Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron stunned fans Monday morning by announcing his immediate departure from the band following nearly three decades of service.
“After 27 fantastic years, I have taken my final steps down the drum riser for the mighty Pearl Jam,” he wrote. “Much love and respect to Jeff, Ed, Mike and Stone for inviting me into the band in 1998 and for giving me the opportunity of a lifetime, filled with friendships, artistry, challenges and laughter. I am forever grateful to the crew, staff and fans the world over. It’s been an incredible journey. More to follow. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart.”
The band responded with a prepared statement of their own: “From being one of our first musical heroes in the bands Skinyard and the mighty Soundgarden, to playing on our first demos in 1990, Matt Cameron has been a singular and true powerhouse of a musician and drummer. He has propelled the last 27 years of Pearl Jam live shows and studio recordings. It was a deeply important chapter for our group and we wish him well always. He will be deeply missed and is forever our friend in art and music. We love you Matt.”
This is the first time a member of Pearl Jam has defected since 1998, and it raises more than a few question: Why exactly is Cameron leaving? Will he remain an active musician? Who will take his place? And why has this band been through so many drummers while the rest of the lineup has remained completely intact from day one?
When Cameron joined the band in 1998, he was actually their fifth drummer in just eight years. He lasted longer than all of his predecessors combined, but he didn’t play with Pearl Jam during their commercial peak. That was a tumultuous time marked by sharp disagreements over the future of the band, a fierce battle with Ticketmaster, endless concerns about selling out, and a Spinal Tap-like parade of drummers, one lasting just a month. Here’s a look back at every person who manned the kit.
When former Mother Love Bone members Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard first invited Eddie Vedder up to Seattle in October of 1990 to meet and see if he’d gel with them and guitarist Mike McCready, they invited drummer Dave Krusen to sit in at their first rehearsal. Matt Cameron played on their early demos before the group even met Vedder in person, but he couldn’t join the group because of his commitment to Soundgarden.
“I was very surprised to hear such a massive voice,” Krusen told Rolling Stone in 2017. “As soon as [Vedder] started singing I was struck by the uniqueness of his voice. He also just started constantly scribbling words down, trying different stuff. He was right into the fire.”
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Krusen remained with the band when they played their first gig later that month, when they toured with Alice in Chains early the next year, and when they recorded Ten. But he had a severe drinking problem at the time. “I’m an alcoholic,” he told Rolling Stone. “I had really been just sick of my disease at that point and could just not stop drinking.”
He was kicked out of the band following their show at the Singles wrap party on May 25, 1991. They were still a baby band at that point — Ten had yet to come out — and he had to watch their rise from the sidelines. “I think it was harder for people around me than it was me,” he said. “I had to either accept or let it run me over. I had to accept it and move on with my life.”
On April 7, 2017, over a quarter century after his last gig with the band, he played “Alive” with Pearl Jam when they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. And on May 16, 2022, he was called back into duty for a single night when Cameron came down with Covid. He backed them on nine sings from Ten. Josh Klinghoffer and Richard Stuverud divided up drum duties the rest of the night.
Pearl Jam recruited former Edie Brickell & New Bohemians drummer Matt Chamberlain to join them when they hit the road following the Ten sessions. “I was just there to help out,” he says in the official band memoir Pearl Jam Twenty. “I didn’t even know these guys. And then they basically asked me to uproot everything in my life and join their band that was in a van, still. Basically, I just had no connection to them on a personal level or musically. I could have been any drummer — they just needed one.”
Right around this same time, Chamberlain was offered a spot as the drummer in the Saturday Night Live house band. To him, it was a no-brainer. “Had I known it was going to generate million and millions of dollars, maybe I’d have given it a second thought,” he said. “But I think I made the right decision. It just wasn’t my thing. They were on a mission, but I was just there to help out for a second. I was just an innocent bystander.”
During his extremely brief time in the band, they happened to film the video for “Alive” at a show in Seattle. The audio is from Krusen’s time in the band, but it forever immortalized the tiniest chapter of Pearl Jam history. (In the summer of 2014, Chamberlain toured in Soungarden when Cameron was busy with Pearl Jam, meaning they basically swapped roles for a bit.)
Pearl Jam were in a tough spot when Chamberlain defected: They had a huge tour on the books. But Chamberlain told them about a drummer named Dave Abbruzzese he’d recently seen play in Dallas with chops that reminded him of John Bonham. They flew him out to Seattle where he watched the “Alive” video shoot, and then jammed with the band for the first time. “He just kind of fit in,” said Ament. “We wanted to argue about it a little bit, but nobody could really argue about it. It was happening.”
Abbruzzese stayed behind the kit for the Vs. and Vitalogy sessions, and the endless tours and promotional work of that hectic time, but personality conflicts surfaced early on. Cameron Crowe captured these tensions when he wrote a Rolling Stone cover story about Pearl Jam in October 1993.
“To me, when I was younger and I heard about a band selling a million records, I thought the band would get together and jump up and down for at least a minute,” Abbruzzese told Crowe, “and just go, ‘Wow, I can’t believe it.’ But it doesn’t happen that way [in this band]. Me, I flip out. I jump up and down by myself.”
In other words, he was enjoying fame while Vedder and the others brooded. As the months ticked by, the distance between Abbruzzese and the others grew wider. Gossard fired him over breakfast in August 1994. “For reasons that I don’t completely understand, the other members decided to fire me in order to pursue a philosophy which they perceive as incompatible with mine,” Abbruzzese said in a statement. “I was not involved in their decision, but I accept it and am proud to have been a part of what Pearl Jam was.”
When the group was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Krusen and Cameron were presented with the honor. Abbruzzese was not. “Whoever is ultimately responsible for the decision that deemed my work with Pearl Jam as an effort that was not important enough to grant me induction knows nothing of what we accomplished,” he wrote in a furious missive on Facebook, “and I am personally at a loss for words for how Stone, Mike, Jeff, Matt, Edward and [manager] Kelly Curtis are accepting of such an injustice.”
Jack Irons formed the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1982 with high-school buddies Flea and Anthony Kiedis. But he left the group in 1988 after the death of guitarist Hillel Slovak, and was playing with Joe Strummer when he met a young gas station attendant named Eddie Vedder at a San Diego club. He recommended Vedder to Ament and Gossard when they were looking for a new singer in 1990, kickstarting the whole Pearl Jam saga.
Partially to pay him back, Vedder invited Irons into the band once they parted ways with Abbruzzese. They debuted him at the 1994 Bridge School Benefit, and used him on No Code and Yield along with Mirrorball, the band’s collaborative LP with Neil Young. But he didn’t adapt well to life on the road. “I had a young family with two children,” he told Rolling Stone in 2022. “I was just getting really exhausted. It was some deep-place exhaustion.”
Things came to a head when they went to Australia in early 1998. “I struggled to find my balance, to get my rest, to recover, to be ready for the next one,” he said. “It was a lot of pressure…I’ll just say it: I was having a hard time with my state of being, without getting too deep into that. I was due for a pullover. I was ready to pull off the road and take a different journey, a healing journey, and really try and get together certain aspects of my life that I had not really done. I had been pushing myself and running on fumes. It was time.”
He joined Pearl Jam for a handful of songs at two shows in 2003. And when the band entered the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, Irons showed up for the ceremony even though he wasn’t inducted. He hopped onto the kit next to Matt Cameron for the finale of “Rockin’ in the Free World” alongside members of Rush, Journey, and Yes.
Pearl Jam were booked to play all across America in the summer of 1998, which didn’t leave them much time to hire a new drummer once Irons left. But Soundgarden split up the prior year, and Matt Cameron was suddenly very available. He had three weeks to learn their entire catalog. “Everyone was super welcoming,” he said. “We already knew each other, we were friends. I just slid right into their workflow…[But] I was playing way too fast. I had to chill out. And I had to try to get closer to the styles of the drummers before me. I had to try to play like Dave Abbruzzese, Dave Krusen — musicians with really different styles — and Jack Irons… man, Jack has such a unique touch. That’s one of the cool things about Pearl Jam: every drummer brought their own vibe. My job was to learn the catalog and do my best to keep the band rolling and get them back on the road.”
From Rolling Stone US
