Eddie Vedder

says that Pearl Jam did not appreciate the strain the fight with Ticketmaster

would place on the band. "You have to understand, this was just one thing of

many that is important to me," he said in a recent telephone conversation.

"The service fees that are added to the ticket is just one small detail when

you're putting on a tour like this. And it turned into a big fucking deal."

Partly to keep the matter in perspective, partly because of the band's

searching desire to be judged solely by its music, Vedder & Co. made a

crucial decision: They would not wage their battle in the press. "This is our

dream, our naive vision," he said with a touch of irony. "What we do is play

music."

In retrospect, this may have been a strategic error of some proportion. Most

seriously, absent Vedder's glamour, the press passed on the story. While

Chuck Phillips at the Los Angeles Times and Eric Boehlert at

Billboard aggressively exposed Ticketmaster's schemes, no one else

did. [Editor's note: Not quite. ATN published a number of reports about

Ticketmaster's shenanigans during the past months; additionally, several

years ago ATN editor Michael Goldberg wrote about Ticketmaster's high prices,

as well as other ticket related issues.] The New York Times, Wall

Street Journal and USA Today barely noticed the story. Most

shockingly, the music press slept. Despite the high profile opponents and the

millions of consumer dollars at stake, Rolling Stone virtually ignored

the issue. Spin sucked its thumb, as did Musician.

Why didn't Vedder use his celebrity to publicize his campaign? "I had to

protect the music," he insisted. "I'm just someone who plays music. I'm not

someone who comes out of a newspaper waving a flag." Probe Vedder on the

issue and you come up flat against a deep distrust of his own celebrity: "I

just thought that if I just ignore it and act like it doesn't exist, it

wouldn't exist."

Ticketmaster's publicity apparatus, by contrast, percolated nicely. The

company repeatedly made the (unanswered) charge that Pearl Jam was engaging

in a sophisticated publicity stunt. "How can it be a publicity stunt," Vedder

asked, "when [I'm turning down] every newspaper and magazine in America,

including Good Housekeeping, wanting to put me on the cover?"

By 1995, the pressures of mounting a Ticketmaster-less tour--including the

tough search for arenas that did not have Ticketmaster contracts but also

creating incontrovertibly secure environments in some nontraditional

venues--grew. The band nearly despaired when it could find no place to play

in all of Southern California, but they finally cobbled together 13 dates.

Even then, the gods did not take pity on the band. The second show of the

tour was rained out. Then came a watershed appearance before 50,000 fans in

San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. A by-all-accounts ashen Vedder could play

only seven songs.

"I get hit with a random case of food poisoning," Vedder said. "I was out of

it. It wasn't my decision, but when I was told they wanted to cancel the

dates, I said 'Hey, whatever.' "

Finally, Vedder:

damning story told to Billboard by Aerosmith manager Tim Collins.

Collins approached Ticketmaster prez Fred Rosen about lowering service

charges for an Aerosmith tour. Rosen's counter proposal: "I'll tell you what

I'll do. Let's raise the service charge a dollar, and I'll split it with

you." Vedder's point: "For every Aerosmith story there's a million bands we

didn't hear about it from. What happened with the next band? They cut a

deal."