Until they returned to the stage in late September, Pearl Jam were off for a year and a half, and bassist Jeff Ament used that time productively: His new book, Since Forever, out now, collects the photographs he’s been taking of his bandmates since their earliest days together. He worked on the project with his brother, designer Barry Ament, who first talked him into digitizing the photos, which bring to life dozens of unseen moments from the band’s history. In an interview with our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, Jeff looked back at some of the book’s highlights, and reminisced about Pearl Jam’s history.
He also addressed Pearl Jam’s drummer situation, which remains somewhat unclear. The interview took place before Pearl Jam’s two sets in late September at the Ohana Festival in Dana Point, California, where longtime Paul McCartney sideman Abe Laboriel Jr. played drums. In the interview, Ament suggested whoever took the stage with them would likely be the band’s permanent new drummer — but on Instagram after the performances, frontman Eddie Vedder described Laboriel as “sitting in.”
In the interview, Ament talked about Temple of the Dog, making Ten, shooting the Vs. album cover, touring with Neil Young, Pearl Jam’s future, and much more. You can read it below; listen to an uncut version on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above.
One thing I realized looking at Since Forever is that you didn’t have a camera for the Green River years, or really for Mother Love Bone. The photos don’t start till later. You must feel kinda shitty about that.
Yeah, there were those first two, three years that I lived in Seattle, there’s literally, like, five pictures, you know? But that was the sacrifice I had to make. I had to sell my camera to move to Seattle. That was the high dollar item. I think I got 100 bucks for it, which was a lot of money in 1983.
So working on the Singles art department, they needed pictures of something and I said, “I don’t have a camera.” And they were like, “Go get a camera.” And I’m like, “What do you mean?” And they’re like, “Dude, just go get a camera and charge it to the movie.” And I was like, “I can do that?” They paid for the camera body and then I bought a fisheye [lens] at the same time with my own money, and that’s the first rolls of film that as we were going through this stuff, it’s amazing. It’s a couple rehearsal shots. And very frugal, because it was expensive. But pretty cool that you trace it to one moment. Just an opportunity that Cameron [Crowe] gave me to work on that movie and make a little bit of money.
And also, they allowed me to go to Seattle Art and buy paint and paper and all the stuff that I dreamt of having that up to that point I had been so tight with, just because I didn’t have any money. All of a sudden now I could be an artist because I had some tools, you know?
Did you get that art department job on Singles because Cameron already knew you as a musician and you’re also in the movie, or how did it come together?
I think I’d met Cameron a few times. He had the idea for these people in the movie that were working day jobs, and I think he was intrigued that I was working at a coffee shop. Stone [Gossard] at that time was working in a coffee shop, too. And then he came over to my apartment, and the walls were… I think he was like, “Oh, you need to work with us on this. You need to help us decorate these rooms and create all the ephemera for the movie.”
And he knew I was designing album covers and T-shirts. So I think he knew that he’d have somebody, a local in the office.
Jeff Ament
What was on your walls that he saw?
This has been a back-and-forth conversation for years with Cameron. But there was a really big Joe Perry Project poster, something I got when I worked at Tower Records for a minute. When they took all the stuff down, some of my records got lost. And I could deal with, like, the skateboard and some of the records ’cause they were paying for it, but that Joe Perry Project poster…
it was the centerpiece of my wall, and then I had flyers and just cool art. I had a couple friends that I worked with that were painters, so I had some of that stuff mixed in, and maybe even like some T-shirt designs that I’d done. It was like 180 square feet. It was like a New York apartment.
But since I was a kid, you just want stuff on the wall that makes you dream and inspires you. Every day they would just give me a project. They’re “Hey, we need an album cover for Citizen Dick,” so it was creating song titles, and then taking them to Cameron and saying… ‘Cause his idea was, the name is Citizen Dick. And then it was just going back riffing, “Why is this song title called this?” And the stuff of mine that ended up in the movie was pretty small, but at the time it seemed massive. That I got to be a part of this huge team and make this piece of art.
Using you that way was smart on his part. People in Seattle had been seeing flyers designed by you for years — I’m looking at a Green River–Melvins flyer you hand-drew.
Yeah. Well, and I was hand-drawing the stuff ’cause I couldn’t afford Letraset, and the stuff that I wanted to do, I literally couldn’t do. But Cameron was pretty great about that. All of his movies, there’s all those details — if you look around the room of any of the movies that he’s done, you’re like, “Oh, my God, look at the detail over there,” the thing that you see once for two seconds.
But I coulda done that job for the rest of my life and been pretty happy. Just ’cause everybody in the office was so fun to work with, and we were going out every night and seeing music. I was taking him to clubs, and it was just a really super creative environment.
There’s some pictures in the book from that era.
There’s a couple rehearsal shots. Maybe a couple small photos of some of the Singles stuff. I think one of the contact sheets is maybe one of the first three. Some of the photos in it aren’t great, so that was the balance, that was the thing that my brother was so great at, oftentimes saying “Man, this photo is so great and these three are not very good.” And I’d be like, “Yeah, but this one really tells the story. It’s really important to me for that photo to be in the batch,” and he would give in.
And he had moved to Seattle in ’91, and so we were hanging out a ton. There’s a handful of pictures where you see, like, his feet in a photo. And there’s a handful of pictures that I’m pretty sure he took. I was using a timer a lot, but there’s the photo of me shooting a basketball. That was on a bike trip, and he definitely took that photo.
Jeff Ament
‘Cause he was helping me digitize these photos, he was the one that said, “Man, you should put a book out.” He said, “Just me personally, I was such a big fan of your band in those early days, to see these photos is so incredible. Photos from recording Vs. and Vitalogy is stuff that’s never been out there.”
And I always said, “Shoot me if I’m the first guy in the band to write a book.” I was really trying to not make it like that I was writing a book. I spent a couple years trying to figure out what the format was gonna be and how [the written segments were] gonna look, and sometimes I went too far. The stuff didn’t really have anything to do with any of the photos, and so there had to be some connection, and the dreams, it had to be sort of things that had to do with the creative process and had to do with the anxiety and the good things and the stress of being in a band.
I had a thing in my notes for, like, five years on my phone, just moving in and out of how I was gonna do this thing. I read every music artist’s memoir, autobiography. But there’s some part of me that was like, I don’t wanna be the guy in the band who’s writing the story of the band. I think the only way that those books do good is if you’re telling the whole story and all the dirt, and I just don’t have any. And there’s not really that much dirt, so it’d be boring.
I enjoyed the written passages, and there’s more to be said. But I get it — you don’t wanna be the first one to write a book.
Right. Yeah, I think I’ll let somebody else write it.
What did you take away emotionally from going back through these? It’s vivid, seeing things through your own eyes from 30, 40 years ago.
Yeah. There were definitely eras that were … and some of the stuff with the band was stressful, but sometimes it was just like what was going on in my life, with my friends or my girlfriend at the time. It was hard to go through that stuff ’cause I feel like I moved through a lot of that through therapy and other things. So to sort of revisit some of that just to see … and not even necessarily bad memories, but just memories that were stressful times.
And then you can see in the book the moment when the band is sort of over having me have a camera in the room. You can kinda see everybody’s smiling and it’s like, “Hey, I’m gonna set up the camera and take a picture of us in the back of the bus. It’s our first bus.” And then you see like a picture of me taking a picture of somebody and they’re kinda looking at me: “Fuck, got that fucking camera on again. What are you doing?”
There’s one of the great New York shots where Ed [Vedder] is looking right at the camera like you’re a paparazzo. Like, “What the fuck are you doing?”
Right, right, right. And that’s probably the reason that I could never be a great photographer, is I think I’m so sensitive to that stuff. A great photographer is just gonna get the fucking shot. You see the photographers that we’ve been around, they will just barge [into] a situation even though they might actually get a heel to the camera. And I don’t have that in me. As soon as somebody looks at me, I won’t pick up a camera for two weeks.
There’s another where you can’t tell if Ed is really glaring or mock-glaring. I imagine that’s the kind of thing that makes you put the camera away for a while.
Yeah. The funny thing is, a lot of that early stuff I wasn’t trying to document. I was trying to come up with content for albums we were making, or at some point pretty early on we were putting out newsletters, and we needed content for those newsletters.
Even with the album covers — it became apparent early on, the label would hire a photographer, and then you’d find out that we were paying for it or we were paying for half of it, and the photographer charged, like, $8,000 for an hour. And there was like that frugal DIY part of me that was like, “That’s ridiculous, man. That’s four times more than my camera equipment’s worth. I can do this shit.”
You were taking bootleg pictures during the Ten shoot.
Well, I would’ve shot that if I could’ve, you know? The concept was all mine, so, good or bad. But yeah, I was working pretty close with [photographer] Lance [Mercer] at that time. Like the “Jeremy” single — I have a sketch of that in the book that I sent to my brother, and then my brother created the crayons that have the different names of the colors.
Jeff Ament
Lance was our guy. He was our friend and he had become a really good photographer at that point. So anybody who’s been in that situation where you’re getting pictures taken by a bunch of people, you immediately gravitate towards the good hang. And Danny Clinch is one of those guys, he’s just a great hang. So he’s the guy, he’s always our first call, ’cause we know it’s not gonna get weird. And Lance was that way in the early days, for sure. He was easy to work with, and if I had some ridiculous concept, like dragging the band all the way out to the Olympic Peninsula, he was in for that, too, so it’s cool.
What do you remember about the moments in those New York street photos?
Oh, man, we were so excited. Stone and I had been to New York once with Green River, but it was brief. And I think Mother Love Bone had been there a couple times, and those were really brief. But having a second chance with the band, and everybody was so fun to hang out with. At that point everybody had the same enthusiasm and excitement and drive. We just wanted to play shows and get better and make good records.
But every single guy in the band had some musical history with a band they loved when they were a kid that came up in New York City. Whether it was Ramones or Kiss or Blondie or the Heartbreakers. We all had bands, so to be walking down the street and to be in the East Village, and I think one of our first shows was at Wetlands, so that’s just down the street from CBGB’s, and it’s like you’re truly living an insane dream. A dream that I don’t think any of us thought we were gonna be playing shows in New York or walking in the footsteps of our heroes. Same street as Paul Stanley. Who would’ve thought, who would’ve thought?
You have these great pictures from London Bridge studio, during the Ten sessions.
Yeah. Either the Ten sessions or maybe an earlier demo, a couple demo sessions, yeah.
But there’s Ed swinging from the ceiling.
Oh, man. That was a huge part of every session, that big rope swing that you could run and you could grab it and flip yourself upside down, and then you could just swing the whole length of this giant room upside down, and it was like taking a little 30-second acid trip. It was like the best.
Some of those photos I didn’t know existed, and it was like, “Oh, my God, there’s a picture.” Looking back at those memories and even the pictures of Ed singing in the booth, which hopefully he’s cool with me, ’cause I didn’t run any of this [by him]. I was trying to put in photos that they would be psyched about. But looking at the contact sheets, I didn’t know what those photos were. You’re going “Man, that’s weird. There’s three photos in a row of just the dark side of the studio.” And then when we digitize them and you put them on the screen, all of a sudden it’s like, oh, he’s singing in the booth there.
Shirtless.
Yeah. Well, ’cause it was fucking hot, man. Like, those isolation rooms didn’t have any air in them, so I’m surprised he didn’t have his Speedo on. Not that he has a Speedo, but…
Those are evocative because he’s performing without knowing anyone’s looking — you can see him moving his hands. Demos or album, it’s an intense moment to capture.
Yeah. And we did crazy amounts of takes. And every take, he’s acting like this is the take. Which I think that sort of repetition was good for us at the time, but it’s also like, that’s a young man’s gig.
Infamously, you did “Even Flow” something like a million times.
Oh, my God. I really understood what Stone was going for, so I was with him lockstep when we were trying to get the feeling of the choruses to really sit back. And as hard as it was for Ed, it was probably even harder for Dave Krusen. He’s trying to make that thing swing two different ways every 30 seconds. So that’s a tough gig.
He had a real baby face at that time.
Oh, man. Yeah. All of us to some degree, but he in particular looks like he’s 15.
We’ve talked about this before — his performance on that album is really great.
Yeah. He has such a unique swing. The reason that that record is so groovy is because of the way that he … plays so relaxed, and yet we’re playing up-tempo songs. That’s almost like my favorite kind of music, when you can play something that’s up-tempo but still feels like it has a big pocket.
It’s wild to see the outtakes from the Vs. animal shoot. Were you trying to shoot an album cover that day?
No, not at all. That’s just south of Missoula. I was with my friend Mike Mora, who’s an architect.I I was gonna build a house out here, and so we looked at a couple pieces of property. And then my friend Eric had a friend who worked at … a farm down the Bitterroot called Lifeline, who raised cattle and sheep and made cheese.
And so we were hanging out, and I grew up with … my dad had cows and pigs and chickens, and I loved pigs when I was a kid. I got to be friends with them, and they would recognize me. And I could tell that this one sheep was following me along the fence, so I started taking pictures of it, and it kept trying to get through the fence. And it was only when I got the contact sheet back, I was like, “Wow, that’d be a great cover,” ’cause we were already talking about … we’d already written “Animal,” and there was a little bit of feeling of us against the world at that time and us against the record company, us against the machine. And so it sort of felt like a natural, so much more natural than the first album cover that was very literal.
And it’s cool to put most of the contact sheet in there just to show people that I wasted a whole roll of film on that.
Is it a sheep or an Angora goat? Because the historical record differs on that one.
I think it’s a sheep.
Good to know — the most famous sheep in rock history. Early in the book you mention the “mushrooms Ministry incident.” What was that?
Well, when we were on Lollapalooza, we were ready to take a break when we got offered that. We’d been touring for almost a year, and I don’t even know if Perry [Farrell] wanted us on the bill initially. Even though we had a rich history with him. Green River played with Jane’s and Mother Love Bone played with Jane’s. But there were people fighting for us, Don Muller and Ted Gardner were a huge part of Lollapalooza.
And it was only when it came back that Soundgarden was on the bill that we got excited about it. At that time it was still just at the beginning of things happening for us, and we were low on the bill. We were like, “Great, we can go play for 30 minutes, and hang out.”
Jeff Ament
So when we saw the bands that were on it, Stone was a massive Ice Cube fan. We were obviously really good friends with Chili Peppers ’cause we’d toured a couple months with them year before. And our idea was that it was gonna be like a vacation, that we were just gonna go play for a half an hour, and then we’d get to hang out and watch all of our friends play music.
As we got to know some of the crew people, found out that there was a guy selling psychedelics and mushrooms. And so one day I made a little tea and watched Ministry from the side of the stage. I was like, “Wow, that was cool.” So then it started ramping it up. There’s actually a couple pictures of him in the book. There’s a guy, Turner, who … I’m not even sure if he did anything other than he was the bone man. He would sit in the front of the bus when they were traveling at night, and if they saw roadkill, they’d pull over and throw the roadkill in the bottom of the bus. He would like boil the bones off these animals backstage. And then he was making sculptures on all the mic stands. Beautiful, but also so perfectly Ministry.
But that coincided with me taking mushrooms. So I would usually take them by myself, and I would just sit down in the pit and watch, and it was like the greatest, the doors of perception, you know? Everything opened up wide for me, and it was one of the only times I’ve ever done that where there was no hangover. I felt fine the next day. It would only last for a couple hours.
Chili Peppers were doing crazy stuff at that time, too. They had the big wheel. It was me playing basketball with Flea and Ice Cube’s crew, and I love Jesus and Mary Chain. I love Lush. It was just like the best tour of all times. Not even close.
You have a bit about the year after Andy Wood died, and it’s easy to forget there was a moment when nothing was clear. You’ve told me you were thinking about art school. Stone was writing music, but without you, because you two weren’t sure you wanted to be in another band together. And then it started to come together, with Chris Cornell, with Ed coming up.
Yeah, I wasn’t putting anything out there that I wanted to play music. I literally thought, “OK, I gotta figure this out. I don’t have a job right now. I don’t have any kind of a plan.” I knew I loved music. But in probably two months, I would go on bike rides with Stone in the morning, and he was pretty secretive about what he was doing. He goes, “Yeah, I’m playing with Mike [McCready] a little bit.” And then I would see Mike — he worked at a pizza joint right across the street, and I would see him. He’d go, like, “You gotta come play with us, man.” It’s different when you and Stone are doing it together than if it’s just Stone.
And he was a really big part of understanding what we had together. He had sort of seen it from a distance. And then Stone had the six or seven ideas together, and we had a couple rehearsals with Matt Cameron, and it was pretty cool. I knew right away … we’d played “Alive” a little bit, but I knew that “Black” and “Alive” were special.
Even pre-vocals?
Yeah, yeah. You could just … such a cool groove and the way that [Stone] plays, like real busy repetition. The “Black” demo, it was so sad. It had such a sadness to it. And after Andy died, I was pretty extroverted in my sadness, and [Stone] was pretty introverted with his sadness. And so I felt like we weren’t really connecting with the loss of Andy, and that song to me sort of connected me to him. And you could argue it’s some of the best music he’s ever made, so, amazing.
Then there’s the picture of Ed with Chris Cornell. Ed was a total unknown at that point and Chris was already, in his way, pretty famous — and yet they’re holding the camera equally.
Well, they’re two peas in a pod. I spent a fair amount of time after Andy died with Chris, and he was a daredevil. Riding our bikes through Discovery Park, these crazy trails, with headlamps on, where you could only see, like, 10 feet in front of you. And Chris and Eric Garcia and me — somebody was wrecking every five or 10 minutes, and it was just lots of laughter.
And Ed has that same thing in him, so the fact that they not only became friends through the music and the creative artistic process, and being a frontman, but also just how they wanted to live. They really wanted to live, and so they were really good together.
And Chris was such a … every once in a while I see photos come up, there’s a great photo of him stage diving, and he’s perfectly at a 45-degree angle about to go into the crowd, and he’s wearing the whole Pearl Jam getup. He’s wearing the red, white, and blue tank top and the white shorts. And then the next day he’d be wearing the full Nirvana getup. And he was such a champion for … he was so proud of what was going on in Seattle because it had been a long time coming, and he was at the forefront of championing everything that was going on in Seattle.
And just always pulling us in … he was such a giving artist in that way. Having him make that Temple record was one of the great gifts of our lives, because I remember he gave me the demo up in [manager Susan Silver’s] office, and I remember thinking “Man, these are complete.” I was like, “You could put these out as-is.” And you could have somebody mix it, and it’d be insane. I was like, “I don’t know what we can add to this.” But he was really adamant about us playing on it, and other than having the idea that he wanted to pull us in and help him sort of process how he was dealing with the loss of Andy — it wasn’t really that planned out. It’s like, “Well, Matt’s a really good drummer. Matt should play on it.” It’s like, “Oh, yeah, Mike, your guitar player, he’s a ripper. He should play on a few songs.” And then over four or five days, the record was kinda done. It was a couple two, three-day sessions.
And sometimes we would come in and he’d be like, “Hey, I got this song. I think I just want you and Matt to play on it,” and that was an all-night thing. And so he played me the song, and I wish I still had … this piece of paper of the arrangement. I couldn’t really figure out what the arrangement was ’cause he was inverting chords. Stuff would sort of turn inside out. And so I played along with it a couple times. By the second time, I finally made it all the way through, and I think I was playing fretless, and he’s like, “That’s great. That’s great.” And it was over before it began. I didn’t even really know the song.
And it’s very similar to how we made that record with Neil Young, where he doesn’t want you to figure it out. He wants you to play from your heart a little bit and don’t overplay. Don’t get too clever or try to show off. Really play it to the song and the melody and the chords.
Speaking of Neil — that tour with Pearl Jam, Neil, and Brendan O’Brien on keyboards. I’ve watched an unofficial video of one of those shows. It was killer.
Yeah, the best. Almost every show he’d come back, like, 20 minutes before, and he’d be like, “Hey, I think we’re gonna do ‘Mr. Soul’ tonight.” And we’d be scrambling around, pulling out a cassette of Decade. And luckily Brendan had played a lot of those songs in bands when he was a kid, so he knew what was going on. But we would literally be back there with our instruments learning the song, and then we’d go out in Berlin and play the song for the first time ever. Just hanging on by the seat of our pants.
But most of those shows, there was at some point in the show where it would just go off. The end of “Cortez.” It would be a different song every night. He would just decide we’re doing a 15-minute version of this song tonight, and hit a couple of his pedals and his amps to get really loud, and you just have to come along, you just have to bring that energy along with him.
And I mean, I know I just said that Lollapalooza was the funnest tour, but that Mirror Ball tour was really special…. We got done and we were like, “Man, we wanna do more of this,” and that was it. Never happened again.
A lot of Neil’s collaborators probably have the same story.
It’s the best. Yeah.
He moves on.
Yeah. Awesome.
You have these great pictures of Matt Cameron, including the one where he’s sleeping.
I love that shot.
His involvement began at the very beginning — he played on those demos, and on the Temple of the Dog record. Did you see his departure from Pearl Jam coming?
No. There’s been talk for six or seven years, and it started once when Soundgarden started up again. And there was a year or two in there where he was burning the candle at both ends. He’s probably away from home for three quarters of the year, which, that stuff’s hard.
And he and I even joke sometimes, we would say, “So what we got, three more years left, right, Jeff?” And he’d be like, “Yeah, yeah. That sounds about right. Three more years.” “So we’ll both be 60.” “Yeah, that’ll be perfect.” And I think it would maybe make the other guys a little bit nervous, but I was joking, and then it turns out that he wasn’t.
And I get it, man. You get to be 60 and we’re lucky to be here at 60 still. But you also have maybe some unrealized dreams and other things you wanna do, and maybe the unrealized dream is you just wanna sit at home with your wife. And I 100 percent understand all of those reasons.
l I look at a band like R.E.M., they were like, I think, late forties or early fifties. It seems like they were older, but they weren’t. They were older to us, but they quit when they were still pretty young. And I remember when they quit, I was like, “Man, that’s the coolest way.”
And at the same time — every once in a while we have a show where I’m like, “Ah, fuck, man.” I’ll put that up against any 25-year-old band, any 25-year-olds out there playing rock music right now. We can still bring it. So for me, as long as we can still bring that top energy to a show, and as long as we get in the studio and everybody’s real excited, and there’s that collaboration, I can’t imagine not doing it, ’cause I just fucking love hanging out with these guys so much. I miss them when we’re apart. We haven’t played a show in a year and a half, so I can’t wait to play the show in September.
Is the plan to just gonna walk out with a drummer at Ohana and that’s how we find out?
Yeah, kinda. Unless something gets leaked, which is always possible. But I hope this is our guy, but I don’t know if it is. We haven’t played a show yet, so it’s pretty hard to be fully committed to…
And if we’re gonna go out and play at the level that we wanna play at, I feel like maybe I only have a few more years of being able to run around like a dipshit and pretend that I’m 28 years old. But for the first time in a long time I’m sort of ready to go play some shows and work a little bit. It’s all a mystery, and that’s good, too, to be in a band for 35 years and have mystery. Nobody really knows what’s gonna happen.
When I spoke to Ed a few months back for his documentary, he said you were woodshedding, between eras, figuring out what’s next. Is that still right?
Yeah. I think everybody’s writing, but we haven’t really written a whole bunch of stuff together. But a couple of things that we have done are really good. And that’s a powerful thing, the time apart you sort of sit with, “Oh, shit, I can’t wait to do this. I’m chomping at the bit.” And it’s gonna take at least a few months.
When did you settle on the drummer coming out with you at the next gig?
Well, it was the first name that came up that we all went, “Well, in our minds, let’s start at the top.” And all of us have really good friends who are drummers, so when Matt decided he wanted to tell everybody that he wasn’t in the band, that was a little bit of a tough thing. But it was probably tough for him, too. The hardest part was telling Richard and John Wicks and my friends who are killer drummers, that we had a guy.
But yeah, it works out, it’s gonna be amazing. That’s all I can say.
There are great early pictures of Mike McCready — you can see your admiration for him. You were photographing him like a star.
And he loved to have his photograph taken. He’s like a comedian, so he’s a really fun guy to hang out with. We both went to Mexico for the first time, both went to Hawaii for the first time together. And some of it was just Seattle was nuts for everybody at that time, and it was just “Hey, we got 10 days off. Let’s go to Mexico.” And so we hung out a lot and we’d play each other music.
It’s the same story. You hear Mick and Keith talk about their relationship, and it was all playing records for each other and making tapes. So Mike was big in that. And Mike was so excited to be there — he still is, but those first couple years, man, he was… I think he felt like maybe his music days were over, and maybe they’re similar for a longer period of time than me. But the fact that he had this outlet for his gift — his gift is so tremendous, and I think he’s one of the most underrated guitar players on the planet.
With Ed, you write about those early phone calls and letters, before he moved out. You were bonding over doing posters and that kind of thing.
Yeah. A lot of my conversation when Stone and I decided to play together was that I was like, “I don’t wanna fuck around.” I think there were people that took that as me being careerist. So I guess I was being careerist in that I wanted to be a musician and I wanted to play music for the rest of my life. I didn’t have any aspirations to be a big rock star and buy fancy cars. In fact, I’ve never done any of that shit.
Jeff Ament
But I did know that I loved music more than anything on the planet. That’s what I wanted to do, and that was my conversation with Stone, and my conversations with Ed. We were just talking about wanting to be in a band with four other guys that cared as much as we each did. And so it was really just taking serious being an artist and all the aspects of being an artist. And the great thing about being in a band is that you can be a painter, and you can be a graphic designer, and you can be a filmmaker, and you can be a photographer.
And so he’s been of great support, and hopefully I’ve been a support to him too. And just fulfilling the artist in you, taking that part of it as far as you can with your abilities and doing it with collaboration. He and I did it a lot on the last tour with the whole staging thing. That was hours and hours. So other than a couple album covers maybe where one guy had a lot going on, for the most part that stayed true all the way back to those first conversations. Sort of us telling each other “We’re ready to work. We wanna work at this so we can play.”
It’s nice seeing photos of Ed smiling in the Nineties. People have this idea it was all misery, but obviously it couldn’t have been.
Yeah, and even at the peak of whatever the public perception of our misery — there’s a picture of us underneath Red Rocks where I set the timer up. There’s a rock and I think my bike is in the background, and I ran over and I think I’m trying to act natural, but I look like I’m posing for the shot. But even in that picture, it almost looks like Mike said something. He’s got maybe a cigarette in his mouth, and everybody’s kinda laughing. And that was like Vitalogy, probably the peak of the insanity. We never lost our ability to have fun and joke around and make it light, and Mike and Stone were kings of that, realizing a tense moment and making a joke.
The pictures from Bill Clinton’s Oval Office are wild — a reminder of what crazy lives you guys have had.
You know the amazing thing is, a year ago, my friend Pat Williams, who was a congressman here in Montana, passed away and there was a funeral, and this lady came up to me. I can’t remember her name now, but she’s like, “Oh, I was the White House staff photographer.” And she goes, “I have a great photo of you guys.” And I said, “Oh yeah, I have a bunch of photos too.” She goes, “Yeah, I was like, ‘We were telling you you can’t take photos in here.’”
And I don’t really remember that, but I do remember at that time being “You invited us here. We didn’t ask to come here, so I’m gonna do whatever the fuck I want.” And so I have two rolls of film from that trip and a bunch of great pictures of us with Mudhoney before we got split up. And Bill didn’t care, man. Bill was like, “Where do you wanna go? I’ll take you wherever you wanna go.” “Can we go to the War Room?” “Yeah, sure. Let’s go to the War Room.” Pretty cool.
It’s a series of time capsules. I think the fans will really enjoy it.
Yeah. My brother thinks so. I knew there were some photos in there, especially the studio stuff from Vs. and Vitalogy, and even No Code, and I just knew I wanted that saved so at some point down the line somebody would have an archive of that stuff.
As anybody knows who digitizes old film, it was like a team of three, four people, hundreds and hundreds of hours. Probably 20 to 45 minutes per photo, just trying to get the stuff cleaned up. So it was a lot of work, but it’s so great to have it done. It’s so great to know that I don’t have to worry about that stuff anymore, ’cause it was just in two boxes in my basement. And I would look at it and go like, “Oh my God, I should get those things off the ground. If there’s a flood, those are screwed.”
Congrats on it again. From talking to you and to Ed, it sounds like the hope is an album next year, then a tour. Is that the thinking?
I mean, I would love that. We’re due. We have some new energy and we have a opportunity to use that energy to the fullest and turn it into something different and something great.
And yeah, Stone and I, it’s the same as it’s always been with Stone. We have these conversations every week or two where it’s like, “Ah, we could do this and we can do this,” and it’s like, “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” But the not knowing is super exciting, and we can’t wait to play. We just had a bunch of rehearsals. It was fucking killer.
But there’s a feeling still doing it, and if you can still do it at a high level, there’s so much gratitude that everybody’s working so hard to play great. It’s how I felt putting the book together. The more that I looked at these photos, all of a sudden I was just so grateful for everybody in the band, and the people that were around us, and [manager] Kelly [Curtis] and Cameron Crowe and Lance and all the people that we made records with. Brendan, [bass tech and equipment manager] George Webb, [original tour manager] Eric Johnson. Just people that were such a huge part of the ride and made the ride so much fun, and it’s just like fucking lucky me, lucky us, man. That not only did we get to be musicians and artists, but we were surrounded by such fucking cool people. Really rad humans that inspired us. It’s just been the greatest.
So hopefully that comes off in the writing of the book. Just how grateful I am to have the best collaborators and friends that a person could ever hope for.
I’m excited to see what you guys do next.
Me too!
