Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament names 11 bassists who shaped his sound
Pearl Jam’s new album Dark Matter has sent bassist Jeff Ament on a journey. It’s a record where he works through punk-adjacent pounding (Running, Scared of Fear); rhythmically fired-up riff rawk (Dark Matter); joyful Stax-styled bass runs (Got to Give); and bar-chopping country ballads (Something Special).
As deep and exploratory as any Pearl Jam album, Dark Matter also scales back the ambient electronic whirl that marked parts of 2020’s Gigaton in favor of a harder-hitting immediacy. “I think that punch probably comes from the process being so quick,” Ament explains, noting it was made in three weeks between producer Andrew Watt’s Beverly Hills home recording space, and Rick Rubin’s iconic Shangri La studio in nearby Malibu.
It also helped that Watt – who previously produced, co-wrote and performed on Eddie Vedder’s 2022 solo album, Earthling – grew up with Pearl Jam’s music tattooed on his brain, and energized the group with his hands-on, middle-of-the-room cheerleading. “Andrew’s a huge fan,” Ament says, “and the Pearl Jam that he likes is the stuff that hits hard. So we leaned into that part of the sound a little more.”
When Vedder invited his bandmates to Watt’s studio, he told them to leave their instruments at home and dip into the producer’s great gear reservoir instead. That shook up Ament’s sound a touch, with the trebly, twonky grit the bassist thwacks onto Dark Matter’s heaviest rockers coming out of a wicked borrowed Ricky.
“There was a white Rickenbacker, maybe a ’72, that felt great to me,” he explains. “I mean, those old 4003s are either great, or the intonation is terrible and they just don’t hit right. But this had flats on it and sounded killer. That’s what ended up on React Respond.”
Some rhythms are more familiar, like his 12-string slipperiness in Dark Matter’s opening moments, which arguably recall Master/Slave, the fretless instrumental movement that bookended Pearl Jam’s iconic 1991 debut, Ten. Then again, that beauty could also be in debt to the sophisticated sliding a much younger Ament heard coming out of various players in the early UK post-punk scene.
“The amazing thing about being down the road a-ways is that I feel like I’ve dipped into all of those styles,” he says. Those inspirations have impacted every era of a 40-year career, from Montana hardcore kids Deranged Diction through proto-grunge icons Green River, glam-dappled Mother Love Bone, Seattle supergroup Temple of Dog – and, of course, Pearl Jam.
“It’s cool when something just comes out naturally. You’re working on a song in the room and all of a sudden you start playing a certain way, and then later on you’re like, ‘Oh, I nicked a little Peter Hook, Eric Avery on that thing!’ That’s what’s cool about doing an interview like this: giving props to so many players.”
1. Dee Dee Ramone
“When I first started playing bass it was my freshman year of college. There was a kid who lived on my floor, Jon Donahue, who was a Southern-Cal punk rocker kid, and we started listening to music together.
“Then, just out of boredom, he was like, ‘We should form a band!’ I played piano when I was a kid, but I didn’t play guitar. He had a bass and a guitar at home and he brought them back after Thanksgiving break, and on Friday and Saturday nights we would play along with records.
“One of the things we played along to the most was the Ramones’ double It’s Alive record. It was like 30 songs and a lot of it is in the same key; a lot of it is in that fifth-fret zone. The other thing that was exciting was realizing Dee Dee wrote a lot of those songs – not just the music, but the lyrics.
“When we decided we were going to write some of our own, as Deranged Diction, that was the thing that inspired me the most: you could have these really super-simple ideas, and write lyrics that were sort of nonsensical, but they were really cool songs. I’ve always been particularly inspired by bass players that write songs. And he’s at the top.
“Pinhead was my favorite Ramones song. But I think at the first Deranged Diction show, we played Blitzkrieg Bop, a couple of Sex Pistols songs and a 999 song called Homicide – all pretty much eighth-note downpicking.”
2. Chuck Dukowski
“I was a really big Black Flag fan. I had been in Seattle maybe two months when I saw them play a show. I couldn’t take my eyes off Chuck; his eyes were rolled back in his head.
“There are songs where he plays rhythmic, melodic parts, but there was this other visceral part of it where he would play so hard. The bass would almost be a part of him. It was such a physical way of playing the instrument, almost anti-musical. Being a physical kid myself, I really responded to that.
“My playing completely changed after I saw that show. I was like, ‘Oh…you can hit all the strings with your fist, and it makes this extra crazy, super-powered, resonant sound!’ Hardcore had a really profound impact on me, just through how physical the playing was with a lot of those guys.”
3. Klaus Flouride
“I think the first Dead Kennedys song that I learned was Holiday in Cambodia, which is hitting an open A string while playing the melody on the D. I was into Joy Division’s Peter Hook and even Adam Clayton of U2 – a lot of that playing where there’s an open-string drone and then the melody on the other strings. Klaus did that beautifully on this song.
“You think about Bleed for Me, which Pearl Jam have played a couple of times, or I Am the Owl; it’s just really thoughtful, melodic playing. All those players were fantastic in Dead Kennedys, but Klaus really shaped the melody and instrumental part of it.”
4. Tom Petersson
“I remember hearing some kids playing the first Cheap Trick record at the swimming pool in town; I was probably 13. I was into Kiss, Aerosmith and Ted Nugent at the time, but I remember hearing He’s a Whore and thinking, ‘Wow… what is that?’ It sounded really unique… but also sort of reminiscent of the harder Beatles stuff, towards the end of their career.
“I started understanding what a 12-string bass was through the Heaven Tonight record, but also through songs like Gonna Raise Hell and Dream Police. Tom Petersson’s bass figures so prominently in those songs, because of how massive that 12-string sound was. It was like having a piano player on rhythm guitar, almost. Massive influence.
“We rented a 12-string when we made the Mother Love Bone album [1990’s Apple] in Sausalito. You can hear it on Stardog Champion – that’s all 12-string bass. There’s also a breakdown in Holy Roller that’s 12-string.
“Right around that time, I contacted Joel Danzig at Hamer with the idea of getting my own 12-string bass. I’d also written a couple loose arrangements on my acoustic guitar, with the idea that this 12-string bass was going to show up. Those songs turned into Why Go and Jeremy on the first Pearl Jam record. I was playing them on a crappy Harmony acoustic guitar, while imagining the tone on Cheap Trick’s Gonna Raise Hell.”
5. Andy Fraser
“When I was in Mother Love Bone I started delving back into bands like Aerosmith and Bad Company. Then I went back further and found a used copy of Free’s Fire and Water. I was blown away by the space in those songs.
“The whole band is incredible, almost like a slowed-down Zeppelin in some ways, but Andy’s playing is just so tasteful and melodic – like that breakdown in All Right Now. He wrote a bunch of those songs. That outro in Mr. Big is just crazy. I’ll be Creepin’ might be my favorite song of theirs.
“When Temple of the Dog did the handful of shows a few years ago, we did a version of I’m a Mover, which Chris Cornell nailed. It was really fun to play.”
6. Mick Karn
“I remember seeing a couple Japan videos, and I couldn’t wrap my head around Mick Karn’s playing. Within a couple of years, though, I figured out what he was doing with harmonics. It’s very Jaco, but meets his Greek heritage. And I think by nature, Mick’s a bass clarinetist.
“Fretless in the rock zone – that was really interesting to me. I didn’t get a fretless bass until we were making the Mother Love Bone record, so ‘88 or something. By the time we made the first Pearl Jam record, I think two-thirds of that record was fretless, with the idea that I was just going to throw myself in deep water and figure it out live every night.
“I’m sure there were some shows in those days where if I wasn’t hearing myself, they probably weren’t great sets. But I figured it out!”
7. Jah Wobble (and Keith Levine)
“Public Image Ltd’s Second Edition is definitely one of my top 10 records, ever since I was a junior in high school. I never go a few months without going back to that record.
“It’s the whole thing – the drumming; how Keith Levine plays guitar; and what Johnny Rotten was doing while deconstructing whatever he’d just done with Sex Pistols. Lyrically, it’s very abstract. ‘The smell of rubber on country tar’ – it’s great imagery.
“There was something hooky about that record in particular. The dub vibe of Jah Wobble’s bass playing, and how Keith Levin is playing these very staccato, anti-blues parts. There’s no bending. It’s leaning into the dissonance so much that it almost becomes hooky.
“I think I was expecting something more like the first P.I.L. record, which was a departure from Sex Pistols… but not that much of a departure. With Second Edition, they really jump off the deep end. It’s super-dark.”
8. David J
“Mick Karn, Jah Wobble and David J… they’re all fretless post-punk players that had a profound impact on how I heard bass in rock music.
“But David J. is also a songwriter. He wrote some of the biggest hits that Love and Rockets had, and there were really interesting choices he made in Bauhaus. The bass carried that band in a lot of ways.”
9. Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn
“I can’t tell you what an impact Booker T. and the M.G.’s had on me – Duck and drummer Jim Keltner in particular – when Pearl Jam did those shows with Neil Young in 1993.
“I remember sitting back behind Duck’s cabinet. I was watching Keltner’s right foot, and watching Duck really concentrate on locking in with it. Keltner has this feel where the hat is kind of on the beat, even pushing it, but the kick is almost like an eighth note back.
“Duck, who historically is a pretty back-bass player, was having to go even further back with it. Every once in a while, though, they would lock into a cool little run or flourish that would remind you that Duck was an assassin.
“I came out of those shows having a completely different understanding of how to play in a mid-tempo groove. Just the economy of it, and leaning where to mute and where to let the note ring. It’s kind of like the way Andy Fraser played, too.
“To bear witness to those guys interpreting Crazy Horse songs, largely, was a thing of beauty. Probably one of the most profound in-person experiences I’ve ever had as a musician.”
10. John Paul Jones
“There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to just name the obvious players, like McCartney and Entwistle – the guys that are part of the fabric of anybody that plays rock music. I just couldn’t leave John Paul Jones off, though, because he’s such an incredibly eclectic player.
“He can play in any style. There’s also the way he played keyboards and bass pedals, or 8-string on Achilles’ Last Stand, which we also played in Temple of the Dog. That was an absolute beast to learn.
“I’ve spent a little time with JPJ, and he might be one of the only musicians I’ve been around where I was a teeny bit starstruck. He was up in Seattle doing strings for a Heart record. We mostly talked about 8-string and 12-string bass. I was super-intrigued that he was playing an 8-string Alembic pretty early on. I think I asked him some stupid questions about Achilles Last Stand, like, ‘What were you doing there?’ But he was very kind!
“I think he gets his due, but he’s even more important to Led Zeppelin than we give him credit for. People talk about Bonham, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, but JPJ was every bit as important as those other guys.”
11. Eric Avery
“The first two times I saw Jane’s Addiction, I played with them – with Green River the first time and Love Bone the second. Both times I was transfixed. Eric Avery plays his bass from that Peter Hook approach: lots of drone-string; really melodic; a lot of repetition.
“I remember watching that first show from the side of the stage and seeing how Eric and drummer Stephen Perkins played together. I said to Stone Gossard, ‘That’s what I want to do, right there.’
“It was rock, largely because of Dave Navarro, but with a singer that wasn’t rock – a super weirdo. The rhythm section was playing very tribally and really post-punk. It was one of those moments where I was like, ‘Whatever that is, I want to tap into that energy.’”
Pearl Jam's new album Dark Matter is out on April 19 via Monkeywrench Records/Republic Records.
