ARTICLES FROM: USA TODAY .. ASSOCIATED PRESS .. PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
AND A RUN DOWN FROM: WHOLE NOTE the OnLine Guitar Community

Please note that i've included the direct links to where these articles are from. The ONLY reason why i've done this is because i didn't want any problems with the direct link not available later on down the track. So i mean to do no wrong heRes¡

BACK .. OFFICIAL BOOTLEGS .. BACK

Pearl Jam's unprecedented simultaneous release of 25 albums continues to make history after securing five slots in Billboard's top 200 chart.

The two-CD sets, live recordings from a summer European tour, reached stores Sept. 26, three weeks after sales commenced on the band's Web sites (tenclub.net and pearljam.com).

A Katowice, Poland, concert charted highest, at No. 103 with sales of 14,093. Also making the cut are Milan at No. 125 (11,197), Verona at No. 134 (10,872), London at No. 137 (10,529) and Hamburg at No. 175 (7,566). Each set sold at least 3,000 copies, with the lowest sales score going to Stockholm, 3,052 copies.

The rankings mark the first time any artist has landed more than two debuts or more than one live album on the chart in the same week.

The sets sold a combined 131,008 copies, or 29% of the 450,000 shipped in the USA. An additional 550,000 were shipped overseas, where sales are brisk, especially in cities where the band performed. The Lisbon concert, first on the Euro-tour itinerary, entered the Portugal chart at No. 1.

"The credit goes to a band that always follows its own path and once again has redefined the rules," says Epic Records general manager Steve Barnett, who recalls label execs scratching their heads when Pearl Jam manager Kelly Curtis first proposed the idea of official bootlegs.

As of Monday, 74,000 copies had been sold online.

"The Internet was incredibly important," Barnett says. "We did very little traditional marketing -- no ads, no TV -- and were very much under the radar. Word of mouth built an incredible anticipation. Next time around, we might stay longer on the Internet, four weeks instead of three, before going to retail."

Pearl Jam, which embarked on the second leg of its U.S. tour on Wednesday, is assembling sets for its stateside run (22 dates on the first leg, 24 on the current outing). A concert DVD also is in the works for a February release.

In light of healthy sales, retailers who initially balked at stocking 25 titles at once may be more receptive when the 46 sequels are unleashed. The Best Buy chain sold 13,000 copies the first day.

One of the project's tougher challenges was securing the exact brown paper specified by the band for packaging.

It was hard to come by," Barnett says. "We bought all the remaining stock in America."

Curtis theorizes that the Katowice set edged the others because the show was unusually long and packed with obscurities. While few critics have tackled the entire batch (rollingstone.com's reviews ranks Hamburg first and Milan second), fans have been buzzing and debating the merits of various shows in chat rooms for weeks.

Sets are $10.98 for fan club members, $12.98 for non-members on the Web sites and $16.98 in stores. Pearl Jam may be undercutting the underground trade, but Curtis doesn't expect bootleggers to go belly up anytime soon.

"I don't know if you can ever stifle bootleggers," Curtis says. "We do know fans are getting a better-quality, cheaper version from us. But the bootlegger can still get it out faster for that person who just can't wait."

Pearl Jam fans will have their loyalty tested on Tuesday. The rock band isn't just releasing a new album - it's putting out 25 of them.

In an unprecedented attempt to beat bootleggers at their own game, the Seattle-based band is selling live two-CD sets recorded at more than two dozen concerts during a European tour earlier this summer.

"We just thought it was pretty cool," said guitar player Mike McCready. "If fans have to buy bootlegs, it can cost them $50. We wanted to do something that was cheaper."

Each album carries a suggested retail price of $16.98.

No one can remember one act flooding the marketplace with so much music at the same time. Even Pearl Jam admits it's not for everyone.

Most musical acts don't vary their set lists much from city to city, making such a project redundant. But like Phish or Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam prides itself on being unpredictable in concert. Each show contains about two dozen songs; Pearl Jam played more than 80 different songs during the European tour.

Their record company, Sony, had to be convinced to go along, band manager Kelly Curtis said. Pearl Jam records all its shows anyway, so the biggest expense was already taken care of, he said.

Virtually every Pearl Jam concert is made available on disc by bootleggers, he said. Curtis knows, because the band has collected most of them.

The musicians rather wickedly considered releasing a compilation of the best live recordings from those discs. After all, what were the bootleggers going to do - sue Pearl Jam for stealing their unauthorized recordings of the band's music?

But Curtis said Pearl Jam took its own approach when they realized there wasn't enough well-recorded material there for a full album.

"We're not trying to talk people who usually don't buy this stuff into buying it," he said. "It's more for the people who buy it already. We really didn't have any idea of how many people that is. We still don't."

For a few weeks, the discs have been available through the band's Web site, selling at $10.98 each for fan club members and $12.98 for others. More than 50,000 discs have been sold that way, he said.

Curtis has run into some trouble among record retailers annoyed with having to stock 25 discs at the same time. Some retail chains are ignoring the release, and others are carrying only a handful of them, guessing at what may be the most popular, he said.

Pearl Jam released no music from the June 30 concert in Roskilde, Denmark, where nine fans were trampled to death and three seriously injured.
"No one even talked about it because they thought it would be a stupid idea," Curtis said.

For fans who aren't able to buy all 25, does McCready have any recommendations of shows he remembers going particularly well? He mentions disc No. 16, from Poland, disc No. 10 from Paris, and either of the two shows from London (Nos. 4 and 5).

"There are some really fantastic shows and some OK ones," the guitarist said. "But there aren't any real bad ones."
McCready himself doesn't worry much about the Pearl Jam bootleggers. His music collection contains about 100 bootlegs of favorite bands like the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.
"I think people that buy the bootlegs buy the records anyway," he said. "I was that way. It's just another thing about the band, so I don't really care if they're making money."

From the outside, it looks like an ordinary rock-star palace on wheels - tinted windows, gleaming chrome, elaborate paint job.

But inside this tour bus, one of several parked on the backstage apron at Camden's Waterfront Entertainment Centre during Pearl Jam's two-night run last weekend, is the future of rock on demand. The front "lounge" area is dominated by a massive recording console that's connected to the stage via an inch-thick cable. Behind it are racks of gear, the kind you'd find in a well-equipped multi-track studio. A little farther back is a video production station.

The equipment makes it possible not only to capture live audio and video, but also to get that material ready for release: When the show's over, the technicians can do mix-downs and video editing, and then send the results back to the home office. Or post them directly to the Internet, as they're doing with the live video.

"We're bringing the bootleg business up to code, so to speak," explains recording engineer Brett Eliason, who has handled the live mix for every Pearl Jam show since the band's club-crawling days. "When you buy a bootleg, you're paying $30 for someone's pocket microphone. Sometimes [the sound] is good, but that's not the norm. The idea is to provide consistent quality."

At the very least, Pearl Jam is providing plenty of material: Starting today, two Web sites (www.pearljam.com and www.tenclub.net) will begin selling 25 two-disc sets from 25 shows on the band's recent European tour. (The abbreviated June 30 show at Denmark's Roskilde festival, during which nine people died in the moshing area, is not among the offerings.) The online price for the sets, which utilize bootleg-style block lettering and minimal artwork, is $10.98. When the sets reach stores on Sept. 26, they'll cost $16.98 apiece.

"The band's been talking about doing something like this for the last six or seven years," manager Kelly Curtis explained backstage before the Friday show, adding that it is documenting the U.S. concerts with an eye toward a subsequent batch of official "bootleg" releases.

Curtis says there is no way to estimate how much money acts like Peal Jam lose to bootleggers, and acknowledges that it may be a drop in the bucket compared with more recent digital-piracy issues, such as the dissemination of free music on the Internet.

"It's not so much to head off the bootleg business - we've learned that's impossible. They're finding warehouses in New Jersey filled with CDs that sell for $40 or $50 a pop. It's more because the band, as fans, have all been burned by those things."

Acknowledging that there's a thriving business in Pearl Jam bootlegs on the Internet, bassist Jeff Ament says that if fans are going to buy tapes or CDs of live shows, the band believes that the sound should be at least decent. "If I could have tapes from shows I saw and loved, I'd welcome it - if I knew I'd be able to really hear the music. That's always been the problem."

It took Curtis six months to persuade the executives at Sony to partner with the band to issue the European shows. "At first, there were a few people who understood the appeal. We explained that it wasn't going to be something for everyone, but would be attractive to the serious fans who are buying the bootlegs anyway. Our pitch was that we could do it cheaper and better than the bootleggers."

The biggest hurdle turned out to be retail: "Some of the old-school record retailers are mad about it," Curtis says. "But the Amazons and the Best Buys totally get it. They're excited to be able to offer so much material. They think there's a market for this."

Curtis doesn't think that Pearl Jam's bootleg releases will stop fans from smuggling portable recording gear into shows. "Kids will still want to do that - Eddie [Vedder, Peal Jam's lead singer] still does that. This is just a way to bring the sound quality up for the people who are buying the boots anyway."

The European experiment was a learning experience for Pearl Jam, which will celebrate the 10th anniversary of its first show in October. Though it has always varied its sets from night to night, Ament says just knowing that everything would be recorded changed the band's approach, ever so slightly. "We discovered that you can get too worried about stuff. At first we were like that - at the beginning of the tour we said, 'We're going to do the artwork right after the show, mix it immediately.' That didn't work. We were thinking too much about the shows and the recording. When we did away with that, things settled into a nice groove."

Eliason says that after those first few shows, the band trusted him with such decisions as which shows to keep, which to throw out. "When they stepped back, everything changed. They let the process happen."

All involved say that the music changed as well. After the initial stumble, Ament says, the band wanted to get loose enough to make music, regardless of whether it was worth documenting nightly. "Ed's always talking about how it's possible to get hung up on making something perfect. And he's right. Lots of times that prevents people from putting music out there."

As for mistakes, they made a few. And the members of Pearl Jam left them on the tape - the discs of the European shows are more like unretouched photographs than elaborate portraits.

Ament mentions the second show at London's Wembley Stadium as one of his personal favorites, and says that the ability to hear the performances shortly afterward provided the band with important perspective. "Sometimes we'd walk off stage thinking it wasn't a very good show, and then you'd listen back and realize there was some serious energy there."

At the same time, he says: "You know there's stuff from those shows you'd like to do over. But the whole idea was to capture what happened. Once you have that attitude, you think less about mistakes and more about the vibe. It's amazing how liberating it can be."