Three Fish Helps Put Life Into Proper Scale for Pearl Jam Bassist

Eddie Vedder’s struggles with fame have been well chronicled, but what do the other members of Pearl Jam do when success overwhelms them?

Bassist Jeff Ament resorted to a mental trick.

“For a while I was wearing a rubber band around my wrist,” he says. “Whenever I would find myself speculating too much about what was going to happen, worrying about the future, I would snap the rubber band and say, ‘Right now!’ The rubber band reminded me that I should be living for the moment.”

For Ament, 33, living in the moment led to Three Fish, a band that started as an impromptu jam and turned into a full-fledged side project with a new album, “Three Fish,” just out on Epic.

In part, the endeavor is Ament’s response to the massive scale of Pearl Jam, the Seattle band that has become the commercial and emotional focal point for the alternative-rock culture.

“Pearl Jam’s a huge, big machine, bigger than any of us,” says the soft-spoken Ament, casually sipping coffee at a Venice cafe with fellow Fish Richard Stuverud, 31, and Robbi Robb, 33. “Sometimes you can lose yourself in that. I was just getting lost in [Pearl Jam].”

Three Fish is a different story. An earthy, organic trio that eschews most traces of Pearl Jam’s carefully constructed, hard-driving riff-rock, the band leans on a no-holds-barred sound that rings with the emotive, loose-limbed flow of Middle Eastern music.

“This music is not over-thought or analyzed,” Ament says. “It’s just complete expression. And no one is thinking about the politics of what it is to be a band.”

Leaving behind his fluid, steady work with Pearl Jam, Ament swaps his bass for 12-string guitar, Wurlitzer organ and djembe (an African drum) to create a from-the-gut sound that seeks higher, transcendent ground.

Stuverud--a veteran of punk-tinged rock bands War Babies and Pilot and punk-pop staples the Fastbacks--alternates between pensive playing and tighter, more conventional rock drumming. Robb, a native of South Africa and the group’s resident mystic, brings his fascination with Led Zeppelin to his guitar, sitar and vocals, occasionally letting out a banshee-like wail that would make Robert Plant swoon.

The nucleus of Three Fish was formed when Robb’s Hollywood-based outfit, Tribe After Tribe, toured with Pearl Jam in 1992.

“From the start, there was a good vibe,” says Robb, who in his patchwork overalls and dreadlocks looks like a refugee from a Grateful Dead concert.

That vibe led to a friendship anchored by poetry, spiritual conundrums and, most pertinent to Ament, questions about individuality and identity.

“In the evenings, we would talk about relationships,” Robb says. “The common thread was the balancing of solitude and intimacy. When we started jamming, it was like the continuation of the conversation.”

“We had no intention of forming a band,” Ament says. “Basically, we got together four times in Seattle. We made music. The last time, we finally said, ‘We should put it all together as a body of music and finish it.’ I was at a point in my life where I had so many loose ends. Here was one thing that I really wanted to complete. Even people in my other band--in the marriage--said, ‘You should put this out.’ ”

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Pearl Jam, which recently completed recording its fourth album, may have also benefited from Ament’s extracurricular activities.

“We finished the Three Fish record about the time that Pearl Jam started recording,” says Robb, who continues to work with Tribe After Tribe. “Jeff went back with that energy. He reminded everybody in the studio what fun he had with Three Fish.”

Ament says he feels too close to the material to come to any conclusions about the new Pearl Jam record, which will be released in September. But Robb, who’s a passionate fan of Ament’s other band, calls it “a beautiful record--very tender, more like the first album in its sensitivity.”

For now, Ament is looking forward to Three Fish’s tour--not so much the conventional stops such as the El Rey Theatre (July 26), but the unorthodox sites like Pappy and Harriet’s in the high desert rock outpost Pioneertown (July 25) and Big Sur’s Esalen Institute--places off the beaten path of traditional rock venues and far from the pressures and demands of life at the top.

“It’s been really great to step out of it,” he says. “I can be objective. . . . It makes me realize I don’t need Pearl Jam--that I can be perfectly happy making music on my own, and I can actually be a fan of that band.”