Bootleg bonanza

Pearl Jam's big release

by Matt Ashare

The past year has seen the record industry slowly come to terms with what many have predicted will be its biggest challenge ever. And I don't mean the recent congressional hearings on the marketing of "inappropriate" content to minors -- that's just another election-year red herring, something where candidates can take a win-win stand that they have no intention of following through on. No, the real challenge is downloadable music and its indiscriminate dissemination on the Internet. And though we don't know how the Napster issue is going to be settled, the majority opinion is that digital downloading is here to stay in one hard-to-control form or another. What's been missing from the MP3 discourse is any sense of how the record industry will cope with digital downloading in the future -- i.e., how, outside of creating regulations that are going to be difficult to enforce, the music business might create a consumer product that's greater than the sum of its digital parts, something that can't merely be copied and traded back and forth on line.

This week, though, the now veteran Seattle band Pearl Jam may have inadvertently demonstrated one way in which artists can counter the forces of technology. This past Tuesday, the band quietly made history by releasing 25 double CDs of previously unavailable material. That's right, a full 50 CDs of recordings culled from Pearl Jam's summer tour of Europe, beginning with a May 23 show in Lisbon and ending with a June 29 show in Oslo. With each of the "Euro Bootleg 2000" discs clocking in at between 35 and 70-plus minutes, that adds up to some 50 hours of music -- in other words, two 24-hour days of non-stop listening wouldn't get you all the way through even once. And as any true music fan knows, once through is nothing: any worthwhile recording requires at least a couple listens. So, having had the set in hand for only a few days, I won't even pretend to have an opinion on which of the 22 versions of "Do the Evolution," the 21 versions each of "Given To Fly" and "Even Flow," the six versions of "Faithfull," or even the four versions of Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World" is the best. I will admit, however, that I quite enjoyed the cover of the Who's "Baba O'Riley" the band encored with on June 26 at Hamburg, as well as the little shaggy-dog story Eddie Vedder tells at the beginning of the second CD of the June 1 show at Dublin's Point Theatre -- it ends with Vedder interrupting himself to explain that the friend he was telling the joke to then stopped to ask, "What's the point," to which Vedder replied, "The Point is a really cool place to play in Dublin."

Those are just a couple of the highlights I happened across while plowing through the set. It's not actually being sold as a set (though you can order all 25 double CDs at once on line at Pearl Jam's Web site, www.pearljambootlegs.com); instead, each double album -- packed in a simple cardboard slipcase stamped with little more than the date of the show, the venue, the band's name, and two set lists (one scrawled, one typeset) -- is being sold separately for the "discount" list price of $16.98, which is about what you end up paying for a lot of single CDs these days. Collect them all and trade with your friends. Although the trading with your friends is the part that makes the record industry a little queasy.

So, what might one band's decision to release an unprecedented amount of new material all at once have to do with digital downloading? Well, consider this: 25 double CDs of live material is more music by one artist than most people need or are even capable of digesting. I mean, how many similar versions of "Daughter" does the average Pearl Jam fan want? Five? Ten? Fifteen? Twenty? (There are actually 20 in the 50-CD set.) But the "Euro Bootleg 2000" series isn't about giving Pearl Jam fans something they want or need -- given the number of Pearl Jam sites on the Internet and the band's loose policy when it comes to letting fans tape shows, there were probably plenty of live Pearl Jam recordings already available on line for no charge. "Euro Bootleg 2000" is about creating a market for something unique -- a coolly packaged 25-double-CD set that'll look great on your CD shelves. Sure, you might be able to download digitized MP3 files of the tracks you want to hear from the set, or even of the entire set. But that's not the same as owning the actual objects. And that, to borrow a Vedder punch line, is the point.