Pearl Jam’s U.S. Tour Will Bring Group Back to L.A.

Four albums, three tours and one nasty and very public fight with Ticketmaster since its last visit, Pearl Jam is finally returning to Los Angeles.

The Seattle rock quintet, which has played only a handful of concerts in recent years partly because of its dispute with Ticketmaster over ticket surcharges, announced plans Friday for a 33-city summer tour of the U.S. and Canada that includes its first L.A.-area show in six years.

Eddie Vedder and his bandmates, who kick off a world tour Friday in Maui, are scheduled to play at the Forum on July 13, with an additional date or dates possible if tickets sell quickly. Tickets will go on sale in early April.

Tickets for the shows will be priced at $23 each before surcharges, and in about half the cities (including Los Angeles) will be available through Ticketmaster, effectively ending the band’s fight with the ticketing giant.

“We want to play and we just can’t keep on trying to reinvent the wheel,” Kelly Curtis, the group’s manager, said Friday. “It just became too big a pain for fans of Pearl Jam to see the band and for us to even do a tour. It was impossible. We kind of gave it our best shot . . . but it didn’t work out.”

Ticketmaster declined comment.

Pearl Jam, which is also scheduled to play July 10 at an amphitheater under construction in Chula Vista, has not played in the L.A. area since September 1992, when it played at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre on the Lollapalooza tour.

The band hasn’t played in Los Angeles itself since Dec. 27, 1991, when Pearl Jam and Nirvana opened a show for the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the Sports Arena. Pearl Jam hasn’t headlined an L.A. show since it played at the Cathouse club on Oct. 1, 1991--two months after the release of its 9 million selling debut album, “Ten,” and three months before the record made the charts and launched the band to stardom.

The summer tour opens June 20 in Missoula, Mont.

Retailers cheered the news of a full-scale Pearl Jam tour.

The band’s new album, “Yield,” debuted at No. 2 on the national sales chart this week after selling about 359,000 copies during its first seven days in stores, but that was about 8,000 fewer than the initial-week sales of its predecessor, 1996’s “No Code.”

And “No Code” marked a sharp commercial downturn for Pearl Jam. It sold 1.3 million copies, a deep drop from the 5 million sold by 1994’s “Vitalogy.”

The sales decline was blamed, in part, on the band’s reluctance to aggressively promote its records through videos, interviews and full-scale touring. Pearl Jam played about 125 U.S. dates around the release of its debut album, but has played only about 100 since the end of 1992.

“This tour is going to do nothing but pump sales,” says Chris Nadler, a regional marketing coordinator for the Musicland Group, the nation’s largest retailer. “It’s going to remind people that there’s nobody like Pearl Jam, and certainly not a front man like Eddie Vedder.”

Pearl Jam withdrew from the road in the spring of 1994 after the suicide of Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain, an act caused in part by Cobain’s inability to adjust to stardom. Vedder said he feared he might end up the same way.

In May of that year, the group launched its campaign against Ticketmaster, alleging in a memorandum to the Justice Department that the ticketing giant exercised a monopoly over ticket distribution and used its market power to gouge consumers with excessive service fees.

After a 14-month investigation by the Justice Department, however, the probe abruptly ended in July 1995, with U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno saying that there was inadequate evidence to proceed.

Pearl Jam’s effort to organize a 1995 U.S. tour without Ticketmaster collapsed in acrimony, though the group eventually fulfilled all the postponed dates.

In 1996, after the release of “No Code,” the band was more successful in touring without Ticketmaster, selling tickets through a computerized telephone system. But the band played only about 15 U.S. dates, most on the East Coast.