Backstage pass: New book's photos "add an extra track" to early years of Pearl Jam

Lance Mercer teaches a class at the Photographic Center Northwest called "Train Tracks and Brick Walls: Photographing Musicians."

The name's a joke. Train tracks and brick walls are where music clichés are made. And Mercer won't go anywhere near them.

Instead, Mercer has made a career shooting on the front lines: The mosh pits, the dive bars. The bathrooms and dressing rooms. And the churning, chanting audiences. For music isn't only seen on the stage.

In the early '90s Mercer traveled with Pearl Jam as the band toured in support of its first album, "Ten." He stayed with them for four years.

Without knowing it, Mercer was capturing Pearl Jam at the very start of a journey that has lasted more than 15 years; a time marked by now-Scripture-like songs like "Evenflow," "Alive," "Black" and "Jeremy," among others.

"There is something that you know is going on at the beginning," Mercer said. "I knew they were doing well, but the extreme — I had no idea, until the stages started getting bigger."

Mercer has just published "5x1: Pearl Jam through the Eye of Lance Mercer," a collection of black-and-white images of the band that tells the story behind the scenes.

"I wanted to come to some sort of conclusion with the time I spent with Pearl Jam," Mercer said. "These photos aren't going to mean anything if they're sitting in a box somewhere."

And now that Pearl Jam has achieved icon status, having sold hundreds of millions of albums and selling out stadiums worldwide, the moments Mercer captured hold even more meaning.

"I drove them crazy, but they trusted me," Mercer said. "The biggest thing you can get is the trust, which is what will allow you to see them with their guard down."

There are Stone Gossard and Mike McCready, facing off on a Hilton tennis court. Jeff Ament suspended in the air. Matt Cameron in the midst of a rhythmic rumble. Ed Vedder chasing manager Kelly Curtis' young daughter through an airport, and sporting a Mod look in a canary-yellow outfit (and wig!) one aimless afternoon at home.

There is the band sweaty and circled up backstage, like players after a game. Vedder's taped-up boots. McCready's scrawny body.

Exhaustion. Exhilaration. Youth.

"There was a real sparkle in our eyes," said bassist Ament, on the phone from a tour stop in Perth, Australia. "We were really fricking motivated at that point and there are a lot of really, really good times that Lance captured."

It took three years for Mercer and designer Regan Hagar to sort through more than 5,000 images from 1991-1996.

Hagar kept the photos on a wall in his house, he and Mercer constantly moving, removing and replacing the images until they hit on the right photos in the perfect order, and put them between the covers. Hagar — who played drums for the Andrew Wood-fronted band Malfunkshun, as well as for Satchel and Brad — designed the book.

"I picked the photos that I always loved," Mercer said.

He and Hagar imagined "5x1" as a yearbook for Pearl Jam fans; something they would carry around in their bags, crack open and share. The back of the book sports a replica of Mercer's backstage pass. He hopes it will be scraped and curl with wear — just like the one he wore all those years.

But the inscriptions are hardly the stuff of high-schoolers. Bruce Springsteen contributed a brief essay, as did R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, activist Gloria Steinem and director Cameron Crowe, who wrote, "These images are meant to be listened to, loud."

"We just asked people for their thoughts, plain and simple," Mercer said.

But when Pete Townshend wrote back, it was hardly plain or simple for Mercer.

"Great photographs like these are in themselves musical," Townshend wrote, "so they add an extra track."

Said Mercer: "I had to walk away from my computer when that one came in. I had goose bumps."

The book is available on the Pearl Jam Web site (www.pearljam.com), but may be sold at independent stores like Easy Street Records. Sales will benefit MusicCares and the Vera Project, which hosts the kind of music shows where Mercer — and Pearl Jam — got started.

Mercer started shooting the Seattle music scene at age 13, using a "no-frills" Pentax K1000. He attended Seattle Central Community College, majoring in commercial photography, and graduated in 1987. All the while he was hitting the clubs to photograph Seattle bands — Soundgarden, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, which invited him on its first tour in 1992.

"He caught us at all the different points," Ament said. "Early on, when everything was new and fresh and we were excited to be out. It was a pretty hectic time."

Later, when "Ten" took off and "Vs." helped to make Pearl Jam one of the best-selling bands of the '90s, Mercer was a friend from home who carried a camera and meant no harm.

"We didn't have any elder statesmen around," Ament said, of that time. "And I think we got burned a few times ... and we pulled back even further. We wanted to keep it in-house as much as we could, and Lance was one of the few guys that we really trusted."

He was inspired by documentarian/journalistic photographers like W. Eugene Smith, Robert Frank and Annie Leibovitz's early work for Rolling Stone magazine.

"I wanted to be a war photographer," he said, then nodded at his book's cover: A row of fans, their faces just visible over the stage barrier. A front line if there ever was one.

"That was my world for the longest time," Mercer said.

He's a slight guy, soft-spoken, in black Converse Chuck Taylors ("Cons," he calls them) and a black sweatshirt — still able to disappear onstage or in a crowd.

The extent of his injuries there, he said, was minimal. A few boots in the back of the head. Eric Johnson, who was Pearl Jam's tour manager while Mercer traveled along, said Mercer captured a time that no longer exists.

"It was a socialist time and everybody was the same," Johnson said. "Lance was just about capturing what everybody was."

His photos are completely honest; they're really the moment that happened.

"He didn't just shoot people playing music," Johnson said. "He captured the reasons they played music."

Mercer, now 40, married and the father of two daughters, 17 and 10, is teaching, playing music and still shooting music shows, as well as Pearl Jam here and there. Eric Johnson became Neil Young's tour manager in 1998. And Pearl Jam is finishing up a world tour in support of its May release, "Pearl Jam."

All agreed — Mercer, Johnson and Ament — that the pages of "5x1" marked a pivotal time in their lives.

"Those were some of the funnest times of my life," Johnson said. "Touring with the dynamic of the band just being regular guys. ... The burping and farting and nicknames and being able to capture that experience. We were really lucky people to be there."

[Mercer] "is an artist to the nth degree," Johnson said. "He lives it."

Nicole Brodeur: 206-464-2334 or nbrodeur@seattletimes.com