"Just stop fucking playing, cancel all your shit, and don't do anything."
I had a whole thing I was going to tell him,
but I never got a chance.
Sometimes people elevate you, you know,
whether you like it or not.
It's real easy to fall.
I don't think any of us would be in this room here tonight
if it weren't for Kurt Cobain, so...
People think that we're whining or crying about success
if we're just really trying to tell you,
that there's some intense pressures
and really some things that could be helped.
He resonates in my life
in this... It always comes up, like, around a campfire
or playing music with a few guys he had known in a garage
for no particular reason.
I always just think, "He would have...
He would have liked this."
I really like him.
I think he's a nice, really nice person.
I didn't like him a lot then,
when I was talking shit about him all the time,
but now I can... I can appreciate him, you know.
I mean, I've realized that, you know,
the same people that like our band like their band,
so why create some kind of feud over something?
He made us think about everything that we did, you know.
His critique of us early on
sure kept us on good behavior.
In terms of everything that we did,
we thought, "Okay, why are we doing this?"
If we're good now,
it's partly because of him.
It's not like you're friends or anything.
I mean, I can consider him
a person that I really like.
I mean, we've had a few conversations on the phone,
and I really like him.
I think he's a nice, really nice person.
Yeah, I remember the sound of his voice,
but I don't remember what we talked about.
Just normal stuff. It was just real...
Just real normal.
I haven't let myself change,
but the way people see you changes,
and that's not in my hands, that's not in my control.
And maybe what is in my control
is not doing interviews, or not being on the TV,
and not anything to kind of glorify your face or position.
I was talking about this band being a bit more faceless,
and it can be done, you know.
Pink Floyd and...
I mean, it can be done.
Ed couldn't be anonymous, and it was affecting him.
So I think psychologically,
he needed to take control of something.
So then he was like, "Okay. I can have control over music."
I felt that anything that we put out was highly representative of me,
because I was kind of becoming the most recognizable guy.
Vitalogy was the first record
where it was like we were making a record in a different way.
I was writing a few songs,
but all of a sudden everybody was starting to write,
and he was writing more, and I was like,
"Wait a minute, you know. I'm the guy.
You know, let me get in there and do this thing.
I know how to do this thing."
And at the time I thought, "This isn't our best record."
The dynamics of the band of how they have changed
to who was "in power",
Stone early on,
Ed now.
As much as I'm excited to play,
I'll cop to it, it's a surfing tour.
I plan on having a surfboard with me at all times.
That was a big worldwide tour.
I think it was the first time we went to Australia.
It was a challenging time, to kind of go,
"I don't know if we're the same band right now,
but we might be a different band right now,
and maybe they'll like the new band."
Jeff and I have always had this adversarial relationship.
It's all been muted now
because what we thought of as our new band
that we might try to control together
immediately was taken over by Ed.
But we learned the greatest lesson of all,
which is just as you're fighting over the scraps of control,
you meet somebody with so much artistic energy
that your argument becomes pointless.
We were always kind of going towards something else.
I think we wanted to be more like Zeppelin.
I think we wanted to be more of a chameleon type of band.
We didn't want to be locked into, like, a real specific style.
But the business aspect of the record company,
it's all about fucking making money now
and fucking wind this thing up, and you know,
they could care less if it's gone tomorrow
because they've got something coming up the fucking backside
that's gonna replace it.
And we were just trying to figure out
how we were gonna be a band down the road, you know..
Like, there wasn't anybody to go to at that point, you know,
not until we met Neil.
The first time we got asked
to play The Bridge School in San Francisco,
we just made a connection there.
He said, "Hey, man, thanks for doing this".
And a few months later, he asked us to go to Europe with him.
Like, it all seems like... All seems like a dream to me.
Doing a record with him, we did Mirror Ball,
it was so educational, listening to him talk about his career.
Playing in stadiums one minute,
and then the next time he's playing in clubs,
and then he's playing in medium-sized places,
but all along, he's doing whatever he wants to do.
His point is to kind of roll with the punches.
I'm happy to finally have an adult in my life
that leads by example.
I've had some crazy adults in my life.
So it's about time I got one that inspires me.
I hope Neil's feeling feisty tonight,
and speaking of feisty,
some smart-ass who arranged the tables
put our table right next to Ticketmaster's table over here.
So I predict a food fight by the end of the evening,
and I would recommend to the classy people over there
to scoot away or join in.
Maybe we should all join in while we got them right here.
In the United States, the hit rock band Pearl Jam
has taken battle against what it claims
is the greed of the entertainment industry.
It's tackling the high cost of buying
from the country's biggest ticket agency, Ticketmaster.
All the band wants, it says, is a fair deal for the fans.
We don't want to be doing a press conference.
We want to be playing.
The nation's top rock band is accusing
the biggest ticket distributor in the business
of unfair practices and price-gouging.
If they don't agree to Ticketmaster's terms, they can't perform.
A spokesman insisted Ticketmaster never told
any promoter not to book Pearl Jam.
He dismissed the band members as, "...petulant young children who ascribe to business anarchy".
Last month, the band took the extraordinary step
of filing a complaint here at the justice department.
When you're on that big of a stage, it's not in your control.
You're sort of playing a part to some larger drama.
We had a very specific problem with Ticketmaster,
and they asked us to come and testify
about our specific problem
in regards to a larger lawsuit that was being brought,
but it's always been perceived as, like,
we were trying to break up Ticketmaster.
The subcommittee will come to order.
We are honored to have representatives
of both Pearl Jam and Ticketmaster here with us today.
The key question is whether recent contractual agreements
between Ticketmaster and most major stadiums
and concert promoters have violated federal antitrust laws.
Who would like to go first? Stone?
All the members of Pearl Jam remember what it's like
to be young and not have a lot of money.
Many Pearl Jam fans are teenagers
who do not have the money to pay $30 or more
that is often charged for tickets today.
We have made a conscious decision
that we do not want to put the price of our concerts
out of the reach of our fans.
Mr. Chairman, this is really about choices.
Fans can go from one music store to another
to find the best deal on a CD,
but they can't go anywhere but Ticketmaster
for concert tickets.
Do you think Ticketmaster is entitled to a profit?
I don't think that question matters, you know.
You do have a contract with your record company,
and it is exclusive. Is that correct?
I think this line of questioning is very strange,
because it seems like what does that really have to do with anything?
The issue at hand here is whether Ticketmaster
is a monopoly, not whether...
Or to have anything to do with our business
or what our relationship is with our manager.
Let's just get it on the record.
- Mr. Horn. - Now I gather...
Do you want these guys to play Long Beach or not?
What I want is a record.
What I want is a record here.
Let's just get it on the record.
A record here.
First of all, I want you to know I think you're just darling guys.
This is so great.
When we got involved in this issue,
I did not know very much, and still don't, about alternative music.
After some requests, I tried to learn some Pearl Jam songs,
but I think it's a little beyond me.
Having been a fan for many, many years,
I don't want to become
something that I despised as a kid, you know.
When my staff told me we were going to have this hearing,
I have to tell you, I knew nothing about grunge,
but I know a lot about the importance of fairness and equity,
and I think you've raised some very important questions.
Who were the powers-that-be that wanted to be perceived
as putting some pressure on Ticketmaster?
It's like, you know, those are back-room,
David Lynch-ian guys in hotel rooms
who need oxygen tanks, darkened L.A.
That's who I always think of.
It's like, he understands.
Almost a year after picking its fight with Ticketmaster,
Pearl Jam remains alone among major rock bands
who could have joined the Seattle group in its boycott
but never did.
It's just a few lonely voices
because not many of the other groups joined up.
There's no deal between us and Ticketmaster.
We're not playing Ticketmaster shows this summer.
Shows where we're going outside of cities
and building shows from the ground up,
that was a really tough time.
We're trying to find how many counterfeit tickets are out there.
We saw some people selling tickets.
So we bought them. We were all psyched.
And then we got up to the door, and they said they were counterfeit.
Right now, we're trying to figure out
how to help these kids get into the show.
Let me just leave you with this observation.
When art is successful,
it unavoidably becomes a business.
The question then is
whether artists have an inherent right
to control the limits of their business
and how it relates to the growth of their art.
The answer, I'm convinced,
is that artists do have a right to that control.
I think we've always just fallen into ways
of doing things the way we felt they should be done,
and whether they were right or whether they were wrong,
they were just our ways of doing it.
I've never heard of Pearl Jam, I must admit..
That makes two of us.
And here we are in your fine place.
And what are the things that you've kept
that remind you of the experience the last 20 years with the band?
I'm sure I've kept the least amount of things of anyone in the band.
How I've always justified that is,
one, I lose everything all the time.
So it comes naturally to me.
And two, Jeff Ament keeps so much,
and really, if all I have to do is just maintain
my good relationship with Jeff Ament,
I can always go over to his house
and look through all the stuff that he has,
and celebrate his keeping of the things.
Pearl Jam in Mexico City
memorial... These are some of the Mexico City coffee cups.
So that's a... It's a little faded now.
Because you use it.
This one clearly needs to go back in the dishwasher.
Here's something.
Mike McCready just sent me this.
It's the demos from Temple of the Dog.
I've got a few...
This is a box full of Pearl Jam "Touring Band" DVDs.
And that's 2000.
I don't know why they're still there.
I haven't... I'm not sure...
And a few Pearl Jam CDs here,
the kind of stuff probably I had someone bring by
because I was trying to remember how to play some songs.
I don't know if there's anything else in here.
Let's see here. Yep, that might be it.
There might be something in the basement.
Lookit. There's a Grammy.
I knew this was gonna come in handy.
You can tell how I feel about the Grammys.
You know, at the Grammys,
I was having kind of a bad day.
I was getting thrown out by security people
for trying to sneak a cigarette in the backstage,
and you couldn't go out because of all the photographers there.
So that was part of it.
Spin the Black Circle, Pearl Jam.
I hate to start off with a bang.
I'm gonna say something typically me
on behalf of all of us. I don't know what this means.
I don't think it means anything.
That's just how I feel.
I remember arguing with tons of my friends,
because my friends were like,
"Man, what the fuck was your boy doing?"
"Like, if he doesn't want to be there,
then he shouldn't be there", and kind of all this stuff.
And I was kind of like, "Fuck you, man".
Like, what does it mean, you know?
Like, are you fucking kidding me?
You get an award for art? Like, that's just ridiculous.
Like, if I would have had the balls, I would have said the same thing.
I should have started a fight right there.
It would have been much more exciting..
What would all these young people be doing
if they had real problems like a depression or Vietnam?
Do they work at all?
Are they contributing anything
to the world they're taking so much from?
It was kind of around the Ticketmaster tour.
The four of us, Jack, Stone, Jeff, and I were traveling in a jet.
Eddie was traveling in a van, doing a radio show,
and then driving all night to the next show.
So there was a huge physical disconnect,
but also an emotional one.
And nobody was kind of really talking.
He was trying to maintain something
that was more a Fugazi or do-it-yourself type mentality.
You know, and we loved them, but we weren't that band.
We needed to sit down with him and go, "Look,
are you embarrassed by us?
Do you want to be in the band anymore?"
We thought we were going to break up essentially.
I thought... I thought that was going to happen.
And we all agreed we needed to take some time off and figure it out.
That's highway 200, and we're like right...
We just passed Ovando.
We're headed towards Lincoln.
And then we just keep going to the northeast.
That's the spot right there, Big Sandy.
That's your hometown?
This is the middle of nowhere, man.
I was sort of pissed off at my parents
for making me live in this desolate...
I mean, I was hundreds of miles away
from anybody that I could even relate to.
I was ready to leave at about 14.
A couple trips to California,
like, really fucked me up.
My mom's brother, my uncle Pat,
he had long hair,
and he had tapestries up in his room,
and he'd put the headphones on me,
and he'd play, like, Abraxas by Santana,
and it would just blow my mind.
I remember just getting, like, a huge buzz off of it, like,
and getting, like, kind of emotional.
And I would go out and try to look for records.
It was really hard to find. There was no record store in our town.
So I started subscribing to Circus and Cream magazine,
and my uncle got Rolling Stone magazine.
And I mean, you'd study that stuff.
In a lot of those punk-rock records, you could really hear bass, you know.
You could fucking hear Dee Dee on those Ramones records.
You know, he was on the right side, and Johnny was on the left side.
So if you were trying to learn the songs,
you could just turn the dial over to the right side
and learn all of Dee Dee's parts.
I moved to Seattle in 1983,
and I think all I wanted to do up to that point
was to live in a bigger city
where there was more like-minded people
and more culture and a punk-rock show,
if I wanted to go see a cool movie.
There were all these... You know, "Eraserhead".
I was hearing about all these movies
that I never got a chance to see.
I don't know if it was the first contact, it must have been,
was from Jeff,
and I do remember there being a...
A real connection made on the phone,
and talking about artwork, how he was into artwork,
and your responsibilities as a band member
or working with people that get that it's not a slacker job,
or it's not a rock star thing, or it's not...
It's about music. It's about art.
It's about... We had all these things in common,
which is probably why we ended up roommates
when we first started touring.
I think that we just connected and became really close.
It's amazing now to look back.
I remember when Ed first came to town.
It seemed like it was something
that he had been kind of waiting for his whole life,
and it was obvious within the first few minutes
that it was something that I'd been waiting for also.
I think it would be a very easy band
in some ways for us not to be a band,
and nobody can really kind of put a finger on what it is
that, you know, kind of keeps us coming back together,
but it's a strange marriage.
I met Mike McCready when I was in seventh grade.
He was good. You know, he played solos
and had a whammy bar and, like, could do the...
And all this stuff.
I had lived in Los Angeles,
trying to make it in my band Shadow in 1986 for a year,
and I paid to play, paid to play at The Roxy,
$700 on a Sunday night in December. And there was five people there.
So I struggled and went through that,
and I gave up playing music for a little while,
moved back to Seattle and said, "I can't. I'm done".
And then, lo and behold, I get a call out of the blue from Stone.
I got to see him play at a party one night
when he was just sitting around
and playing lead guitar with somebody
and was just, in the way that he does, unconsciously,
giving you these jolts.
He's channeling stuff that sounds like
it's coming from the fucking heavens,
but I think it's coming from inside.
There's something spiritual about the way he plays.
And that's when he's in tune with the good stuff, you know.
As you know, the song Reach Down, which was the second song I wrote
for the Temple of the Dog record,
I wanted it to be sort of like a Neil Young,
"Fuck you to the world of people
who don't want to hear a guitar solo.
I'm gonna make an 11 or 12-minute song that's mostly guitar solo,
and that's gonna be the first song on the album,
and you can fuck off."
When I heard Cready play guitar,
I was like, "We're gonna pull it off for real.
This isn't gonna be a joke. He can actually fucking play."
Because I couldn't.
He went out of his mind.
This guy's a... he's a fucking rock star.
Like, he's got problems,
and we just thought he was a nice little kid.
And he's got something in there, like, he's infected,
and that's gonna come out again somewhere. Good luck, guys.
He knows me. That's...
I would say that's 100% accurate.
Eddie said, "Ask Mike about the drummers."
Ask me about the drummers?
Yeah. He says, "Mike will give you the drummers rap".
Here we go.
We started out with Dave Krusen. It didn't work out.
Matt Chamberlain, he didn't want to go on the road.
He knew of a drummer named Dave Abbruzzese.
It's very Spinal Tap of us to have this many drummers.
Jack Irons.
- Good drummer. - Great look. Good drummer.
Jack was the guy that gave the tape that he got from Stone to Ed.
Ed wanted to repay that favor
and say, "Hey, you want to come and try out?"
And we toured with him after we did Yield,
and he played on that whole record.
That's when it was starting to get too much for Jack.
He called up and said that he couldn't tour.
We already had a tour booked.
Who can we call that can do that? Matt Cameron.
Soundgarden had broken up, so Ed called him.
Eddie, what's going on?
And he's like, "Hey, what are you doing this summer"?
Nothing.
We need to leave in three weeks.
- In 10 days, he learned 80 songs. - They had a list of, like, 60 or 70.
Something crazy like that.
I would just sort of, like, close my eyes,
and I'd go like that, and it was like,
"Okay, do I know that song?" It's like, "No!"
Matt Cameron made us a better band than we've ever been.
When we'd... We'd have to switch,
let's say, a drummer or something,
you do it out of survival mode.
It's just like removing an organ.
And when you remove, like, the drummer,
you're removing, like, the heart.
So it's like you had a heart transplant.
Binaural is a dark time for me for sure,
because I had my Crohn's. I have Crohn's disease.
I was struggling with that,
struggling with addiction.
I was taking pills to take care of that,
and then that got out of hand.
For me, it was a struggle, for sure.
In the early years, we had those transcendent shows
where it was just like everybody was drunk,
and it was just the "lose your mind" shows.
Everybody lose your mind at once, you know.
It was harder to lose your mind at that point
because everyone was more like, "I'm 32".
You know, "we've got some records out".
"I've got this relationship", or you know...
We just became more self-conscious
and more aware as you do as you're an adult,
but it's more difficult to kind of go, "Okay.
"We got to just go out and get crazy."
And around this time, I think we were...
You know, we were less popular.
I don't think we were doing any press.
We'd have meetings about those things.
It's like, "How far are we gonna do press on this tour"?
"Are we gonna do this? Are we gonna do that?
Or are we not going to do any of it?"
And when you don't do any of it and the changing times,
you know, you fluctuate, people get over you, you know.
That's probably around that time Binaural is.
Maybe people were like, "Okay. We're kind of over these guys.
What's next?" you know.
But some people stayed with us
because we stayed true to whatever our vision was.
How important is commercial success to you?
Does grunge still exist today?
How did the second 10 years happen?
You did survive.
And what are the turning points to you?
Change your position. Moving back.
We still have a problem here.
It's one of Europe's worst concert tragedies.
The band had stopped playing just before the incident.
Deadly trouble in the shape of a crowd 40,000 to 50,000 strong.
There has been a lot of pushing and pressure up here,
and 10 to 15 people have been badly hurt.
We don't know how bad yet.
Tragedy occurred in the rain and mud
late Friday night at the annual "Roskilde Rock Festival"
outside the Danish capital, Copenhagen,
when rock fans surged forward during a performance
by the American group Pearl Jam.
Fans at the outdoor rock concert
packed closer and closer to the stage,
ending in a crush that killed nine people and injured three more.
I just wanted to get out of there.
I just didn't want it to be true.
It was happening right in front of us,
but I just didn't want it to be true.
And something as horrific and as shocking
as people being pulled over the barricade
that aren't alive anymore,
what the impact of that was on us
is, you know, it will never really go away.
From that point on, we rethought everything.
I didn't know what I was feeling, you know.
I think I had such an onslaught of confusion that...
I mean, the last time that I felt like that
was when Andy Wood died, and...
I didn't know if I wanted to play music anymore.
You know, I think we kind of quantify everything that's happened to us
as pre "Roskilde" and after "Roskilde", and...
You know, if early on there was the birth or the beginning of "No",
for us Roskilde was the beginning of "What?".
What are we doing?
What do we do to assist the families?
And what have we become?
And what do we... What do we do to survive?
I think even since Roskilde in 2000,
I think that made everybody get into a real unique perspective
on where we were at and how fragile life is,
and I think ever since then, every once in a while,
we'll just say to one another, like, "Can you believe it?
Can you believe we're still doing this?"
When I interviewed the band in 1993
for Rolling Stone magazine, I asked Eddie Vedder
if there was an Andy Wood song
he would ever be interested in singing.
He said there was one and one day he would sing it.
On the band's 10th anniversary show in Las Vegas,
he announced to the group that he wanted to sing Crown of Thorns,
one of Mother Love Bone's greatest songs.
And in that moment, the two bands united.
We wouldn't...
We wouldn't mind attempting something
that's even older than 10 years.
For Ed to kind of acknowledge the past and sort of say,
"Yeah, this is part of where we came from,"
and that he would be generous to Jeff and I and say, "Yeah, of course".
That was another huge, huge gift.
I used to think of Andy all the time,
especially when the band got bigger,
because I used to think,
"He would have loved to play this place.
He would have loved to play this place.
He'd love to play The Garden.
He would have tore this shit up."
And I wrote down on this paper "Andy and Ed",
just because I think about Andy all the time,
and in the creative process, I always think about
how lucky I am to still be able to, like, you know,
go in my basement or, like, pick up a guitar and, like, write a song
and then manifest it if I want,
figure out how to, like, record it or whatever, and that...
That's kind of all he ever hoped for,
is just somebody that would just record him
and, like, some group of guys that would just, you know,
play these songs for him or whatever, and I...
I wish that we could go back in time and be the band for him.
He was playing in those places in his head...
...for a long time.
So the thing is, is he got to play them.
Andy.
We played a show in Nassau.
I would say three-quarters of the crowd fucking booed us
It actually really bummed some of the band out.
They were just, like, "I never want to play that song again."
I actually fucking dug it. It was art.
I remember there was a fireman in the front row,
and he was, like, showing me his badge.
Fuck you, asshole!
It was just a bad time in American history in my mind,
and we were trying to say what we thought.
When you know the crowd has turned
and there are that many people,
it just feels like you might not make it out of there alive.
That was Ed really trusting his instincts
about a very specific thing that he needed to say,
and he wanted to do it in a way that was antagonistic.
I think if you have the opportunity,
you have to... You have to take on that responsibility.
You didn't like that one.
It's great to be in a band
where, you know, we're not afraid to do that,
not afraid to speak our minds
and get booed once in a while. It's all right.
It was an uncertain time for Pearl Jam,
a period when many bands quietly break up and move on.
But from the beginning, Stone and Jeff
had always wanted a band that would last,
one that would keep writing and recording music,
and that's what Pearl Jam did.
Show by show, they became
one of the most dependably unpredictable bands in rock.
Ed has a feeling pretty much everywhere that we play,
and it's such a great gauge of, you know,
how the crowd's feeling, and that's, a lot of times,
why the set list doesn't get done until...
I mean, oftentimes, it's done 10 minutes before we play.
As difficult as it was at different times,
where you're like, "We can go out and kill this crowd.
We can go out and kill them right now.
Let's just start out with these five songs."
And you know... "Yeah. No. We're gonna go on,
we're gonna play this one to start out with.
We haven't played this one together, but let's...
We'll work it out backstage. It'll be fine."
And inevitably, you're so nervous
that you go out there and fumble it,
and then you're like, "God! Let me just...
Let's play a hit, you know."
You know, it would be a lot easier to play a similar set every night.
It would just be so much easier,
and yet we can't find it in ourselves to do that.
That's why you see Pearl Jam.
It's fucking different every night.
Every night it's different.
It's funny, but lots of those decisions we made,
it took 10 years to see why they were good.
In that regard, you know,
mixing our set list up every night,
it's the greatest blessing we could have ever done.
The door is so open for us to be who we are every night
that we just trust it.
You know, I think that all of us
have been totally influenced by the seventies.
We're all, like, products of it, but yet we're not, like, stuck in it.
Our classic guitar heroes, you know, like Hendrix for Mike
and, like, Jimmy Page for me,
and, like, for Eddie, it's like he totally loved The Who.
The Who was the greatest rock band ever.
It's like all these bands, so in a sense,
it's a total tribute to the seventies.
Roger Daltrey wrote me a letter saying would I like to come play,
and I told him no way, because that's it.
That's the ultimate. That's the pinnacle for me,
is that band, you know,
that arrow on the mod sign, you know.
We have to decide whether or not we're going to remain a circus act.
In other words, doing what everybody
knows we can do and what we know we can do. Right?
Until the band eventually turns into a cabaret act,
- which is inevitable. - No, that's ridiculous!
Here's me and Johnny Ramone. I'm wearing a Bob Dole mask.
Uncle Neil.
This is me and Joe Strummer.
And that's the night I met Jack Irons.
This was hanging in a dressing room.
It was actually the first night I had met Pete.
I was terrified.
And the first thing he said was,
"I've waited so long to meet you."
Now we're just grateful for our band and who we are
and what we've become,
and grateful that we finally figured out how to do it.
I think that there was a huge element
of our fans that just kind of carried us
through a period of time where we were not there all the way.
You see their belief, and even when you don't have it,
you go, "Okay. I've got to figure this out."
Joining the band, I was super impressed
with how in-house everything is.
Like, there's no outside influence going on, you know.
It's like it all comes from the band.
They saved me in a certain way.
You know, we've been doing it for 10 records or 20 years,
and I can't think of a show where I ever felt
like I was just phoning it in.
It's always pure stoke, you know, like...
I think that there really is, like,
a collective understanding of how lucky and how fortunate we are
to still be playing music with the same group of people.
I mean, everybody, you can feel it,
and it makes being in a band a joy.
There's a... This communal exchange.
And there's obviously a line drawn
between who's on stage and who's in the crowd,
but not really.
I fucking loved it. We were two rows from the front.
It was fucking incredible.
- This was my fifth show. - 24.
- 61. - 54.
153.
Pearl Jam are a band for the fans.
"If you love us, stick with us",
and we've stuck with them all the way,
because what we get out of them is overwhelming.
These guys flew from Bucharest this morning.
Budapest.
We came from Denver.
- Townsville, Australia. - London, England.
Took two weeks off from my job,
and traveled to nine shows in a row last tour.
There's not another band like them.
Everybody rode the whole crest of a wave with Ten,
and it was just the thing to be into,
but after that, they've come out a lot stronger,
because they didn't play the game.
They took on Ticketmaster. They were pissed off
that people were getting ripped off,
and they took on the man,
and they could have lost, but they didn't.
I think this band is really only beginning.
There was a rumor
that it was sort of gonna be like The Kids Are Alright.
That would be a misconception, because The Kids Are Alright
is really super genius,
and what we're gonna put out is gonna be really super us.
Hey, Josh. How's it going?
Fuck you, Kevin.
They stay true to fans as well,
about them releasing the bootlegs of their albums
so that other people can't bootleg them and make a sly penny off it,
and that's clever shit.
We're not filming this conversation, are we?
Yes, we are.
Now you're back. Why do you keep doing it?
I don't know whether they realize
exactly how much they have given to us, the fans.