Pearl Jam kicks of North American tour

DETROIT, March 31 (UPI) -- Pearl Jam fans like it when the Seattle rock band plays live. They like it even better when they can keep hearing the shows.

As the quintet kicks off its first North American tour in nearly three years Tuesday in Denver, it's continuing the practice it began with its 2000 world tour of releasing soundboard recordings from each show. The 2000 series of 72 titles surprised the industry by selling more than 1 million copies.

This year, Pearl Jam is making the recordings -- overseen by the band's live sound engineer Brett Eliason -- available online at pearljam.com. So far the band has put out 15 albums from its shows in Australia and Japan, and the group members think they're even better now.

"I think all that stuff has gotten way better this time,'' says bassist Jeff Ament, who co-founded Pearl Jam with guitarist Stone Gossard in 1990. "There were some things about the last one, like the drum sound, that I thought could be improved, and we did.''

Guitarist Mike McCready, meanwhile, says he's still surprised at the appetite Pearl Jam's fans have for the live recordings. In 2000, he says, "I felt like `Oh my God, we're putting out 72 records; is that completely self-indulgent or is it just total overkill?'

"I'm glad people liked them. It was nice to give them audio snapshots of the show. If they were in Cleveland and we put out a Cleveland one, or Seattle, wherever, they got to enjoy the show again."

Ament -- who so far recommends that fans buy the Feb. 23 show from Perth, Australia, and the March 1 show from Yokahama, Japan -- says that he's pleased with the way the band has been playing on this tour, in support of its 2002 studio album "Riot Act." He's particularly happy that it didn't seem to take Pearl Jam long to get its act up to the vaunted standards the group set during the early 1990s.

"It seems like historically we always take a week to 10 days," Ament says by telephone from his home in Seattle. "But this time ... the second show we played, in Brisbane, was really, really good. I remember feeling after the show 'We're getting better at this. We're figuring it out quicker, kind of getting into that mode."

The 2003 tour has an interesting business sub-text for the band as well. The group's contract with Epic Records has reached an end, and Ament says he and his bandmates -- McCready, Gossard, frontman Eddie Vedder and drummer Matt Cameron -- are considering a number of options for their future.

Pearl Jam, he says, is being openly courted by several major labels -- including Epic -- but the success of the live album series and other projects the group does through its active fan organization, the Ten Club, also has Pearl Jam considering taking matters more into its own hands.

"It's great to be at that point, after our seventh record, where we're free agents,"

Ament says. "Over the next year, we'll figure out how we kind of want to make records and put them out. I think we can do it however we want.

"I think we have a little bit of a new lease on life at this point. We feel like we can mess with things a little bit more, and I think that's given everybody a bunch of new energy."