Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Meet Your Blogger: TwoFeetThick.com

 Sometimes I sit down with my Pearl Jam RSS feed and ask myself, who the heck are these people and why are they so obsessed with Pearl Jam?  To answer that questions, TheSkyIScrape brings you a new biweekly (by "biweekly" I mean whenever I'm able to pull these things together) series called “Meet Your Blogger!”  I hope to showcase the great Pearl Jam bloggers, writers, and webmasters that being content to you and me.  For the first installment of the series, I take you Fremont, California. -B


ON-LINE PERSONA: KathyTFT, CrookedArm23

WEBSITE: www.TwoFeetThick.com
TwoFeetThick.com is “a useful, quirky, detail-oriented site with completely original content: a unique, interactive resource of Pearl Jam information past present and future, with both perspective and a healthy sense of humor. In other words, cool original stuff you can’t find anywhere else.”  You can find great concert setlists, concert reviews, and high-quality, original, fan-written content.


REAL NAME: Kathy Davis


LOCATION: Fremont, California USA (San Francisco Bay Area)


DAY JOB: I own Fremont Rubber Stamp Co., Inc. (www.FremontRubberStamp.com), the family rubber stamp, office signage business


FAVORITE ALBUM: Yield “... if forced to choose.”


FAVORITE SONG(S):
Live/Slow: Release
Live/Punk: Spin The Black
Live/Rock: Go.


“... and everything else they play live.”  


Studio: No Way, Help Help, All or None  
“I CAN'T PICK! And they change often.”


FAVORITE BAND MEMBER: Stone Gossard “Riffs and songwriting. We wouldn't be talking if it weren't for him. 'Nuff said.”


HOW MANY SHOWS HAVE YOU ATTENDED? 155 so far 11-1-92 Bridge School, first show.


IT’S SAFE TO SAY THAT PEARL JAM IS YOUR PASSION.  WHY PEARL JAM?
I'm a life-long fan of rock music, since I was 4 years old starting with The Beatles.   Back in 1992, I had a friend who was a big PJ fan. I had no clue who Pearl Jam were (was in to U2, REM, and XTC at the time, amongst others), and this close friend was a huge Love Bone fan who went to see all the local Mookie Blaylock shows, shot tons of amazing photos, and kept talking about them - "you have to see them, you HAVE to see them". He didn't have MTV, and wanted me to tape Unplugged for him. I watched it, and it changed my life. I think I sat there numb and stupefied, and said "holy fuck" a lot, and then immediately went to all of my local record stores to scour the bins for anything and everything I could find. The music and passionate live performance literally froze me in my tracks.


To see a band play so intensely -even ACOUSTIC -, the passion, the fire..to play like they were going to blow apart at any moment and then right themselves with just as much cohesiveness was like nothing I had ever seen.  So for me, that's 'Why Pearl Jam.'. They are still doing that, 20 years later.


WHAT WAS YOUR GREATEST PEARL JAM EXPERIENCE? First time I travelled to see them was Vancouver/The Gorge/Portland Meadows, opening for Neil Young. September 1993. Was doing the Footsteps fanzine at the time, and Stone's sister was running the Ten Club - they liked my 'zine.  So that weekend, at the Portland Meadows, I had band tickets, passes, watched the show ON the stage sitting on Stone's hard cases, and watched them shoot the Time Magazine cover, standing feet away from them as they posed for the picture. What a way to start my career.


HOW EXTENSIVE IS YOUR PEARL JAM COLLECTION? I have a PJ Room, a fairly healthy chunk of every type of PJ Collectible. Not a completist, but have some great, unique stuff that I enjoy.  Lots of T-shirts, picks, posters, discs, video and audio boots, and about 20 file boxes of paper memorabilia. Magazine articles, books, handbills. Some one-of-a-kind stuff.  Nothing extraordinarily valuable financially, but priceless from a "dear to me" standpoint.


IS THERE A SPECIFIC LYRIC THAT MOVES YOU?
"You can come to terms and realize, you're the only one who can't forgive yourself" is a heavy hitter live.  


"If hope could grow from dirt like me, it can be done.”


“Release me."






WHAT ELSE IS ON YOUR IPOD RIGHT NOW?
Brad (is that cheating), The National, Nick Cave, Interpol, Muse, The Frames, Beck, PJ Harvey, The Beatles, many movie soundtracks, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel, John Lennon, The Who, U2, REM...


WHEN YOU WALK AWAY FROM YOUR COMPUTER, WHAT ARE YOU DOING? Trying not to walk back to it!  


WHAT PASSIONS DO YOU HAVE BEYOND PEARL JAM?
Traveling. Singing. Writing. Going to lots of movies. Joss Whedon, JJ Abrams, Christopher Nolan. Twilight (yes, I'm an internal teenager). My kittens, my husband, my beasties...laughing as much as possible.
WHAT’S YOUR GUILTY PLEASURE?

The Twilight Saga and all that entails...and I don't know that I'm guilty over it.


WHAT ADVICE DO YOU HAVE FOR ASPIRING BLOGGERS, TWEETERS, AND/OR WEBMASTERS? Follow your passions. Make it happen. What are you waiting for?