Good for him, good for the band. Listening to '98 Great Woods II... Who would have imagined the band to be where they are now? Tried listening to '05 Philly, but I don't really enjoy the bootlegs since 2003

matt cameron fueled my love for this band and made them more interesting for me. thanks matt.

I'd have rather had Jack.

its obvious where this thread will go so i just want to say hi to ike and dirty frank and good luck with your thread.

ibtalessiana?

evacuation pwns whale song

Angel, Go and WMA > evacuation pwns whale song. But the band has never sounded better live than with Matt in the band.

with all due respect, sans angel, go and wma both had all the band members input on it though...so...

anyways. this isnt a pissing contest. I love mat cameron and its all personal preference. he is fucking incredible live and anyone that says he is a too repetitive live is not really listening.

god im a loser, its saturday night.

Yeah, me too. But...I sometimes fail to give Mr Cameron the props he deserves. He's a fine drummer.

I still prefer Jack, though.

So that makes matt the drummer to stay with the band the longest. Will history remember Pearl Jam as having Matt Cameron as their primary drummer, after a few years of feeling out other guys? Sometimes I think I prefer Jack. Especially when I hear songs like In My Tree from shows pre-matt. But then again when go back and listen to VS and hear the tenacity of Dave A's drumming I think to myself "what if?".

Are you sure it was May that he joined? That's an awfully short time before touring to learn all the songs.

I didn't even know he was the drummer until the tour had started.

I think he was asked to join the band in April.

here's the Rumor Pit from May 1998:


May 6, 1998 - Matt Cameron and Pearl Jam

Matt Cameron, formerly of Soundgarden and filling in for Jack Irons on the tour this summer, took a break from PJ rehearsals to chat with fans at boomtheory.com. [full transcript at boomtheory.com] During the nearly 90-minute chat, Matt also fielded some questions about playing with Pearl Jam and the upcoming summer tour.

The recent appearance on the David Letterman show was fun but "too damn cold," said Matt. Just about everyone who's either been on the show or in the studio inevitably comments on the temperature of the Ed Sullivan Theater. We think it's to keep all that ham from spoiling. In preparing for the upcoming shows Matt said he'll learn 60 songs and do a lot of rehearsing with PJ. "So far my favorite PJ song is 'Faithfull'", he said when asked which PJ song he liked to play. He also revealed that he'd be helping out with backup vocals this summer.

Ever charming and tactful to boot, when Matt was asked who he'd rather have on vocals in his 'ultimate band', Eddie Vedder or Chris Cornell (of Soundgarden), he said, "To have the ultimate uber supergroup I would have both Chris and Eddie as my singers. My two favorite rock singers." Got to love him...

Matt also hinted that if Pearl Jam does a Soundgarden cover this summer, it could be "Room A Thousand Years Wide." He said he'd also rehearsed "Leaving Here." [a rockin' Holland/Dozier/Holland song covered by the early Who as the High Numbers that PJ often plays at the end of their sets]. Later, during the chat, one sports fanatic asked if Matt could kick Jeff Ament's butt in basketball and Matt replied, "No. He's a good player." We're sure the b-ball games will be interesting as the summer goes on.

One of our favorite answers was about what it takes to be a great drummer, hard work, talent or just destiny, wherein Matt replied, "Passion to play music." Since we have a passion to listen to great music, we're eagerly counting the days until the tour begins... Thanks for sharing, Matt.

I like having Matt around, if for no other reason than he enabled the band to successfully become "The Next Grateful Dead."

How's that?

Wasn't that because of the fan base?

every other drummer suffered from exhaustion and capel tunnel syndrome...

so no, not all just cause of the fans. matt had enabled them to hit the road more vigorously, in ways.

To explicate "more vigorously", the shear number of dates per tour, the continents toured each tour, AND the length of each concert.

PJ went from a band playing 30 shows per tour on two continents in '95 and '96, to 70+ shows on two contients in '98 and eventually 3 continents for their most recent tour. Ticketmaster factors into the equation for the low number of shows with Jack, but given that with exception of Soldier Field and Randall's Island, most shows with Jack were lucky to reach the 2 hour mark and hung around 1:30 or 1:45-- with Matt, 2 hours minimum is the norm.

I've been wondering lately "what if" about the '98 tour if Jack had been around-- it almost feels like his departure would have been inevitable, with the number of shows PJ had arranged for their summer tour under the presupposition Jack was their drummer-- which leaves me and my conspiracy self to wonder if it was known ahead of time he was leaving, and which SVT kind of mystifies at a few points, namely "action, Jack" and he doesn't show up AND when Ed says, "People say it's like a marriage, but it's not like a marriage... Someone could walk in here and say, 'I'm going to take a year off,' and what could we do" while Jack is in the foreground while Ed is speaking.

Then there is the empirical, albeit anecdotal... there was that poster here after the Santa Barbara show where Jack played in 2003 that said they met with Jack after the show and spoke with him and he said his departure in '98 was abrupt and everyone in the band was pretty annoyed and pissed off and didn't speak with him for a while.

Also, it's odd-- on many of the '98 dates in the US with Cameron drumming, they still played Red Dot before the band took the stage which was a JACK song, AND in the above interview, Cameron sounds like he's just filling in, like he's not their drummer-- just helping out...

Even after Roskilde, he wasn't committed to joining permanently. It wasn't until they were doing promotion for Riot Act that he specifically said that he was "in" for good.

From Matt, in the Ten Past Ten article from Spin:

End of tour, Eddie said, "Hey, man, you want to join?" I said, "Let me think about it." So I said, "I'll do a record, do a tour, if you wouldn't mind me doing it that way." I haven't really joined them long-term.

http://www.fivehorizons.com/archive/art ... n801.shtml