Pearl Jam - 'American Masters: Pearl Jam Twenty' profiles

VH1 "Behind the Music" biography series often around 40 minute mark of tragedy, usually in the band or jail or on drugs or alcohol, the singer's best befalls.

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But in "American Masters: Pearl Jam Twenty," airing Friday, Oct. 21, on PBS -- as part of the first PBS Arts Fall Festival (check local listings) -- Documentary film director and music journalist originally from Cameroon to do two hours 40 minutes and then there is marked - since all the founding members of Pearl Jam continue alive and free.

Crowe says, "People used to say, about some of the stories that I wrote for Rolling Stone, they would say, 'Why don't you write about Iggy Pop? Why don't you write about Stiv Bators?' And I'd be like, 'Well, let the Stiv Bators story be written by somebody who's invested in that music.'

"But still, that was the challenge, to do a movie about a band that wasn't that, and did survive. That's why there are leaps we had to take, years where literally they're just surviving and playing concerts. So that became part of the story."

And this story, the tragedy is also the first Pearl Jam was formed.

Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament were band member who also in another Seattle band in the '80s, called Mother Love Bone, alongside charismatic frontman Andrew Wood.

Sadly, at 24, Wood died following a heroin overdose.

As to whether the film is, in a way, Wood's story, Crowe says, "It is kind of that. When we started, that was one of the things that I really thought about. His story needed to be told, and from that, I thought the whole Pearl Jam tale should come, as it did in life."

By film's end, there is, here is even footage of Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder performing one of Wood's songs.

Crowe says, "I did an interview with them early on, where Eddie wouldn't tell me what song it was that he would sing, at some point, of Wood's. So when I heard that he played 'Crown of Thorns' at the concert, I said, 'Fantastic, I've got to get a recording.' "

Strangely enough, a "Behind the Music" is a tragedy that a Pearl Jam documentary that attracted me to lack.

He says, "If we had the movie where somebody does die at the 40-minute mark, we wouldn't be here. I wouldn't have done it; you wouldn't be talking to me. Just another one of those films … .

"I always get the feeling that, if civilization disappears for a while, and all this stuff that exists now goes into a time capsule, somebody comes along later, goes, 'Oh, rock music, it was made by people that die young.' "