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July 18-25 1996
It's easy to forget sometimes that Pearl Jam are more than just the sum of Eddie Vedder's vocal exertions and brooding moods, that other significant parts of the equation were in place long before he migrated north to Seattle. Go back and listen to Mother Love Bone -- the group Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament and guitarist Stone Gossard were ready to conquer the world with until singer Andrew Wood OD'd -- and you'll hear what might have been: the cocksure sound of a band who wouldn't have been the least bit put off by fame or the kind of rock-and-roll indulgences Pearl Jam now righteously shun.
Ament hasn't forgotten about those days, or about how much fun they were on a purely musical level. He's just been channeling that energy into the side project he brought to the Lansdowne Street Playhouse for a low-key gig last week. The outfit is called Three Fish, and for the past couple years it's been a sanctuary where Ament has been jamming and, from the sound of it, smoking bushels of pot with a dreadlocked South African singer/guitarist named Robbi Robb and hard-hitting Seattle drummer Richard Stuverud.
The black-and-white snapshots on the inside cover of Three Fish's homonymous Epic debut say more about the band than do the words to "The Story of the Three Fish," a parable by the poet Rumi that Robb recites on the disc. The photos capture Ament, Robb, and Stuverud on a rustic vacation in what looks like Mexico or South America, kneeling solemnly in front of a church one minute and tossing back a couple of cold ones on the beach the next. There are heavy spiritual overtones that hover like dark thunderclouds over the dozen tracks on Three Fish, raining reverb and Eastern-tinged melodies on Robb's banshee wail of a voice, giving a quasi-religious tone to the Zeppelin-esque metallic thrust of "Silence at the Bottom" and to the mellow, spacy textures of "Here in the Darkness." But there's also a sense that toying with the exotic sounds of the Orient, pounding on imported Djembe drums, and adding little mellotron flourishes to psychedelic rock is these guys' idea of kicking back and having some fun.
As if to reinforce that impression, Ament introduced Robb to the ample yet well-under-capacity crowd at the Lansdowne Street Playhouse as "a guy who's made me laugh, even during some difficult times." With his torn Jimi Hendrix T-shirt, arena-rock stage moves, and a voice that sounds like a cross between Robert Plant and Perry Farrell, Robb is a bit of a clownish presence on stage. He shook his tangled mane of blond dreads enthusiastically on the harder-edged rock tunes, danced around in some silly imitation of an Indian spiritual rite with the microphone in one hand and a cymbal-on-a-string apparatus in another on the haunting "Strangers in My Bed," and explained that "this particular street, Lansdowne Street, is a magical place for us because this is where I met Jeff when he came to see a band I was in called Tribe After Tribe."
Ament and Robb took advantage of the gig's low-pressure setting and the addition of a fourth Fish, keyboardist Cary Eckland. Between songs they switched instruments so that both Ament and Robb got equal time on bass and guitar. They also left plenty of space for Stuverud to display his deft, muscular command of the drums, and they even set aside a minute or two for him to read from a book of poetry. It wasn't hard to imagine that this is what Ament might choose to do on a night off from Pearl Jam back home in Seattle; it's nothing more than a very musicianly way to blow off some steam. But that was more than enough to keep Three Fish and 150 Pearl Jam fans happy for an hour.
-- Matt Ashare
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