Brian Hiatt
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While Pearl Jam was conquering the world in its early days, Jeff Ament always had his camera on hand. Jeff Ament Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament is also a photographer, and you already know his work: He shot the sheep close-up on the cover of 1993’s Vs., as well as the covers of 1998’s Yield, 2002’s Riot Act, and the 2003 rarities collection Lost Dogs. He’s also been turning his camera on his bandmates since the early Nineties. His excellent new book, Since Forever — created with his brother, designer Barry Ament — collects more than 250 of those black-and-white photos, along with his written reflections.
The book came out Sept. 25, the same night Pearl Jam played their first show since Matt Cameron left, a surprise appearance at the Ohana Festival — with longtime Paul McCartney drummer Abe Laboriel Jr. behind the kit. Vedder told the crowd Laboriel was helping out for the night, and the band hasn’t said whether he’s joined for good. Pearl Jam headline the festival tonight.
In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Ament breaks down the stories behind the photos in Since Forever, and goes deep on Pearl Jam’s early days, touring with Neil Young, the band’s next chapter, and much more. To hear the whole episode, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above. Here are some highlights from the discussion:
Ament sold his camera to move to Seattle in 1983, and only got a new one when the Singles production told him to charge it to the movie. “Those first two, three years that I lived in Seattle, there’s literally, like, five pictures,” Ament says. “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 or something, which was a lot of money in 1983.” That changed when Cameron Crowe brought him into the art department for Singles. “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?'”
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Ament’s DIY streak kicked in when he learned that a photographer hired by the label might charge $8,000 for an hour, and that Pearl Jam was footing at least half the bill. “The funny thing is, a lot of that early stuff, I wasn’t trying to document,” Ament says. “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. And even with album covers, it became apparent early on, like, you know, 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 a photographer charged like $8,000 or something for an hour. And there was like that frugal DIY part of me that was like, ‘That’s ridiculous, man. Like, that’s four times more than my camera equipment’s worth. Like, I can do this shit.'” Ament was surprised to see he had shot photos of a shirtless Eddie Vedder in the vocal booth during the recording sessions for Ten. “Looking at the contact sheets, I didn’t know what those photos were,” Ament says. “You’re just going like, ‘Man, that’s weird. There’s three photos in a row of, like, 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.” He didn’t clear the shots with the band. “Hopefully he’s cool with me,” he says. “I didn’t run any of this [by them].” As for the missing shirt: “‘Cause it was fucking hot, man. Those isolation rooms, they 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…”
The sheep on the cover of Vs. was following Ament along a fence on a Montana farm. He had no idea he was shooting an album cover. “I could tell that this one sheep was following me along the fence, so I just started taking pictures of it, and it just kept trying to get through the fence,” Ament says. “It was only when I got the contact sheet back, I was like, ‘Wow, that’d be a great cover,’ ’cause 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, you know, whatever the machine. And so it sort of felt … so much more natural than the first album cover that was, you know, very literal. … It was cool to put the whole contact sheet, or most of the contact sheet, in there just to show people that I wasted a whole roll of film on that.” For the record, Ament thinks it’s a sheep, not an Angora goat, as some accounts have it.
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When Pearl Jam backed Neil Young on the 1995 Mirror Ball tour, Young would spring songs on them 20 minutes before showtime. “Almost every show he’d come back like 20 minutes before the show and he’d be like, ‘Hey, think we’re gonna do “Mr. Soul” tonight,'” Ament says. “And we’d be scrambling around, like, pulling out a cassette of Decade. … Luckily Brendan [O’Brien] had played a lot of those songs in bands when he was a kid, so he sort of 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.” Young took the same approach onstage: “He would just decide, like, ‘We’re doing a 15-minute version of this song tonight,’ and sort of, like, hit a couple of his pedals and his amps would get really loud, and you just have to come along.”
Ament and Matt Cameron used to joke that they had about three years left in Pearl Jam. Ament was kidding. Cameron, it turned out, wasn’t. “He and I even joked sometimes, like we would say, like, ‘So what we got, like three more years left …?’ And he’d be like, ‘Yeah, yeah. That sounds about right. Three more years.’ Like, ‘So we’ll both be 60. Yeah, that’ll be perfect,'” Ament says. “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, like, maybe some unrealized dreams and other things you wanna do, and maybe the unrealized dream is like you just wanna sit at home with your wife. Could be just as simple as that.” Still, Ament isn’t ready to stop. “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,'” he says. “I just fucking love hanging out with these guys so much.”
Pearl Jam’s new drummer was everyone’s first choice. “It was the first name that came up. … In our minds, let’s start at the top,” Ament says. “And all of us have, like, really good friends who are drummers. … The hardest part was, like, telling … my friends who are, like, killer drummers that we had a guy.” Speaking before the reveal, Ament wasn’t ready to call it permanent: “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.” When it’s suggested the new drummer might turn out to be a robot, Ament plays along, referring to the band’s endless takes of “Even Flow”: “We finally got the ‘Even Flow’ thing figured out. It really sits back on the choruses. We programmed it into this drum machine. It’s amazing. You’re gonna love it.”
Ament wants Pearl Jam to make a new album and tour next year. “I would love that,” he says of the possibility. “We’re sort of due. … It’s like we have some new energy, and like, we just have an opportunity to use that energy to the fullest and turn it into something different and something great.” The band has only just started writing new music. “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. So I think we understand the potential. … The time apart, you sort of sit with, like, ‘Oh, shit, I can’t wait to do this.’ I’m chomping at the bit. … But it’s gonna take a little bit of time, at least a few months.” He and Stone Gossard have been talking it through. “It’s the same as it’s always been with Stone,” he says. “We have these conversations every week or two where it’s like, ‘Ah, we could do this, we could do this.’ And it’s like, ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.'”
