Is Pearl Jam’s Shooting Star On A Downward Spiral?

The five members of Pearl Jam will look a lot more comfortable in 24 hours when they perform before 8,000 cheering fans at the Palau Dels Esports arena than they do now as they gather after dinner in the lounge of their hotel for an interview.

On an off night in one of the most glamorous cities on any European tour itinerary, lead singer Eddie Vedder and his equally media-shy mates would rather be almost anywhere else. Yet Pearl Jam knows that it has some explaining to do.

The question throughout the rock world: Are Pearl Jam’s days as a multiplatinum act over?

With album sales slumping and its credibility being questioned, Pearl Jam is the subject of widespread discussion.

Quipped one industry veteran: “Pearl Jam always said they didn’t want to be stars. Well, it looks they may soon have their wish.”

That possibility seemed unthinkable as recently as six months ago when the Seattle band was the toast of the record industry, having racked up $250 million in album sales in five years despite turning its back on videos, interviews, marathon tours and other promotional activities long considered essential to success in the pop world.

Pearl Jam seemed to feel invincible when it declared war in 1994 on Ticketmaster, vowing to use alternative ticketing systems rather than support a company that it maintained charged fans excessive service fees - a move Ticketmaster called a “marketing ploy.”

Then things appeared to start unraveling.

The first hint of trouble was the grumbling last year of frustrated fans who complained they couldn’t see Pearl Jam live. Many blamed the group’s “obsession” with Ticketmaster for the group’s low concert profile.

To compound matters, the band’s reputation was hurt when - unable to play in premier rock venues such as the Forum in Los Angeles because those facilities have exclusive contracts with Ticketmaster - the band sometimes scheduled its few dates in out-of-the-way places that proved to be logistical nightmares. The band was called everything from arrogant to naive.

The shock, however, came in September when the group’s fourth album, “No Code,” sold only 367,000 copies in the United States in its first week. That was the seventh-highest opening week total of the year, but a whopping 61 percent drop from the group’s 1993 high of 950,000 first-week sales for “Vs.”

And the sales of “No Code” didn’t pick up. Two weeks ago, the album - which retailers had counted on being one of the hot holiday sellers - sold 31,000 copies, making it just No. 83 on the national charts. Total U.S. sales to date: about 1.1 million.

Rolling Stone magazine went for the jugular in an October cover story that suggested that Vedder, who has spoken in interviews of a troubled childhood, was actually a popular student in high school, active in drama classes. The implication was his whole anti-rock-star persona was an act.

To some, all these events suggest that Pearl Jam is at a crisis point - at least commercially.

“I think they are still a very, very important band culturally, but they’ve got to rethink the way they promote themselves if they want to continue to be one of the big players,” said one executive who has no business ties to the band or its label, Epic Records. “The way it is now, they are cutting themselves off from their fans. With some changes, however, they could be as big as ever. It’s their choice.”

In the Barcelona hotel lounge, the band - Vedder, guitarists Stone Gossard and Mike McCready, bassist Jeff Ament and drummer Jack Irons - left little doubt about their position.

They said they feel good about their brief U.S. and European tours and are looking forward to doing more dates in the United States next spring and summer. Though they still won’t use Ticketmaster, they will work with regional ticket companies in some markets, thus allowing them to play more conventional rock venues.

But no, Pearl Jam doesn’t plan on the kind of marathon tours - or other extensive promotional activities - that industry executives believe are required to guarantee multi-platinum sales.

“I guess what has happened to us with this record shows that promotion really does matter, just like everybody told us,” Vedder says during the group interview. “If you don’t operate in that framework, which we don’t, it’s obvious that you won’t sell as many records. And that’s fine. We expected this to happen much sooner than it has.

“To us, it’s about choices and lifestyles. Do you want to spend your time on the road and doing promotion, or do you spend your time making (new) music and living your life? At the end of the day, what is most important? To us, I’d like to think it’s our music and the quality of our lives.”

For all the industry debate over Pearl Jam back in the States, the band members are surprisingly upbeat as they step onstage at the arena here.

To the delight of cheering fans, Vedder speaks only in Spanish between songs - simple greetings such as “Hola! Cmo ests?” and “Nosotros estamos muy bien.”

When the band returns for the final encore, however, the musicians throw out the night’s high-energy set list and close with a sweet, uplifting tune from “No Code.” The song - “Around the Bend” - means a lot to Vedder, and he doesn’t know enough Spanish to introduce it that way, so he resorts to English.

“This one’s a lullaby,” he says of the song, which he wrote for drummer Irons’ infant son. “So, go home and sleep peacefully … have nice dreams.”

That same positive spirit was felt earlier in the night during “Alive,” one of the 1991 Pearl Jam songs that helped establish the group in the ‘90s as the new voice of disaffected American youth.

Instead of ending the song with “I’m still alive,” as he does on record, Vedder, who often stands at the microphone with his eyes closed while he sings, pointedly looked out at the crowd as he changed the line to “We’re still alive … we’re still alive.”

Vedder was emphasizing the song’s self-affirmation message, but it’s tempting to think that he was singing about Pearl Jam itself.

In a series of interviews that stretched nearly five hours, the group spoke candidly about the tensions that almost tore the band apart during the making of the “Vitalogy” album in 1994 and the showdown last year in San Francisco that finally brought it back together.

“All the success happened so fast that it took a while for us to get our balance, to get past all the bickering and the infighting - and we are still learning,” said guitarist Gossard the night before the concert.

“I think we’ve learned something about long-term relationships and pulling together, and I feel good about it. … There was a time around ‘Vitalogy’ when I didn’t know if Pearl Jam had a future. It feels like a band now. We realize what a great opportunity we have to make music together, and we don’t want to throw that away.”

On the question of touring, the group expects to do 30 to 40 shows in the United States next year.

Why not 75 to 100 shows, which would be normal for a band of its size? “I think touring is always going to be a compromise,” says bassist Ament. “Eddie and Jack are both married and they don’t like to tour a lot, while some of us would probably like to tour more. I can go either way.

“The Ticketmaster issue has gotten the most attention, but it was just one piece of the puzzle. We also tried to work with arenas to keep the price of T-shirts down, and we tried to put up special barricades at shows that would make it safer for the fans. It was how we felt a band should be.”

Despite the generally upbeat mood in the band, Vedder says his personal battle is not over. He is proud of the new album, and he has enjoyed the U.S. and European tours. Yet he still carries the emotional scars of that first explosion of stardom - which has led to a total disruption of his personal life, including stalkers at his house in Seattle.

“Good days, bad days,” he says, flashing a smile. “Sometimes I think of how far I’ve come from the teenager sitting on the bed in San Diego writing ‘Better Man’ and wondering if anyone would ever even hear it. But then there are times when it just all seems too much.”

Vedder and the rest of the band feel more comfortable talking about the music, which has taken a deeper and more personal tone since Vedder wrote the spiritually tinged song “The Long Road” last year after the death of Clayton Liggett, the drama teacher who was his favorite instructor at San Dieguito Union High School in Encinitas.

Overlooked in all of the questioning of Pearl Jam’s sales punch is that the group’s music has matured dramatically, the unrelenting teen angst of the first two albums now augmented with a more universal and, in the best sense of the term, classic rock vision.

Of the searching, introspective tone of such songs as “Off He Goes” and “Present Tense,” Vedder says, “I think there’s a little self-examination in those songs, something that a lot of my friends are going through too, as they approach 30.”

Listening to Vedder, Ament nods.

“Except for a few moments on the first record, a lot of times Eddie’s lyrics were just stories to me,” the bassist says. “I knew he was a great writer and there was a lot passion behind the lyrics, but I didn’t always relate to them. On this record, it’s like my own thoughts are in the songs. … In some ways, it’s like the band’s story. It’s about growing up.”