Jeff Ament Opens Up on Pearl Jam Photos, Cameron Exit, New Drummer

Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament published a book of photographs on Sept. 25 — the same night the band played its first show since Matt Cameron's departure, with longtime Paul McCartney drummer Abe Laboriel Jr. behind the kit at the Ohana Festival.

The book, Since Forever, created with Ament's brother, designer Barry Ament, collects more than 250 black-and-white photos of his bandmates, shot since the early Nineties, alongside his written reflections. Ament's images are already familiar to fans: he shot the sheep close-up on the cover of 1993's Vs., as well as the covers of 1998's Yield, 2002's Riot Act, and the 2003 rarities collection Lost Dogs.

In a new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now hosted by Brian Hiatt, Ament traced the stories behind the photos and the band's next chapter.

A camera sold for $100

Ament sold his camera to move to Seattle in 1983. "Those first two, three years that I lived in Seattle, there's literally, like, five pictures," he says. "I had to sell my camera to move to Seattle. That was the high-dollar item. I think I got 100 bucks for it or something, which was a lot of money in 1983."

The drought ended when Cameron Crowe brought him into the art department for Singles. "They needed pictures of something, and I said, 'I don't have a camera,' and they were like, 'Go get a camera.' … 'Dude, just go get a camera and charge it to the movie.' And I was like, 'I can do that?'"

His DIY streak solidified when he learned a label-hired photographer might charge $8,000 for an hour, with Pearl Jam footing at least half the bill. "There was like that frugal DIY part of me that was like, 'That's ridiculous, man. … That's four times more than my camera equipment's worth. Like, I can do this shit.'"

Vedder, shirtless in the booth

Digitizing contact sheets from the Ten sessions, Ament discovered photos of a shirtless Eddie Vedder singing in the vocal booth — images he never cleared with the band. "Hopefully he's cool with me. I didn't run any of this [by them]," he says. As for the missing shirt: "'Cause it was fucking hot, man. Those isolation rooms, they didn't have any air in them, so I'm surprised he didn't have his Speedo on."

The Vs. sheep followed him along a fence on a Montana farm. "I could tell that this one sheep was following me along the fence, so I just started taking pictures of it," he says. Only when the contact sheet came back did he think, "Wow, that'd be a great cover" — a fit with the us-against-the-machine mood after they'd written "Animal." For the record, Ament insists it's a sheep, not an Angora goat.

Learning Neil Young songs backstage

On the 1995 Mirror Ball tour with Neil Young, songs arrived 20 minutes before showtime. "Almost every show he'd come back like 20 minutes before the show and he'd be like, 'Hey, think we're gonna do "Mr. Soul" tonight,'" Ament recalls. "We would literally be back there with our instruments, learning the song, and then we'd go out in Berlin and play the song for the first time ever. Just hanging on by the seat of our pants." Onstage, Young would simply decide, "We're doing a 15-minute version of this song tonight."

Cameron wasn't joking

Ament and Matt Cameron used to joke they had about three years left in the band. "I was joking, and then it turns out that he wasn't," Ament says. "You get to be 60 and we're lucky to be here at 60 still. But you also have, like, maybe some unrealized dreams and other things you wanna do, and maybe the unrealized dream is like you just wanna sit at home with your wife."

Ament isn't ready to stop. "Every once in a while we have a show where I'm like, 'Ah, fuck, man. I'll put that up against any 25-year-old band,'" he says. "I just fucking love hanging out with these guys so much."

The new drummer

The band's new drummer, he says, was everyone's first choice: "It was the first name that came up. … In our minds, let's start at the top." The hardest part was telling his "friends who are, like, killer drummers that we had a guy." Speaking before the Ohana reveal — where Vedder told the crowd Laboriel was helping out for the night — Ament stopped short of calling it permanent: "I hope this is our guy, but I don't know if it is. We haven't played a show yet, so it's pretty hard to be fully committed."

Asked whether the new drummer might be a robot, he played along, referencing the band's endless takes of "Even Flow": "We finally got the 'Even Flow' thing figured out. … We programmed it into this drum machine. It's amazing. You're gonna love it."

Ament wants Pearl Jam to record and tour next year. "We're sort of due. … We have some new energy, and like, we just have an opportunity to use that energy to the fullest and turn it into something different and something great," he says. Writing has only just begun — "a couple of things that we have done are really good" — and he expects it to take at least a few months. He and Stone Gossard weigh options in regular conversations that always end the same way: "Let's not get ahead of ourselves."

How quickly that new energy converts into a record — and whether Laboriel becomes permanent — will define Pearl Jam's next chapter.