Time, Change, and Pearl Jam
A Few Thoughts on Matt Cameron
I have seen Pearl Jam live 26 times. That’s not so many on the super-fan scale, where numbers routinely touch three digits and take on the mystical aura of the famed Grateful Dead nomads of yore, but it’s a pretty healthy number. I don’t really love to travel, which is a big limitation, although I’ve managed to see the band in some pretty formidable strongholds like Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, and Madison Square Garden.
I own every studio album they’ve released, some on multiple formats, and a solid batch of official bootlegs, too. I’ve read three books on the band, many magazine articles, and even went to theatrical screenings of two of their films, Pearl Jam Twenty and Let’s Play Two.
So I feel like my PJ-fan bona fides are well established. I like to call them my favorite band of all time.
I love a lot of bands, but that number one spot is fairly well staked out at this stage. I don’t hate all new music, and there’s even a lot of classic stuff I’m almost completely ignorant about, but it’s hard to imagine anyone suddenly emerging to unseat them.
I’m OK acknowledging that Pearl Jam’s currency with my life – their career has been happening as I’ve lived and watched, from the early days listening to their first radio songs on a Walkman as I cut the grass in Raleigh, North Carolina to live this May in Nashville, and apparently missing meeting Eddie Vedder at Third Man Records by about an hour – is a fair amount of the attraction. That’s made them more relatable, more real, and I can’t be sure I’d have the same affinity if I hadn’t heard them until seven or eight albums in.
But it doesn’t really matter why you love something, it just matters that you do.
My first Pearl Jam concert, in October 1996 on the famous / infamous ‘No Ticketmaster’ tour, tucked away at a minor-league hockey arena in North Charleston, South Carolina, featured Jack Irons on drums.
All twenty-five since, including the four I saw earlier this year, all featured Matt Cameron in the same role.
If there’s to be a show number twenty-seven, it will be with a different drummer. This week, Cameron announced his departure from the band after nearly three decades, the first lineup change since Irons stepped down in 1998.
Lineup changes aren’t necessarily fatal to bands – in fact, they only rarely are. Founding drummer Bill Berry left REM in 1997 and the band continued to record and tour for fourteen more years. Metallica has had four bassists. Original Rolling Stone Charlie Watts passed away in 2021, but the band has not only logged a new album and tour in the interim, they’re currently making noise about another album, which would likely be accompanied by yet another tour1. The Who lost Keith Moon in 1978 (and later, John Entwistle) and has proceeded into approximately 167 Farewell Tours, or maybe it just feels that way. Don’t even get me started on KISS.
The aforementioned Grateful Dead lost Jerry Garcia and proceeded to tour for decades as The Dead, then Dead and Company – not passing themselves off as the same thing, but the connotations are obvious. The Foo Fighters lost Taylor Hawkins and kept going. The Eagles. Lynyrd Skynyrd. The Allman Brothers Band. Iron Maiden. Jefferson Airplane / Starship. The Dave Matthews Band. And on and on.
Even Pearl Jam themselves have weathered changes – depending on how you’re keeping score, Matt Cameron is either their fourth or fifth2 drummer. Some of their most vital and heavily played songs were recorded with Dave Krusen, Dave Abbruzzese, or Jack Irons behind the kit.
Many other band changes are marked by tragedy. Matt Cameron, as far as we know, is fit and healthy with life left to live. He might even have other musical projects he wants to pursue.
But the news of his departure left me a bit numb. I didn’t know what to think. I don’t know why he’s leaving, what meetings or scenes may have played out, whether he knew he was leaving as he sat behind the kit this past spring, whether the band already knew, if there was any drama behind it or whether it’s just a simple recognition that, at 62 years of age and 27 years as Pearl Jam’s drummer, almost immediately on the heels of 12 years in Soundgarden, he was just ready to chill out. Cameron has always struck me as a fairly laconic guy, so even though his Instagram announcement says more information is coming, I don’t know what we’ll ever learn about the whys and wherefores of his decision.
And I don’t know what it means for Pearl Jam, a band that has already nearly broken up at least twice that we know of, and while rumors fly and fans wait, we don’t know if there are more albums or tours in the future or if the rest of the band might be inspired to pack it in over trying to break in a new drummer for the first time in more than a quarter century. When the youngest members of your band are pushing sixty, it’s fair to say there are fewer albums and tours ahead than there are behind. Even if you’re The Rolling Stones. They may simply decide they’ve said all they have to say.
When Matt Cameron joined Pearl Jam, I wasn’t married and didn’t have any children. Now I’ve been married for almost twenty years and the oldest of my three children is about to become a senior in high school.
Even though I’m not an especially nostalgic person, this news definitely has me remembering, thinking, wondering. It’s a weird thing, when something like a band – made up entirely of people I don’t know, but feel I do, in a way – that has been a constant in your life for such a long time, always there, suddenly changes. It’s unexpected. It’s real. It reminds you that life can change pretty fast, with no notice. That’s an insanely, almost absurdly simple statement, far lower on the profundity scale than I’d love to reach, but reading and re-reading it before I post this, it feels right. Sometimes the simplest statements are the correct ones.
It wasn’t necessarily easy or cheap for me to take in four shows on the Dark Matter tour this past April and May. But I was glad I did at the time. And now, even more so. Fair winds and following seas, Pearl Jam. Best of luck in whatever you do next, Matt Cameron. It’s been a great ride.
It’s always interesting and humorous for me to remember The Rolling Stones were considered by many to be washed up on the Steel Wheels tour - thirty-six years ago.
The fifth, after — or really, before — Krusen, Abbruzzese, Irons, and Cameron, would be Matt Chamberlain, who played on some of the band’s early demos.