What happened? Somehow this band survived the kind of crisis that usually ensures a breakup-a crisis that not only engulfed them but swirled through the city of Seattle during the grunge rush of the early Nineties. As a singer and principal writer Eddie Vedder said, "It wasn't just a Pearl Jam crisis. It was the whole city. Nirvana was even in front of us as for as taking it head-on."

To the world outside the band, in the months after Pearl Jam's first three albums - Ten (1992), Vs (1993), and Vitalogy (1994) - each sold between five and ten million copies, the situation seemed even more volatile. There was no Pearl Jam album in 1995; instead, they made Mirror Ball with Neil Young, an act of homage for them and a battery-charge for him. Then, when they tried to tour on their own, Vedder contracted the most famous case of food poisoning since George Bush puked on the Japanese prime minister, and had to cancel a 50,000-seat concert in San Francisco after less than twenty minutes onstage; Young filled in and got booed. In the wake of that episode, a U.S. tour was canceled. Pearl Jam toured Europe as Young's backup group. The band's fourth album, No Code (1996) sold fewer than two million copies. There was no effort to do a U.S. tour; it was hard to believe that the band still had any interest in doing one.

"It's difficult to see, when you're in the middle of it, that you're not having a great time, sometimes," says Stone Gossard. "At least for me, just because there was a lot of pressure to keep going and to keep writing songs and to kind of justify selling as many records as we did. I think we all felt that we really wanted to get better and to feel like we deserved this sort of attention. But at the same time, we weren't really communicating very well. I don't know how much we really were enjoying being around each other. And I don't know whether it was just the pressure we'd kind of created around all this. I don't know exactly what the causes and effects were. It felt like a real adolescent periods of time in the band, in terms of the kinds of things that we were having disagreements about."

There was a temptation to see the crisis - more precisely, the series of crises - as stemming mainly from Vedder, whose voice and onstage persona dominated the band's image. But it wasn't just Vedder, although as the band's charismatic frontman, lyricist, and main spokesperson, he articulated grievances most often.

"I think everybody has a different way of dealing with those sorts of things," says bassist Jeff Ament. "Maybe we were a little bit more ready [than other bands struck by success]. Then there are aspects of it that there's no way you could be ready for being in a grocery store at then in the morning and having a bunch of people run up to you and ask for your autograph. Especially if you've been in this neighborhood for ten years. To have that happen all of a sudden one morning, you're just like, 'What was that? What happened over the last two months that changed?'"

In a situation stressed both by internal relationship problems and an attempt to control the virtually uncontrollable perils of fame, any one of three things can happen: The ban's leader can take over and turn the project into some kind of solo act - the Alice Cooper model. Or the band can break up and begin the arduous process of finding out whether any of them has it in him for a solo career - the Beatles model. Or the band can deny the problem and soldier on - the Who model. None of these approaches is conducive to creativity, and only the latter will give a group longevity.

Pearl Jam, it would seem, has cut a new path. It has come through the crisis, found out some things about itself as well as about the nature of success, and decided to see what might be made of continuing its career. "I think the only way we could get to the place where we could all go home and then not do anything for a little while and then have a little bit of excitement about getting together and writing songs was to say, 'We can't tour anymore. We can't do any interviews. We can't make five videos for this record,'" says Ament. "That's all the stuff that just tries you. It's a lot of sitting around and waiting around, and just being frustrated, and maybe putting the creative control in other people's hands, and maybe feeling like you're not being represented the way you want to be. The way that things happened for us and the way that initially everybody wanted a piece of us, I think we had to say no a lot. And that probably did come across as [us] being control freaks.

"It was about being burned, too-about somebody saying, 'Oh, yeah, I'm your friend and I'm gonna do all this,' and then a year later you find out that they're collecting stories to write a book about you."

Ament's bandmates were equally forthcoming about their feelings; all said they shared this sense of frustration and rejection. All five agreed that what enabled them to survive as a band was learning how to limit their commitments, and realizing that there was a way to scale down the process of success and render it livable.

"I feel like we went through the fire a little bit and ended up coming out and realizing...especially after we stopped doing press and stopped doing videos and things started to settle down a little bit in terms of everyone feeling like, 'God, we're not doing that stuff, and everything's still fine! We can still make records. We might not be selling as many records, but everything seems fine,'" says Gossard. "Going through that kind of allowed us to then sort out a lot of our own personal issues and then get to the bottom of what may be some of our fights."

Jack Irons, who replaced original drummer Dave Abbruzesse, is a year or so older than the rest of the band. He's got the most critical distance on what happened, since the height of their fame came before he joined and he's not from Seattle. (A former member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, he still lives in California.) Irons also has perhaps the most professional perspective in the group-and the most adult, since he's the only one who has kids. "This band wanted to be together," he insists. "They actually like each other, and it was just the circumstances that were kind of closing in. With time and good intent, that sort of goes away. You've still got to deal with it, but it doesn't have the same power anymore."

All the other bandmembers say essentially the same thing. Vedder sums it up: "At some point, we realized that the one small circle of people who would understand what each of us might have been going through on an individual level, even more so than the other people we had closest relationships to, the only people we could really communicate to about the situation that we were in, were the other guys [in the band]. They were the only ones."

Even if statements of solidarity are inevitable when a band returns to the touring circuit, what Pearl Jam is saying seems real. That's mainly because the music on the new album, Yield, confirms that something like this must have happened. Although it does contain several songs that evoke classic Pearl Jam of the first two albums (Ament's "Pilate" and "Low Light," McCready's and Vedder's "Given to Fly"), Yield is an eccentric vehicle, not at all a typical approach for this band.

Part of the reason is the songwriting credits. There hasn't been such a diversity of voices in Pearl Jam's songwriting since Ten. Ament in particular has been absent as a writer, and he's never contributed lyrics prior to Yield. "We approached this record so differently in terms of writing," he says. "I think it's the first time everybody came to the session with demos of complete songs or partial songs or ideas. Ed actually gave a lot of us the confidence to do that. He said, 'You know, if andy of you guys feel like bringing complete songs the next time we do this, that would be great.' And that was huge."

Vedder's perspective is, naturally, a bit different. "Pretty much everyone has always written music. That might mean bringing in a piece of slop, saying, 'This is music.' My job for a long time was to make something of it. I loved that. I was in control. I could dissect it in my lab and then come out with something. I was writing songs too. Then they started writing, and more music was coming in. But it was still in this linear shape.

"All I know is that this year we came back and there were good songs just handed to me," Vedder continues. "Completed: bass, drums, guitar, vocals, words, backgrounds. And some of them were totally moving. You just listened to it, and then you'd go in and play t, and there was none of this democratic hammering out of the riffs. I remember the first time Jack and I played 'Low Light' with Jeff. I just sang it over the guitar and the drums, and I got chills. Part of it was knowing that Jeff wrote it. And it just sounded good; I really enjoyed what he had written. It sounds kind of lush and lovey-dovey, but it was just a great moment. I was so thrilled that we were making music and it was gonna be this easy. You know, there's nothin' wrong with each once in a while."

"Is was just so cool," he says, "'cause it got to be homework after a while. As great as that is. I mean, if I sit at home and write something, and if words or something don't happen immediately, I'll just play something else. But if someone gives you something that they really like, and something doesn't happen, then you have to start circling it and getting in it, seeing if you can just throw a couple of things out. Sometimes that just happens, and it's great and it's done. But other times it's a little more difficult, so it would become a little bit of homework. And for them to come in and just have this stuff together..."

Vedder shakes his head. "So now I'm sheepishly saying, 'Sounds great, you know.' Kinda waiting to say, 'Well, you can sing it, 'cause I'm not gonna. Your version is good. Let's record it.' They'd pretty much say, 'It'd be great if you could sing it' or ask me to try this or that, and then I'd embrace it and go at it."

Still, Vedder insists that not very much ha changed in the band. Certainly not its sound: "I think we just kind of experiment. We try something, and it happens, and that's what it is. If it really doesn't belong, we don't put it on the record."

What's different, he thinks, is that the band has found a new relationship to the world outside itself. "I just thought that you didn't have to be so extreme, that you could still play, that when you made a record you didn't have to tour the whole world and then take another year off because you've spent a year and a half with these people and you can't stand another minute, you know, with the guitar player's voice in your ear, or ordering food or something-these little things. Look, all I want to do is play music. Now I have an opportunity. I want to keep going. I'm gonna be playing music for a long time. I'd like to keep offering it to people. I don't need to offer it on this superhuge, megahype level. There are some rewards [from that approach], but not really important ones. And there are sacrifices."

For example, the band seems to have taken a series of fairly conscious decisions to downsize its popularity. This was the consequence of a sequence of changes that began with a change in the band: the addition of Jack Irons. Jeff Ament talks in detail about how Irons' playing opened up Pearl Jam's sound: "It's made me rethink a lot about how I play, because he approaches the drums from such a soulful place. He never has a shortage of beats: He'll play some crazy groove, and everybody will fall in.

"I feel I'm approaching the new songs way differently," Ament adds, "so it makes me excited to be playing bass again. Then I feel like Jack has given some of the old songs a lot more space. All of a sudden, a song like 'Evenflow,' which I feel like we've struggles with... I know it was a great song all along, and I felt that it was the best song that we got the worst take of on the first record. There were a hundred takes on that song, and we just never nailed it. Then all of a sudden Jack starts playing, and it's like, 'Wow! That's how it was supposed to be played.' Leaving a big space there and a little space there, all of a sudden the song opens up and it swings.

"I think some of it, too, is Stone and Mike and me learning how to not play. So much of the first couple of records, Stone's riffs were kinda going the whole time; they were like the hi-hat of the song or whatever. Now there are huge spaces in songs where people aren't playing at all.

"Neil Young said something about how we were wise in that we knew when not to play. I don't know if we were necessarily doing it at that point, but him saying that's what we were doing, that made us realize that that's how you get to that point. It's just like any relationship: It's about givin' it up at certain times, and letting somebody else hold the floor."

"For me, a couple of the songs I didn't play on at all-which are 'No Way' and 'Evolution'-are two of my favorite songs on this record. Three or four years ago, I don't know if I could have said that. I think I'd have been kind of bummed that I wasn't part of the song, or wasn't at least playing bass or doing something on the song. At that point, it seems like it's interesting to sit down and learn a bass line that Stone wrote. It's great to listen to something purely being a fan of the people I play with, to sit back and have a pure perspective and just say, 'Wow, that's a great song.' It's not because I played on it; there's nothing to do with my ego in this. It's just about listening to it as a song and as a fan. I think there's been a lot of growth in this record in that way-just giving up things to other people and letting other people do things."

As McCready is Pearl Jam's most musically obsessed member, Mike tends to see everything through the lens of music. His reflection on the band's squabble over concert surcharges: "When we took on all those issues, Ticketmaster or whatever, that started to get in the way of just creating music and playing shows. That was when it started to get not so fun, for me. Once we get out there and play again, that's when I love it."

But, perhaps because he sees so much in terms of how it affect the music, Mike's also the band member who best defines how the band's musical evolution has altered its way of working together. "We've opened up and started talking a lot more than we ever have before-confronting each other on issues, having arguments, whatever."

The trick in all that is that it never sounds forced. It sounds like five guys who understand each other so well that they can use whatever irritants remain in their lives and relationships as fuel for their fire. For thirty years, bands have been trying to figure out how to live with success. Pearl Jam might not have discovered the definitive answer, but they've found one that works for them: Not quite so much success, but a lot more communication. At least that's what it sounds like when Vedder says they've found "a real manageable something that allows us to have lives and really enjoy the fact that we get to be a band and release records and play live.

"It really did happen," he muses. "We really did turn a corner. Now it's just movin' on and bein' a band and just doin' what we do. We've kind of established what we do, and we're not gonna defend what we do. If someone doesn't like it, fuck off. I don't really have time to hear it. I'm doin' something pretty good with my life, and I challenge them to do the same."