The TFT Interview with Tim Bierman, Part 2

Picking up where we left off last week, here is the second half of Two Feet Thick’s conversation with Ten Club’s manager, Tim Bierman. We sat down with him in San Fransico this July during Pearl Jam’s three-show run.

PART TWO: Tim talks seniority, 10 Mail, Vault, PJ socks, Deep magazine,
PearlJam.com, and more.

Kathy	align=”left”> You worked in a record store. Did you go to a lot of concerts?
Tim	align=”left”> Oh yeah! I grew up in St Louis and my older sister was a big music fan so she taught me the ways of all kinds of things including going to concerts. In my youth, I saw the Who and Jethro Tull and Led Zeppelin. I saw the Who when I was eleven. I didn’t know what I was seeing. At the end of high school and college, I kinda got into a little bit of a Grateful Dead thing. I went to a lot of shows.
Kathy	align=”left”> A lot of Deadheads came over to Pearl Jam, let me tell ya.
Tim	align=”left”> Yeah, absolutely.
Jessica	align=”left”>At the Pearl Jam show in ’95 at Soldier Field, the Dead had played there the night before so all those Deadheads were still there and they were just amazed at the Pearl Jam fans, like we were somehow related to them.
Tim	align=”left”> Passing the torch.
Kathy	align=”left”> It was funny to read, was it your interview in Entertainment Weekly, or maybe it was Kelly Curtis, talking about studying the Grateful Dead business model.
Tim	align=”left”> Yeah, we actually came down here and went to their place. It was good.
Jessica	align=”left”> Did that influence digging out stuff from the vaults and starting to offer that?
Tim	align=”left”> Yes and no. We had always had that in mind, otherwise we wouldn’t have a vault, you know? But, for sure, it was inspiring. I think that the Grateful Dead comparisons are so inevitable. And a lot of people talk about how, “there’s absolutely no comparison in the music.” It’s true, there’s not really genre specific-comparisons, but I think there are very similar approaches to the way the music is played; listening to the other players and playing off of each other.
Jessica	align=”left”> Jam is in the name for a reason probably. We understand that.
Tim	align=”left”>I don’t think any of the guys [in PJ] really ever listened to the Dead, to be honest with you. But they come from the same ideals and the same places that inspire that approach to music.
Kathy	align=”left”> Do you play any instruments yourself? Guitar?
Tim	align=”left”> Yeah, I have. I’m a guitar player. I’ve been in bands.
Jessica	align=”left”> I want to hear names. I gotta have the exact data.
Tim	align=”left”> [laughs] I was in a band that started in Missoula and we came back here to San Francisco, with a couple of guys who were in American Music Club.
Jessica	align=”left”>Oh wait, is this Clodhopper?
Tim	align=”left”> Yes.
Jessica	align=”left”>Jeff plays on one song on the record.
Tim	align=”left”>Then I was also in this other band after that called Tarkio, and that band was in Missoula. And it was kind of a kind of party band. Really I just kinda got in that band to meet girls. But the singer-songwriter for that band left Missoula and moved to Portland and played in the coffee shops and then all of the sudden kinda got popular when he started a band called the Decemberists. The Decemberists got big, so now the Tarkio record is out there on Kill Rock Stars and I’m on it. I actually got a royalty check.

Jessica	align=”left”> Was it substantial?
Tim	align=”left”> No. It was like $300, but it was more than I think any of the American Music Club guys ever got for royalties.
Kathy	align=”left”> Well, they opened for Pearl Jam. At the Greek.
Tim	align=”left”> Yeah, they’re one of my favorite bands.
Jessica	align=”left”> You’ve said you weren’t involved in assigning numbers to fan club members. At some point [in the late 90s] we got member numbers.
Tim	align=”left”> Right.
Jessica	align=”left”> But did you have something to do with deciding to move over the seniority model for tickets? Was that your call?
Tim	align=”left”> Everyone got together and tried to figure out how we were going to do it. It was just one of those brainstorming ideas. Obviously, I can’t remember the specifics of how that happened, but what I’m assuming is we got to a point of, “how are we going to do this? What can we do to make this ticketing thing work? How can we reward the people that have been with us the longest?” And obviously, we’ve had to tweak it a little bit a couple of times to make it work right.
Kathy	align=”left”> Do you mean the decision to move from seniority in blocks to number specific?
Tim	align=”left”> Yeah. It’s much easier than the block system. The block system was horrifying and it put an extreme amount of pressure on the [10C ticket] person on the day of the show because they had to come to the show, get the tickets, make sure they were all there, count them out.
Jessica	align=”left”> I think we found out at the Garden in 2003 when you guys did exact for the first time, that was great.
Kathy	align=”left”> How do you decide who gets seated where? I know Ticketmaster ranks their tickets by x numbers so you know what the better tickets are.
Tim	align=”left”> We don’t use that rating system.
Jessica	align=”left”> Thank you!
Tim	align=”left”> [Laughs]
Jessica	align=”left”> Because Ticketmaster gives shitty numbers to the seats right in the wings that are obviously amazing seats.
Kathy	align=”left”> Yeah, fan club members would like to be on the side, and you’re doing that now, which is great.
Tim	align=”left”> It’s all just us looking at the venue and going, “ok how is this going to work?” It’s just kind of common sense.
Kathy	align=”left”> I was curious about Deep magazine as well. Was it your idea?
Tim	align=”left”>It was Ed’s idea. The idea is to try to make it more consistent and easier on the designers so they don’t have to come up with a crazy design idea every issue. We just put too much pressure on ourselves because every one was different. Well, we can’t go back to that because we’ve already done that. There’s enough pressure on our creativity as it is coming up with all these things.
Jessica	align=”left”> Is there any desire to put some of the onus on fans to send in stuff to print other than just letters? Stone kinda touched on that in his column, but I don’t know how serious he was about that.
Tim	align=”left”> Yeah, it would be really cool to have some content that was fan delivered. It’s an idea.
Kathy	align=”left”>So your plan is to continue?
Tim	align=”left”> Yeah, our plan is to continue. The biggest problem is this content situation. We lean on the band for content and it’s just so hard. It’s really hard for the band to focus on the newsletter when they’re concentrating on performing. And then when they’re not performing, they’re trying to distance themselves a little from being in a band.
Jessica	align=”left”> Pictures! Jeff takes pictures.
Tim	align=”left”> Well with the pictures, Jeff is always like, “Yeah, I got a bunch in Missoula, I got a bunch in Seattle. One of these days I’m going to get to it.” And I say, “yeah, right. How long have I been hearing that?” “Maybe I could grab somebody from your office?” I’m like, “no problem. Anytime.”
Kathy	align=”left”> Let’s talk about the redesign of PearlJam.com.
Tim	align=”left”> That’s a thing I really like to talk about. It’s something that I want to promote more because I don’t think people are fully aware of all of the functionality.
Kathy	align=”left”> What do you want it to do for the fans?
Tim	align=”left”> I want people to rely on it as the definitive source for mostly the setlist stuff. You guys’ Concert Chronology is so much more in depth, and we would be that detail-oriented, but we’ve decided to make ours database driven, so you have to have this consistency. So, like last night when Ed sang “Georgie Girl,” we don’t want to enter that into our song database. I don’t think, and the band doesn’t think, that that song is worthy to have a listing.
Jessica	align=”left”> It’s kind of misleading.
Tim	align=”left”> Yeah, it’s, “Oh, they did ‘Georgie Girl.’ They do Georgie Girl.’” They don’t do ‘Georgie Girl.”
Jessica	align=”left”> Right, like when Ed sang a bit of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” at Slim’s in 1993. [Click here to read about that show in the Concert Chronology] And people saw that and were like, “Oh, they do Cyndi Lauper.”
Tim	align=”left”> Yeah!
Jessica	align=”left”> So, if you bought that bootleg for that reason, then you wasted your money.
Tim	align=”left”> Like this morning I got up and updated our site with the setlist from last night.
Kathy	align=”left”> Ask and answered. I was just going to ask if you do the updating yourself.
Tim	align=”left”> I do it. [laughs]
align=”left”>Kathy	Mr. Non Computer Guy.
Tim	align=”left”> Well now I kinda know how to do stuff. So, “Gods’ Dice,” I don’t know the last time it was played, and so today, someone could go on there and see that the last time “Gods’ Dice” was played was whenever it was and then it was played last night. That was the impetus behind the redesign. We’re going to create this information-filled site instead of such a pretty eye-candy thing.
Jessica	align=”left”> Although it’s well designed.
Tim	align=”left”> Yeah. Brad [Klausen] did a great job with the art and it looks cool. I’m really proud of it.
Jessica	align=”left”>Do you watch the statistics of how many hits a month you get?
Tim	align=”left”> Yeah. And those are misleading. A lot of it spikes hard when there’s an onsale. When we had the Leg One onsale, we were in the top 400 websites.
Jessica	align=”left”> Refesh. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. [laughs]
Tim	align=”left”> Yeah, there was a lot of refreshing.
Jessica	align=”left”>A friend of mine wanted to know about the mail. Do you still get crazy, crazy mail [for the band]? What do you do with it? What is the craziest stuff you get? And do you deal with that?
Tim	align=”left”>There are people in the world who write manuscript after manuscript of what’s going on inside their head and they mail it to whoever they think is inspiring. We have a few of those.
Jessica	align=”left”> No one is sending, like, like, Stone statues made out of butter or their wax replica of a Pearl Jam stage? Quirky stuff?
Tim	align=”left”> That sounds cool. There’s definitely weird stuff. The web has kind of made it go down a little bit I think. People can fire off their rants and stuff and get it out of their head if they want.
Jessica	align=”left”>Has there been anything that was so remarkable or funny that you kept it around?
Tim	align=”left”>Sure, yeah! Absolutely. People send little trinkets and sometimes they look really cool. A lot of times its so personal that you have to put it away. And sometimes things are completely useful. Like someone will send an incense burner with some really nice incense. But that’s not an open invitation for people to send incense. [laughs]
Jessica	align=”left”> No, don’t smoke out the Ten Club. No incense. Don’t send incense. [all laugh]
Tim	align=”left”> Sometimes people send cool things and obviously a lot of times, almost always, they’re meant for the band.
Jessica	align=”left”> Well, how many more pairs of Pearl Jam socks does Stone need?
Tim	align=”left”> Stone loves his Pearl Jam socks. But I gotta tell you, Jeff is the man behind the Pearl Jam socks.
Kathy	align=”left”> They’re all college athletic socks, I’ve noticed.
Tim	align=”left”> NBA. It’s the same company that makes the NBA socks. These socks right here [slaps the Pearl Jam socks he's wearing], these.

Tim Tunes The fan club manager is also a musician. Are you surprised? Nah, neither were we.
Tim plays on Tarkio’s Omnibus.	Clodhopper’s Red’s Recovery Room. Tim was a member and Jeff Ament also appears on this album.
Tim in the studio recording the Clodhopper record. This photo and the photo of Jeff, right, is courtesy of Dannypearson.net	Jeff Ament in 1997 recording his 1965 GTO for part of his contribution to the track, “Moonshiner,” on Tim’s band, Clodhopper’s album.