hugely successful - and a soldout crowd of 35,000 definitely nullifies any claims you may have to margin-walker status - precisely because it was so exhilaratingly different from what was successful at the time, constantly twisting themselves into knots in an effort to retain their outsider cred.

The result, of course - amid angsty frontman Eddie Vedder's public hand wringing over the horror of fame and a trio of artistically accomplished records bogged down in overly earnest musical experiments - is what a lot of folks turned on to Ten or Vs. have come to perceive as Pearl Jam "hating its generation" for making it huge.

The thing is, if the boys would get over the need to constantly reaffirm a long-lost "oppositional" stance to the mainstream and just get on with the business of being one of the most consistently vital rock bands on the planet, we'd probably all appreciate them a lot more.

Because Pearl Jam really kicks it live - and, with eight years together under its collective belt, probably harder and more viscerally than ever.

If you believe the reports of renewed inter-band enthusiasm for making music (and there's no reason not to - oft-surly Vedder came across as a downright jolly soul last night), there's ample justification for labelling this a peak performance time for the band.

All it took was a few bars of an incendiary raver like "Brain of J." for Pearl Jam to remind the appreciative throng that it's still a monstrous stage presence.

Catalogue standards like "Animal," the deliciously grinding prom ballad "Dissident," "Daughter," "Jeremy" and an oddly perfunctory "Even Flow" drew the first real mass whoops of the two-hour-plus evening. But it was material from the band's most recent album, Yield - the delicate "Wishlist" (complete with warm-and-fuzzy disco- ball light show), the U2-ish "Given to Fly" or "In Hiding," an intricate, dynamically varied gem that gets better with each listen - that really impressed.

What often sounded strained and slightly unfinished on record came across energized and accomplished last night, the product of a hugely talented band reaching to challenge itself and, more often than not, succeeding.

Vedder's breaking-point baritone and the constant go-for-the- throat musical barrage can get a wee bit exhausting over two hours, granted. Over-familiarity and too much aping by other bands have, unfortunately, cut into the rush Pearl Jam once elicited.

That said, though, we'll give the nod to the triumphant crowd- pleaser "Alive," which Vedder and the band seemed to tear into with as much full-throated, raging exuberance as it did eight years ago - as the evening's climax (no small thanks to some mighty fine dual- guitar action from Stone Gossard and Mike McCready). It actually felt like the first time all over again.

Getting back to those airy metaphors: Let's talk Cheap Trick, the former rock kings of Budokan turned independent opening act for a band half their age. It was hard not to flash into the future, when a still beloved but slightly past-expiry-date Pearl Jam may indeed have its own career championed by the latest thing and hits the trail in front of a young and fickle audience.

If you were there the first time, I'm sure it was wonderful to see the Trick tearing into "Dream Police" and "Surrender" with scrappy, joyful aplomb. If you weren't - like most of the largely indifferent throng - you applauded politely for the old guys, nodded approvingly at the songs you recognized and yelled "Eddie" during the down time.

Leah McLaren. The Globe and Mail. Toronto, Ont.: Aug 24, 1998. pg. C.2

All material copyright Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. or its licensors. All rights reserved.

Grunge may be dead but Pearl Jam is still alive

Tempestuous singer Eddie Vedder seems to have mellowed out after his wars with concert-ticket conglomerates and the music press.

Monday, August 24, 1998

Special to The Globe and Mail,

Barrie, Ont. -- At Molson Park in Barrie Ont.,on Saturday

After playing two or three of its rollicking signature tunes, Pearl Jam paused for breath. From somewhere in the crowd of 35,000, a football spiralled through the air toward the stage. But before it could whack the lead singer flat, he caught it with an expertise that would make most Argo receivers jealous. Then it was the audience's turn to pause.

How would Eddie Vedder, the testy, ultra-earnest guru of grunge respond to this gesture of stadium-rock foolishness? Kick it back in a smooth punt that sailed far past the seething mosh pit in front of him, of course.

Pearl Jam, the legendary standard-bearers of the now-parched Seattle scene, mounted an open-air stage at Molson Park in Barrie, an hour's drive north of Toronto, Saturday night as part of the group's 44-date North American tour. It's the band's first full-scale jaunt since it headlined the multigroup Lollapalooza alternative-rock festival in 1992.

After years of battling Ticketmaster, the U.S.-based ticket-handling giant, over service charges, ignoring music videos and refusing interviews, Pearl Jam finally seems willing to put aside its Garboesque moodiness and play the big-venue gigs again. (On this tour, 30 to 50 per cent of the dates, including the one Saturday night, will be handled by Ticketmaster.) The group has also released Single Video Theory ,its first foray into what it calls "home video," which shows the band in concert, jamming together and giving interviews.

But perhaps the band's most startling change can be observed in the disposition of frontman Eddie Vedder. Notorious for his tortured persona and extreme petulance with the press, the onetime poster boy for misunderstood youth appears to have exchanged his self-pity for a sense of mid-career serenity.

In a recent interview with Spin magazine, Vedder expressed his disillusionment with being such a famously disillusioned guy: "Things have changed. I don't know if it's age, but I'm just getting tired of complaining -- all this energy going completely nowhere."

Luckily, Vedder's energy was going somewhere in Barrie. Completing the day's lineup, which included performances by Cheap Trick and Cracker, Pearl Jam mixed raucous versions of its older punk-edged anthems ( Jeremy , Alive , Evenflow ) with the more subtle, restrained tunes from its latest album, Yield . And despite 11 arrests at the venue throughout the day (a result of an assortment of minor offences, including public intoxication and vending without a permit), the fans received Pearl Jam with ecstatic -- if slightly rowdy -- approval.

Between muscular power-rock sets, Vedder found time to enjoy himself. Looking more like an overgrown skate-boarding punk than a superstar in his goofy shorts and shaggy-dog haircut, Vedder danced, grinned and thanked the crowd repeatedly, but he couldn't resist one minor complaint.

"You guys have handled yourselves in an extreme fashion tonight, but I just don't know about these big venues," he confided. "We'll play three shows next time in a smaller place with the same amount of people."

Vedder then went on to point out that there might not be a next time.

"It's five minutes to midnight on the doomsday clock," he declared, poking fun at his own previously stormy reputation. "You don't know what that means? It means were all gonna die!"

In concert, Pearl Jam also performed the Led Zeppelin-inspired track Given to Fly from Yield , a song that married the band's punk-tinged sound with a mellow groove reminiscent of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant's Going to California (although some others might see it as a shameless rip-off).

Vedder's voice filled the park grounds, moving effortlessly between insinuating whisper and anguished roar, leading the band from melancholy guitar-picking to crunching power chords in a matter of seconds. Matt Cameron (former drummer of Seattle's now-defunct Soundgarden) kept an aggressive beat in place of drummer Jack Irons, who decided not to tour.

As the sun set, the Bic-lighter-flicking crowd was serenaded by the love letter Wishlist ,the most recent evidence that Pearl Jam has indeed mastered the rock ballad. Vedder sang with true tenderness, underlining the vulnerability that has made Pearl Jam such an appealing band for so long.