Happy to Be Jammin’

PHOENIX —  It’s day 13 of Pearl Jam’s U.S. tour, and Eddie Vedder is backstage at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, playing--not guitar, but pingpong.

Grimacing as one of his returns sails out of bounds early in a match with drummer Matt Cameron, Vedder looks around sheepishly as if to say, “Just warming up.” When another shot is wide by several inches, both musicians laugh so hard they bend over.

But Vedder eventually gets his stroke down and wins a close contest before yielding his place at the table to guitarist Mike McCready, who has an even more animated match with Cameron, the former Soundgarden drummer who is filling in on the tour for the ailing Jack Irons. Later, guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament take their turns at the table.

A few minutes earlier at rehearsal for the evening’s sold-out concert, members of the band’s stage crew passed a football back and forth across the huge Coliseum floor. . . . And, even earlier than that--at 3 a.m., when the band arrived at the hotel after a flight from Albuquerque, N.M.--the group took advantage of the warm Phoenix air to jump into the pool. . . . Then, there were the early morning surfing expeditions on the Australian leg of the tour.

All of which might prompt the question: Is this a rock tour or a summer vacation?

This kind of peaceful, easy feeling isn’t exactly what you’d expect from Pearl Jam on the road. Rock musicians over the years have frequently battled writer’s block, but the problem in Pearl Jam’s case has been road block.

Not only did the band demonstrate a reluctance to tour soon after its phenomenal early ‘90s rise, but the strain of the road led to occasional, much-publicized concert postponements. It was part of a wider image of a band having trouble adjusting to the pressures of its sudden, massive stardom.

So the good news on this tour--which includes sold-out stops Monday and Tuesday at the Great Western Forum--is that the band is adding, rather than canceling, dates.

Since the U.S. segment of the tour began June 20 in Missoula, Mont., the number of shows has increased from 34 to 44. The boost isn’t just a sign of the band’s willingness to do more shows, but also the strong demand to see the group. By the time the tour ends in Miami in mid-September, the band will have been seen by more than 900,000 fans.

“The reaction of fans on the tour has been touching, humbling,” Vedder says backstage before Wednesday’s show in Phoenix. “I’m just blown away. The bootleg tapes are going to be thoroughly embarrassing in some ways because I can’t help myself from thanking people at the end of the night.

“I know it sounds like, ‘Oh, he’s doing it in every city’--just pushing buttons to get applause. But by the end of the shows, you want to express your thanks. I must have done it five or six times last night.”

It’s a surprising but welcome statement from a singer whose reputation, both because of the angst in his early songs and in his own early complaints about the pressures of stardom, has tended to cast him as a gloomy, humorless figure.

The comment is typical of the attitude of everyone in the group--the sign of a dramatic transformation that has been going on behind the scenes for some time.

The Seattle quintet has always been a potent live attraction. But it often seemed so caught up in the pressures of its stardom that the band members weren’t always able to fully enjoy their situation. Indeed, there have been questions about whether the band would survive.

Not only did Pearl Jam get the normal public and media scrutiny that comes with selling 15 million albums in two years, but the 1994 suicide of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain caused the media and part of the grunge rock audience to turn to Pearl Jam as the next voice of a generation. And Vedder, especially, felt overwhelmed.

The stress made communication between band members difficult. This wasn’t a group that had spent years together on the club scene before breaking into the Top 10--a bonding process that would have built a spirit of cooperation and trust.

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Two things have helped in Pearl Jam’s transformation. Partially because the band resisted some proven marketing strategies (videos, marathon tours and, with a few exceptions, interviews), album sales have dropped off dramatically since the multi-platinum early ‘90s days of “Ten” and “Vs.” Despite generally excellent reviews, “Yield,” the band’s latest album, has sold only about 1.4 million copies in the U.S. since its February release.

In addition, the band members have grown closer.

“One big difference is the hysteria has gone away,” manager Kelly Curtis says backstage, when asked about the comfortable spirit in the band. “I think they are happy about the level of success now. I know a lot of people find that hard to believe, but it’s true because the level now is manageable for them. They can deal with it. They’ve also gained a lot of experience. They have been through a lot together, and that builds a certain trust.”

In a separate backstage interview, Vedder expresses a similar thought.

“We are at a perfect level [of popularity],” he says. “We can travel comfortably. We don’t have to travel in vans, yet we are able to move from city to city without being a freak show with paparazzi following us everywhere we go.”

Another way that Pearl Jam has made it easier on itself is by abandoning its 1994 pledge to not play buildings that use Ticketmaster, the nation’s largest ticket distribution system. The group argued that Ticketmaster’s service fees were too high, a charge that the giant company branded a publicity stunt. The decision caused all sorts of problems for the band, adding to the existing stress level.

The band still prefers to sidestep Ticketmaster, but will use the system if there is no viable alternative in a given market. Tickets for about 30% to 50% of the dates are being handled by Ticketmaster, a band spokesperson said. The result is the band can concentrate now on the music.

“If we can sustain this type of energy, I’d definitely be in favor of touring three or four months out of the year,” guitarist Gossard says. “But I don’t think it’ll ever be more than that. We want to leave time each year for work on a new record and some time for our personal lives. That’s the balance we need. . . . We were all out swimming together at 3 o’clock in the morning last night. That wouldn’t have happened at one time.”

Vedder says he was feeling confident about the tour even before the group started the U.S. leg.

“I think we have begun making it a priority to enjoy ourselves offstage as well as onstage,” he says. “When we were in Australia, you’d get up at 6:30 in the morning and drive for two hours to go surfing to some special beach with great waves--the kind of place you’d die to go to as a kid when you saw it in some surfer magazine.

“By the time I got to the shows, I felt so healthy . . . like someone who was enjoying his life--and I got to play music on top of it. There was a time when I worried that if I enjoyed life too much, the music might suffer.”

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For the 14,000 fans in the audience, the Phoenix show seemed pretty much like all Pearl Jam shows in recent years: nearly two hours of supercharged songs--from the early, stark “Jeremy” through the recent, playful “Do the Evolution”--that combine passion and craft, idealism and inspiration in the same way that many of rock’s greatest groups have done over the years.

The sole disappointment of the show was the tendency to focus on the high-energy songs that elicit the most response in arenas. There’s another side of Pearl Jam that has surfaced over the last couple of albums, songs that have contributed greatly to the band’s creative growth. On Wednesday it performed the intimate, reflective “Wishlist,” but left out “Off He Goes,” “The Long Road,” “All Those Yesterdays” and “Around the Bend.”

Watching the band from the wings, however, there appears to be a spirit of community. Where there was once a certain tension and distance between band members, there’s now a sense of team--and the smiles are as infectious as the music. It’s not long into the show before Vedder is thanking this crowd too.

To see the smiles on the band members’ faces doesn’t make Pearl Jam’s music any better, but it does make the band’s future much brighter.

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* Pearl Jam and X play Monday and Tuesday at the Great Western Forum, 3900 W. Manchester Blvd., Inglewood, 8 p.m. Sold out. (310) 419-3100.