Creativity Quote by Jack Irons

There is a particular kind of understatement musicians use when they are describing a period that probably ate their lives, and Jack Irons nails it with “off and on.” On paper, he’s simply marking time: No Code drops in 1996, touring follows. In practice, the phrasing quietly captures the stop-start reality of being in a massive band that’s also wrestling with itself.

No Code wasn’t a victory lap; it was Pearl Jam leaning harder into mood, texture, and inwardness at a moment when the machinery of rock stardom demanded clean narratives and constant visibility. Saying “completed and released” sounds procedural, almost corporate, which is its own tell: by the mid-’90s, album cycles weren’t just creative arcs, they were logistical campaigns. Irons’s language flattens the romance of it, as if to insist the work was work.

The subtext sits in the refusal to mythologize. “Some” touring, “off and on” touring: not the triumphant road-warrior saga, but something intermittent, negotiated, possibly tense. That matches the era’s context: Pearl Jam’s ongoing pushback against the concert-industrial complex (and the ticketing fights that constrained where and how they could play) made touring feel less like a default and more like a contested choice.

Irons, as the drummer, is also speaking from the engine room. Drummers don’t get to float above the grind; they measure time in sets, travel days, bodies holding up. The calm tone reads like survival, not nostalgia.