Jeff Ament
Jeff Ament
Jeffrey Allen Amentis an American musician and songwriter who serves as the bassist for the American rock band Pearl Jam. Along with Stone Gossard, Mike McCready, and Eddie Vedder, he is one of the founding members of Pearl Jam. Ament is also known for his work prior to Pearl Jam with the 1980s Seattle-based grunge rock bands Green River and Mother Love Bone, and is particularly notable for his work with the fretless bass, upright bass, and twelve-string bass guitar...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionGuitarist
Date of Birth10 March 1963
CityHavre, MT
CountryUnited States of America
I had a portable 8-track player under all my ramps, cranking one of my four 8-tracks - Cars/'Candy-O,' Ramones/'Road To Ruin,' Cheap Trick/'Heaven Tonight' and the first Devo record. I don't remember skating without music.
I think at that point we were aspiring to be a Led Zeppelin kind of a band where you could pick up your acoustic instruments or you could go out and rock or you could play a country song. I love all those bands we got mentioned with, but it never felt like we fit into that group very well. So the fact that they're still saying, 'The band that survived grunge' is kind of funny.
Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love talked trash about the fact that I hooped. I once stopped to say 'Hi' before a show, and as I walked away, Courtney yelled, 'Go play basketball with Dave Grohl!'
Our first record didn't come out on vinyl, so I think that might have had something to do with actually being in a position to make sure that it came out in vinyl this time. It sounds way better.
I think I've become numb to that over the last 15 years,
We opened for Black Flag, and none of the bands had dressing rooms, but Henry Rollins had his own. He had struck me as different from that.
Unless you're a vegan freak of nature like Tony Gonzalez, I don't think you can play sports much past your early 30s.
We've always been a band that stood up for what we thought was right.
I didn't write this song. Someone was talking in a room. I just wrote down everything they said.
I feel like in a lot of ways I can relate to the fans, just being a fan of music myself.
We saw something starting to happen with the industry and we called them out on it,
We went to Big Sur about three years ago and hung out at the Esalen Institute.
Everything Ticketmaster stands for is what we're fighting against. They're just a small cog in a machine where the artist is at the bottom.
Everybody got away from what Pearl Jam are supposed to be.