Band is back and is looking for the mainstream spotlight

The band will abandon its anti-establishment status.
By BRIAN McCOLLUM
DETROIT FREE PRESS
"We're gonna play the game now."
Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready doesn't pause when he says it. He doesn't chuckle, and he's not pulling your leg. McCready is dead earnest when he proclaims that his band -- which used to avoid talk of success and fame like it was feverish -- is ready to head out of the rock wilderness and enjoy some mainstream sunlight. Pearl Jam is going to play the game now.
Yes, that Pearl Jam. The one whose lead singer infamously accepted a Grammy in 1996 by mumbling to a theater full of music bigwigs, "Thanks, I guess." The one that quit making videos after 1991, that avoided the media for years, that stubbornly released albums of increasing weirdness while moving further away from the multiplatinum riff-rock of 1991's "Ten."
But 2006, it's clear, is a new start for the old band. After 15 years with Sony Music, Pearl Jam has a fresh label home at J Records, run by golden-eared impresario Clive Davis, best known for making Whitney Houston a pop star and remaking Carlos Santana into one. The Seattle quintet's new record -- titled, in an appropriate square-one sort of way, "Pearl Jam" -- debuted last month at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart. And band members such as McCready aren't just talking with the press again, they're talking about the thrill that comes when the masses like your music.
"There's a new energy to it: The record label seems to be into it a lot. People are keying into the songs. Radio is picking it up. We honestly didn't think we'd be at this point again, and it's a pleasant, pleasant surprise."
Such words might have been regarded as heresy in some corners of the Pearl Jam camp a few years ago. In the late '90s, as groups such as Silverchair and Creed made a home at rock radio, McCready and his bandmates -- vocalist Eddie Vedder, guitarist Stone Gossard, bassist Jeff Ament and drummer Matt Cameron -- launched a series of maverick albums that seemed to disavow the alternative-gone-mainstream genre Pearl Jam had helped create.
Those records -- 1998's "Yield," 2000's "Binaural," 2002's "Riot Act" -- all enjoyed Top 5 debuts, thanks in large part to a fan base that became condensed to its smaller but most loyal core. None, though, scaled the heights achieved by the band's first three albums, each of which had sold more than 5 million copies while delivering batches of hit singles.
If Pearl Jam had once hovered near Biggest Band in the World status -- an idea that seemed plausible as late as 1994 -- then it clipped its own wings. The group's drawn-out battle against Ticketmaster for that company's perceived monopoly on ticket sales, an ultimately futile campaign that took Pearl Jam out of America's biggest venues at the height of its career, was perhaps the biggest symbol of the group's bent for self-sacrifice.
It also helped defuse criticism that the band's anti-establishment stance was mere posturing from a second-string Nirvana. Pearl Jam's return to center stage of the rock world isn't the only thing that harkens back to the heady early days: The group's new album has been widely portrayed as a reclamation of the big, riff-rich Pearl Jam sound that dominated such albums as "Ten" and "Vs."