The shouts of joy have been echoing across campus ever since the rumor began that Pearl Jam was going to be playing at People’s Bar and Grill.

Wait a minute! Pearl Jam? That’s not Pearl Jam that is playing Wednesday night. It’s Mango Jam. Get it straight.

But it doesn’t matter that Pearl Jam isn’t playing in Ames anytime soon. What does matter is that Mango Jam is.

The group’s “Midwestern roots rock with a dash of Caribbean/African flavoring” sound (as described by a variety of publications including The Des Moines Register and High Times) is sure to more than make up for Pearl Jam’s absence.

Mango Jam is a unique breath of fresh air in a music industry that is often stifled with copycat bands and regurgitated ideas.

The group’s CDs, “Mango Jam” (1992), “Somewhere In The Middle” (1994), “Flux” (1996) and the recently released “Preserves,” display the band’s growth throughout its eight year existence.

Mango Jam’s growth and maturity are also crystal clear during its live performances, which can best be described as a mixture of Tom Petty, Peter Tosh and the Grateful Dead.

“We always switch up what we do live,” vocalist/lyricist/bassist Jason Bush said. “We throw in a lot of solos that aren’t planned, so each solo is new or is a new take on a solo pattern. But we do take the music out there once in a while. But it’s more along the lines of an Allman Brothers style jam.

“The Dead will trickle off to nothing for 15 minutes and make noises,” he continued. “When they talk about free-form jamming, they are extremely free form. But the Allman Brothers sort of take a structure and build it. There is more of a build up and more of a climax with what they do. There is more of a structure to it.

“I think we fall into that category a little bit more,” he concluded, “but at the same time, I think we do our own thing because we rely on percussion. That gives it a different type of flow than the Allmans or the Dead had.”

But although the group’s music might be different than the Dead’s or the Allman Brothers’, it is aesthetically similar. Mango Jam also shares these group’s creativeness and postmodernistic (not to mention impressionistic) sensibilities.

Learning to jam

“The music industry is hard work,” Bush said, “Plain, hard work. I think there are lots of different angles you can pursue in this business, a lot of different ways that you can succeed or fail. It’s kind of difficult to keep on the right path. When we started out, for the first three years, we established ourselves as a live show band that could really make people dance and stuff like that.

“We still play six nights a week,” he added, “and go all over the country and just play, play, play. We’ve developed a following, a ground base interest, rather than relying on sending demos to major labels. But I think that the road we’ve taken is pretty much the best option for our band and our type of music.”

The group’s constant touring schedule has certainly yielded a large amount of success for the Minneapolis, Minn., based quintet. The band has done several national tours (the last regional tour, which ended almost three weeks ago, saw the group selling out large gigs in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Utah) and manages to play over 200 shows each year. But an impressive touring schedule isn’t the only thing the group has going for it.

“We are on the largest independent record label in the country,” Bush said, referring to Shanachie Records. “They distribute all over the world. Getting signed to that label really helped things to escalate smoothly. Now we don’t have to sell CDs on consignment, and I don’t have to personally look for record stores to sell it in. They do all of that work for us. So, we have a good thing going for us.”

But that wasn’t always the case. Bush was a member of several bands when he was in high school. His love of playing music continued when he started attending the College of Associated Arts in St. Paul, Minn. But eventually Bush “got serious” about his education and stopped playing music for three years so he could major in communication design and art history.

Upon graduation, Bush discovered that he was “jonesing to play some music.” So he got together with keyboardist Mark Aamot and drummer Bret Erickson and formed a group called Third Stone. Eventually, the trio met guitarist/vocalist Jon Herchert and hired percussionist Geoff Prettner (who had played with Bush in an earlier group called Something Else) and Mango Jam was complete.

The only problem was that the group didn’t start out with a large following and its members knew absolutely nothing about the music business. It would be quite a few years before Mango Jam fully established itself as a formidable collective of musicians and started making enough money to support themselves solely on a music career.

“Eventually it got to the point that we could be booked five nights a week,” Bush, who was working as an art director at the time, explained. “It also got to the point where we could make a lot of money. So, we all kind of decided that playing music was something we should pursue, something that we might be able to make a living out of. Now here we are, over eight years later.”

But the group quickly caught on to how the music business operated.

“The industry is driven by a lot of money,” Bush stated. “They toss you up against the wall and see if you stick. If you do, then you get a lot of money behind you helping you to get radio play and all of the media support. All of that helps towards selling records.”

Of course it also doesn’t hurt that the group has performed with such popular groups as Widespread Panic, Soul Asylum, Sheryl Crow, The Wallflowers, Blues Traveler, Rusted Root, the Freddy Jones Band, Big Head Todd and the Monsters, Natalie Merchant and Steve Miller.

“I think that the most incredible show we ever did was at a protest against the building of a nuclear power plant near a river in Minnesota,” Bush reflected. “Steve Miller and Natalie Merchant were both in town to play that weekend and stopped by to play at the protest. We ended up being sandwiched between Natalie Merchant and Steve Miller. That was absolutely incredible.

“But the coolest part of it was not following up Merchant, who was excellent,” he continued. “It also wasn’t playing right before Steve Miller’s a capella acoustic set. We got to play on a solar powered stage with solar powered equipment. We were literally powered by the sun. It was amazing.”

Art and creativity

Bush also quickly learned that writing a hit song isn’t as easy as it might seem to people who are not involved in the music industry.

“I think it’s really hard to make a hit song,” he explained. “I have a lot of respect for those people who can write one hit song, let alone two or three or more. But there’s a feeling among people that bands like Hootie and the Blowfish suck because their songs were on pop radio. They get ripped on a lot. But what they did is a real impossible thing, so I respect them for that. It’s hard to prevail in a lose-lose situation, where you hated for being on the radio, but are obscure if you are not.”

Hopefully that won’t happen to Mango Jam as it begins its steady climb up the charts. The first radio single from “Preserves,” a charming, metaphorical song that shows the perils of solitude through the eyes of a dog (the song is titled “Pretty Little Town”), has already been added to hundreds of radio stations across the country. That’s pretty good for a group that is signed to an independent record label, especially since “Preserves” was just released yesterday.

Bush isn’t sure whether or not he would classify “Pretty Little Town” as a hit single or not. But he is willing to admit that the song represents how his song writing abilities are changing with time.

“I’m trying to get a more poetic quality,” he explained. “The best songs I’ve written are broke into fragments and lots of thoughts and images peep through that are free for the listener to interpret, as opposed to having the whole thing put together for them.

“My favorite poetry is the stuff where there is an intention that the author wants you to think about, but it is not nailed down. I think a lot of times poetry can become really good song lyrics because it is rhythm and it has lots of metaphors that create images of people. It gets them to feel a certain way through the words that are used. Song lyrics should do that as well. Poetry and song lyrics are one and the same to me.”

Bush also doesn’t perceive much difference between music and art. He thinks that both are forms of creativity that can be combined together to form a cohesive whole. Although Mango Jam doesn’t really combine art and music at the moment, Bush is working on a couple of things that would change all that.

He is currently building a six-foot high jam jar that is equipped with hula hoops and shower curtains that will be used as a stage prop for the group’s live performances. He would also like to make an abstract artistic backdrop for the group to utilize in its shows. But that’s barely the beginning of the things he would like to accomplish by mixing art and music.

“I have lots of weird ideas,” he stated. “I have this idea that involves musically interpreting the sound of a storm coming in, but creating it with different things that would imply that a storm is rolling in. Maybe a door jingling from the wind as the rhythm, and as the storm intensifies, the jingling would intensify. I could find lots of things to create that kind of sound. There’s all kinds of sound effects and weird stuff that I could do with an idea like that.”

Mango Jam will be bringing its tropical funk sound to People’s Bar and Grill tonight at 9. The performance is part of the group’s CD release-tour supporting “Preserves.”