Along with names like Stone Gossard and Mark Arm, Jeff Ament is one of the cornerstones of grunge music in the Pacific Northwest. The 60-year-old, Montana-born bass player was part of formative groups like Green River and Mother Love Bone before co-founding Pearl Jam.
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With so much experience and influence, some may wonder just what Ament has to say about the music he helped grow, about his craft, life and love, and the world at large. That is the subject of this inquiry. Here below are the 20 best Jeff Ament quotes.
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1. “I have to go someplace where I can soak myself in a creative atmosphere.”
2. “I’ve seen kids turn their lives around. It’s usually a kid who’s outside of the team-sport world, or maybe has a darker personality or doesn’t fit in. Skateboarding ends up being something they latch onto. It sounds hokey, but finding a focus on something—whether it’s skateboard or playing your guitar—can be life changing.”
3. “With Pearl Jam, everybody is so good at what they do, it’s hard to get up the courage to say, ‘Can I sing this part,’ or, ‘I want to play guitar.’ I feel like I have more courage to do that [now].”
4. “There really is a certain magic that happens when you’re in the studio. And it’s important in life to feel that magic—to feel that there is something greater moving all this along.”
5. “We’ve always been a band that stood up for what we thought was right.”
6. “It’s great that people are basically spending their two weeks of vacation to come out and be with us in some weird part of the world. And I think we owe it to them to take ’em to some cool places.”
7. “I’m a big fan of power trios where there’s only three instruments.”
8. “It was hard to figure out what were the good causes, the bad causes, even the good politics and the bad politics. So we started taking requests and figuring it out.”
9. “When I moved to Seattle, I was hanging out with kids who had done drugs, had sex a million times. I look at them now and realize their childhood was taken away.”
10. “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.”
11. “Punk rock and skateboarding took the ‘school’ out of living your life, and I related to learning as I went, doing a lot of different things that I liked, when I liked. Consequently, I’m mediocre at all of the above, but still stoked on being a lifetime student of music, skating, painting, writing, etcetera.”
12. “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!'”
13. “That’s probably half the reason I wanted to be in a band—I wanted to see the world.”
14. “I love sad. Sadness makes you feel more than anything.”
15. “I led the state in defensive interceptions my senior year, with seven in nine games. Then I went to Montana to play basketball and found out quickly that my college career wasn’t going to work out how I’d envisioned it.”
16. “I just have a serious problem with business for business’ sake—this bottom-dollar mentality. I have a serious problem with evil.”
17. “Right after Backspacer, my best friend got killed tragically. Something happened to me then where I got super motivated. I had a shelf of all this unfinished music. … So I just went to work and made a conscious decision that I was going to finish a bunch of stuff. Life’s short.”
18. “Make movies. Don’t make videos. Videos are evil.”
19. “Ever since I picked up a bass, I’ve written songs.”
20. “I certainly didn’t want to be in a punk rock band, because I had already been in a punk rock band. I wanted to be in a band that could do anything—like Led Zeppelin.”
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