Jeff Ament’s Since Forever and Pearl Jam’s Open Drum Question

Pearl Jam were off the road for a year and a half before returning to the stage in late September, and Jeff Ament used the pause to go through his own archive. Since Forever, out now, collects photographs he has taken of his bandmates since their earliest days, assembled with his brother, designer Barry Ament, who first pushed him to digitize the material. The result is a body of images from inside the band rather than in front of it.

The collection has a visible starting point. Ament sold his camera to fund his move to Seattle, getting about 100 dollars for it in 1983, which is why only a handful of photographs survive from his first two or three years in the city. The camera that restarted the habit came through the art department of Cameron Crowe’s Singles, where the crew told him to buy a body and charge it to the production. He added a fisheye lens with his own money. Some of the first rolls were rehearsal shots.

The interview that accompanies the book also touched on Pearl Jam’s drum situation, which stays unclear. Ament suggested that whoever played with the band would likely be its permanent drummer. Abe Laboriel Jr., long a Paul McCartney sideman, played the two Ohana Festival sets in Dana Point, California. Afterward, Eddie Vedder described him on Instagram as “sitting in.”

The book has no such ambiguity to settle. It records what already happened.