01:00 AM EDT on Monday, June 5, 2006

BY BRIAN MCCOLLUM
Detroit Free Press

"We're gonna play the game now."

Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready doesn't pause when he says it. He doesn't chuckle, and he's not pulling your leg. McCready is dead earnest when he proclaims that his band -- which used to avoid talk of success and fame like it was feverish -- is ready to head out of the rock wilderness and enjoy some mainstream sunlight. Pearl Jam is going to play the game now.

Yes, that Pearl Jam. The one whose lead singer infamously accepted a Grammy in 1996 by mumbling to a theater full of music bigwigs, "Thanks, I guess." The one that quit making videos after 1991, that avoided the media for years, that stubbornly released albums of increasing weirdness while moving further away from the multiplatinum riff-rock of 1991's Ten.

But 2006, it's clear, is a new start for the old band. After 15 years with Sony Music, Pearl Jam has a fresh label home at J Records, run by golden-eared impresario Clive Davis, best known for making Whitney Houston a pop star and remaking Carlos Santana into one.

The Seattle quintet's new record -- titled, in an appropriate square-one sort of way, Pearl Jam -- debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart. And band members such as McCready aren't just talking with the press again, they're talking about the thrill that comes when the masses like your music.

"Dude, we're stoked. Believe me," says McCready from a backstage room in Chicago's United Center an hour before Pearl Jam's second show in a two-night Windy City stand. "It's a feeling of elation and gratitude that we're still doing it after 15 years.

"There's a new energy to it: The record label seems to be into it a lot. People are keying into the songs. Radio is picking it up. We honestly didn't think we'd be at this point again, and it's a pleasant, pleasant surprise."

Such words might have been regarded as heresy in some corners of the Pearl Jam camp a few years ago. In the late '90s, as groups such as Silverchair and Creed made a home at rock radio, McCready and his bandmates -- vocalist Eddie Vedder, guitarist Stone Gossard, bassist Jeff Ament and drummer Matt Cameron -- launched a series of maverick albums that seemed to disavow the alternative-gone-mainstream genre Pearl Jam had helped create.

Those records -- 1998's Yield, 2000's Binaural, 2002's Riot Act -- all enjoyed Top 5 debuts, thanks in large part to a fan base that became condensed to its smaller but most loyal core. None, though, scaled the heights achieved by the band's first three albums, each of which had sold more than 5 million copies while delivering batches of hit singles.

If Pearl Jam had once hovered near Biggest Band in the World status -- an idea that seemed plausible as late as 1994 -- then it clipped its own wings. The group's drawn-out battle against Ticketmaster for that company's perceived monopoly on ticket sales, an ultimately futile campaign that took Pearl Jam out of America's biggest venues at the height of its career, was perhaps the biggest symbol of the group's bent for self-sacrifice.

It also helped defuse criticism that the band's anti-establishment stance was mere posturing from a second-string Nirvana. Today, McCready says that while the group was indeed keen on the idea of building mystique -- obscuring its faces on album photos, for instance -- the notion of Pearl Jam as a group of reluctant stars was very real. And, he concedes, "we probably suffered for it."

"Early on, we just got too huge too fast, in our minds -- certainly for Ed," says McCready. "We made a conscious effort to pull back, concentrate on the music, and try to live normal lives.

"That was good to a point, because it helped us survive as a band. But bands have a want and a need to be heard on the radio, to be seen in the press. You want people to know that your music is out there."

Pearl Jam's return to center stage of the rock world -- which includes the cover of Rolling Stone magazine -- isn't the only thing that harks back to the heady early days: The group's new album has been widely portrayed as a reclamation of the big, riff-rich Pearl Jam sound that dominated such albums as Ten and Vs.

McCready says that while there's some merit to that description -- he's heard it from everyone, starting with his brother-in-law -- the band didn't consciously set out to summon the past.

"I think the energy we've captured is similar to the early days. But it's more of a controlled chaos now -- we've harnessed that energy. Back then, we didn't know where it was coming from. . . .

"We don't really talk about a direction. Musically we just kind of go where we're at, and we were at a period in our lives at this point where we wanted more melodic, harder-rocking songs. We wanted to work hard on those songs, and we took a year and a half to do it."

Onstage, the band's show is front-loaded with songs from Pearl Jam -- less a shove-it-down-their-throats mind-set than a vote of confidence in the crowd's reception to the new material. It's a hard-won luxury, earned in no small part by the same declaration of independence that took Pearl Jam off the bigger radar: a deep respect from the devoted contingent of fans who stuck close.

If some new ones come aboard -- or some old ones return -- McCready says he'll happily welcome their ears and attention.

"I wake up and think, 'Tonight there's gonna be 10,000 people that want to see us and sing our songs,' " he says. "To also have a career where we still talk to each other, and still be friends, is just cake."