0.13 Dark pop  (Page 10/13)

Curtis was sitting glumly alone in his office, smoking cigarette after cigarette, at a desk facing a wall on which was hung a guitar that Cobain had smashed at the end of a Nirvana show. He looked like he was supposed to look about 30 but had been aged prematurely by chain-smoking and the stresses of his job.

Before I could sit down, he launched into his tale.

During its salad days, Pearl Jam’s members resolved to keep their concert ticket prices low no matter how popular they became. Now the most popular band in the world, they were in a position where they could more or less name their price. And rock-music prices were high: The Eagles, for example, sold out two performances in the Tacoma Dome, the Seattle area’s most popular large concert venue, with ticket prices of $45, $60, and $85 that year. But Pearl Jam wanted its shows to be affordable to kids, and accordingly decided to set an $18 maximum ticket price. They first ran afoul of TicketMaster when they decided to stage some free Seattle-area performances over the 1992 Labor Day weekend. TicketMaster wanted to assess a $1 service charge for the free tickets, and the band balked, finally deciding to distribute its own tickets. For its 1993 tour, Pearl Jam charged $18 per ticket and forced souvenir and T-shirt vendors to lower their prices, absorbing a loss in income to the band that promoters estimated at $2 million.

In 1994, Pearl Jam went after TicketMaster, which had been charging between $4 and $8 in service charges for $18 Pearl Jam tickets. The band wanted TicketMaster to charge $1.80 or less, and when TicketMaster refused, Pearl Jam decided to tour without using the company for any of its concerts. After performing in New York and Detroit, the band discovered that it couldn’t get into any more venues because TicketMaster had contracts with the venues stipulating that they never stage a show without using TicketMaster as their exclusive ticket distributor. If Pearl Jam wanted to stage concerts using a different distributor, it would have to do so in venues it somehow built itself. The band ended up canceling its 1994 tour. “It’s possible to do a tour without TicketMaster,” Curtis told me, “but it’s an incredible pain in the ass.” Pearl Jam decided to spend a year building a TicketMaster-free infrastructure in the form of outdoor venues that, Curtis said, “we’ll build from the ground up.”

The band also filed a complaint with the U.S. Justice Department, and two of its members found themselves testifying in 1994 before a Congressional Committee. When Curtis and guitarists Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament flew to Washington to testify, they decided to spend their free time at the Holocaust Museum. Admission to the museum was free, but there was a $3 service charge for the tickets—distributed by TicketMaster. “That blew me away,” said Curtis. “They had a service charge for a free ticket into the Holocaust Museum .”

Pearl Jam had always been a little at odds with the other Seattle bands, partly because Vedder, a southern Californian, was a latecomer to the scene, hiring on with the band after Andrew Wood’s death just as the Nirvana juggernaut was taking off. When world media started descending on Seattle in 1991, Vedder proved the most talkative, and he emerged in magazines and television broadcasts as the spokesman for and leading public figure in the Seattle “scene”—his relative lack of familiarity with it notwithstanding. Most other grunge musicians regarded Vedder’s subsequent avowed discomfort with celebrity as a pose similar to his Californian’s pose as a Seattleite—particularly since he displayed his angst so publicly. After the Screaming Trees’ Van Conner unburdened himself to me about his travails, he begged me not to make too big a deal of his sorrows. “I don’t want to come off sounding like Eddie Vedder crying about how ‘It’s such hell being a rock star,’” he said, mock-bleating.