January 1998 – Eddie Vedder has never made it a secret that the business of rock is an irritation he'd be happy to live without. Nonetheless, it doesn't seem likely that he and the organization known as Pearl Jam, Inc., will find nirvana (the spiritual high, not the band) any day soon. With their latest album, Yield, ready to hit the stores on February 3rd, and a world tour opening up in Hawaii (of all places) a few weeks later, it seems as though '98 could be the year of the Jam.

But, alas, as has been the case with Pearl Jam in recent years, the current focus is more on the business of their music rather than whether or not it rocks. Having emerged second-best from their scuffle with Ticketmaster, and flat-out refusing to help flog their product with videos, Pearl Jam are now, by pure association, entwined in a tussle with Internet downloaders-cum-bootleggers.

Seems that through the wonders of technology – and access to a friendly Pearl Jam newsgroup – downloadable copies of Yield have been available on the Web, long before its in-store date. As an understandable commercial reaction to this, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), the watchdog for recording companies, has issued a blunt ultimatum to over-zealous webmasters, such as Californian Paul Andersen, who runs the Pearl Jam Yield Archive (or tries to). "Cease and desist," the directive states.

Curiously enough, band guitarist Stone Gossard, on tour with soulful side-project, the band Brad, recently told Australia's Triple J radio station he felt "flattered" that fans had posted "Given to Fly," the album's lead-off single, on the Net. Mistakingly, Andersen read that remark as a "green light" to create his Yield page.

"I haven't talked with Eddie Vedder about it, but I'm pretty sure they groove off this. After all, they encourage recording of their concerts by fans," Andersen told me when I spoke to him recently (online, of course). Although he originally ignored the RIAA instruction, Andersen was definitely not a better man come Monday, January 26, 1998, when the Feds got involved. "RIAA and FBI contacted my ISP, sirius.com," Andersen said, "and they deleted the files. I am currently talking with someone who has their own server to put the files back up."

All this attention has left Andersen – a committed Pearl Jam devotee – bemused and bewildered. "Personally, I don't see what the big deal is, the vast majority of emails I have gotten say, ‘thanks! I'm definitely going to buy this CD when it comes out.' I thought publicity was the name of the game?"

Not that Yield needs that much of a promotional push, gauging by the lead-off single, "Given to Fly" and the band's upcoming world jaunt. Angstmeister Vedder is in fine, soaring voice on "Given to Fly," as the band's Led Zep-meets-Seattle growl passionately ebbs and flows. Not only is it the best song U2 never recorded, it's the most inspired these Seattle rockers have sounded in aeons. In Andersen's eyes (and ears), the rest of the album is just as emphatic.

"I think Yield is their best work since Vs.," he said. "The thing that is most noticeable for me are the lyrics – they seem to have a more spiritual aspect than in the past. Some people have slagged on it being a ‘Christian' album, but I tend to see it as more spiritual than religious. Vedder slammed ‘religion' recently, so I think that's where a lot of this album comes from.

"And," he added, reminding me that he's a rock fan first and a downloader second, "the guitar work is great."

Having sampled some of Yield myself, I'm inclined to agree with Andersen. There's a raw power that drives tracks such as "Brain of J" and the wild rave-up "Do the Evolution," while the neo-metallic clamor of "Pilate" is a rare glimpse of Pearl Jam's studiocraft. They even take a passable stab at dub-rock on "No Way." If you didn't know this was Seattle's surliest, you'd swear this inventive and energetic long-player was the work of some bunch of upstarts straight out of the garage, rather than a band heading into the twilight of their career. The album blazes with the kind of fire and brimstone Vedder and Company brought to Ten and Vs. Who knows, maybe their slug-fest with Ticketmaster and rejection of the MTV-fixated world has given the band a much-needed kickstart.

Of course, once the listening public devours Yield, it's likely that today's Internet drama will become tomorrow's vague memory, just another minor glitch for a band whose career path has more bumps than Highway 61. "I'm not spending too much time on it since the record's going to be out in a week," their manager, Kelly Curtis said to online magazine Addicted To Noise. "I really haven't talked to anybody [in the band] about it."

Much ado about nothing, methinks.