Pearl Jam Still Battling Ticketmaster

Pearl Jam, the nation’s hottest young rock band, is heading on tour this summer. But don’t look for them at your local civic center.

Instead, try a nearby ski area, racetrack or even amusement park.

Pearl Jam is giving no ground in its ongoing battle with Ticketmaster, the nation’s largest concert ticket agency. That means its two-month, 40-date tour promises to be one of the most unusual of the 1990s both for where concerts are held and how they are run.

“We may be forced to go in and create venues from the ground up, which means fences and power and water and parking and stages,” said Kelly Curtis, the Seattle-based band’s manager. “We’re really concerned that we put on a safe event. That’s why it’s difficult.”

Pearl Jam fought with Ticketmaster last year over a service charge tacked on to the price of tickets. The band decided to tour without Ticketmaster, but canceled the plans after learning it wouldn’t be easy. Two of its members testified against the agency last year in a congressional antitrust investigation.

Two-thirds of the nation’s 10 million concert arena seats are governed by exclusivity contracts between Ticketmaster and arena managers, according to the industry newsletter Pollstar.

Pearl Jam is itching to perform, Curtis said. The band recognizes that will mean no concerts in the arenas controlled by Ticketmaster contracts, he said.

Ticketmaster isn’t trying to hinder Pearl Jam’s ability to go on tour, spokesman Larry Solters said. In an odd way, a successful tour by the band would prove Ticketmaster’s argument that it’s not a monopoly, he said.

“It just validates what we’ve said all along - that Pearl Jam and any band has the ability to tour whenever they want,” Solters said.

One of the nation’s top promoters thinks Pearl Jam will succeed. Because the band is so popular, and because the group’s current LP, “Vitalogy” remains in the Top 5 of the charts, promoters will do all they can to work with them, said Jim Koplik, president of Metropolitan Entertainment in New York.

“They don’t really control the market to the extent that you can’t set up a tour,” Koplik said of Ticketmaster. “They control the market to the extent that you have to do a lot of work.”

Since Ticketmaster established industry dominance in the late 1980s, it has helped handle tickets for every major arena tour, Pollstar editor Gary Bongiovanni said.

Koplik, like other promoters across the country, currently is scouting out concert sites. He’s looking at such areas as racetracks and a ski area near New York City. Amusement parks are a good bet because they have open land and some facilities already set up, he said.

Within the next month or two, Pearl Jam will choose the 40 best sites, Curtis said.

The band also must set up its own ticket distribution network. Curtis said the idea is to make tickets as accessible as possible, a particular concern for a tour that will be popular with scalpers.

Toll-free telephone sales is the most likely route, said Bongiovanni.

Pearl Jam’s venture is risky because of the potential downside if any concertgoers get hurt, experts said. Creating concert venues where they haven’t existed before means literally dozens of things can go wrong; just ask Woodstock promoters about logistical problems.

And don’t expect it to be a model for many rock concert tours in the future.

“I’m guessing that it’s more of a political statement than any groundbreaking event,” Bongiovanni said. “It’s going to be so difficult for them to do it profitably. They are not taking the most logical course, and it’s going to be expensive for them to do it.”

Indeed, the rock band R.E.M., whose management publicly supported Pearl Jam in its Ticketmaster fight last year, is using Ticketmaster on its own tour of the United States this summer.

No hard feelings, Curtis said.

“I’m sure most bands will take the easy way,” he said. “You can’t ask everyone to go and do what we’ve done, to make the sacrifices we’ve made. We’re taking a huge risk by doing this. We’re kind of up for it.”