Happy Birthday, Pearl Jam!

Good lord!  35 Years?  Is that how long we've been doing this?  Well, you'll see below, I guess it's been more like 33 years for me.  Still, we've been through the highs and lows of this band. I can't think of a way I'd rather spend my time then laying on the floor reviewing album art while these songs take me to all the places I want to be. 

Happy Birthday, Pearl Jam!  In honor of all you do, from our book, this is how I found you!

I’m sitting here, wanting to tell you how my Pearl Jam story began, and I’m struggling to start the story with a mental picture that wouldn’t draw complete incredulity from my children. Listen, guys, we used to listen to music on giant boxes that we called shelf systems. I just tried to Google a picture of one, and you can’t even do that. It was a big wooden box. There was a dual tape deck in the middle for making mix tapes. The last one I made was given to my wife while we were dating. There was a CD player somewhere in there. The amplifier and equalizer were all built in. My uncle had a record player on top, but either records were not cool or I was not cool when I got mine. Oh, and did I mention the giant wood-grain speakers on either side. This was a significant piece of furniture. This was no free Spotify account on a phone that fit in your pocket. This was a commitment, and I got my first one for Christmas in 1991. 

My parents gave me two CDs. Mariah Carey’s Emotions and Boyz II Men’s Cooleyhighharmony. Strap in folks, we’ve got a ways to go. Here I was [checks Chapter 1], four months after the release of the album that spawned this whole project, and I was absolutely and completely oblivious to it. Stay with me though. I was getting there. Because earlier that year, Bryan [no relation] found a dubbed cassette of Metallica’s Garage Days Re-Revisited in a field where we were playing tackle football without pads, helmets, or even long pants and we played that tape until it barely played at all. I know, I know, the timelines don’t really line up. I’m not good with dates. Around this same time, I was the only Honors student at my high school to skip out of AP US History to take Geography with the baseball coach in the corner basement room near the bathroom with all of the kids in suspension and the athletes desperately clinging to a C- average. Please don’t let it worry you that I was the one put in charge of every single date in this book. 

By now you’re yelling at your book, “Brandon, tell us about Pearl Jam!” To you, I say, “You just read a whole book about Pearl Jam, can’t you just chill out for a minute and let the story wash over you? I haven’t even flown to Germany yet!” Pearl Jam first played Germany in March of 1992. That has nothing to do with my story. I just wanted you to know that it is a date, and I’m aware of it. I also want you to be aware that you were just yelling at a book. 

OK. I went to Germany in the summer of 1992, and I developed a crush on Carli, a woman that was really far too old for me, and it’s embarrassing to commit that story to text which, presumably, will be available to the whole world for a reasonable price at your favorite book store, easily purchased by her or my friend Chris who will laugh at how I changed the name. While we were hanging out in Munich, she introduced me to her musical obsession, Pearl Jam. If you’re wondering why I had never heard of Pearl Jam a full year after the release of Ten, let me share one more story. I grew up in a fairly religious home and wasn’t allowed to watch MTV when I was in high school. That meant that I had to sneak that channel in after school and late at night after my parents had gone to bed. Well, back then you watched MTV by setting your television to channel 3 and powering up a cable box on top. Our remote had a “Favorite” button, which automatically took you to the most-watched channel. So, when my parents hit that button and got MTV, it was extremely hard to stay on top of popular music because the cable box started going to work with my dad. 

Back to Germany, I was there, giving puppy dog eyes at my crush when suddenly, the most amazing thing I ever heard was playing through the headphones of my Sony DiscMan (still four times heavier than an iPhone). I wish there was less archaic technology in my story, but I can’t help that now. I can, however, tell you that this moment was carved into my brain like the Challenger explosion or the 9/11 attacks. She skipped “Once,” making the little digital number readout jump from 1 to 2, and dropped “Even Flow” on me out of the gate. No Pearl Jam virgin should have “Even Flow” dropped on them like that. It’s irresponsible. It’s like uploading the Works of Shakespeare directly into the brain of a baby. It’s too amazing to process all at once. 

I had that CD on repeat for the whole rest of my trip, staying up late with it, missing subway trains because I couldn’t hear people calling my name, and being a general pain in the ass as I discovered a sound and a message that I needed so badly at that time of my life. I have lived a wonderful, privileged life, but as a teen, I was struggling to find myself, and it was disheartening. Then, and the decade that followed, was the time when Pearl Jam spoke to me the most. The way Ten pushed against the world and everything that came before lined up perfectly with my leaving the nest and hammering out who I was. I wore out multiple CD versions of Ten, Vs., and Vitalogy before leaving college. 

And then came the community. The Internet was new and my roommate, majoring in Computer Science, taught me how to code a rudimentary website. Nothing special, but enough to put pictures and animated gifs of Homer Simpson onto a Geocities site (pre-MySpace, which was pre-Facebook). It was enough to cast my Pearl Jam obsession into the stratosphere, and in the pre-Google days Pearl Jam fans were able to forge connections along those thin threads, on- line bulletin boards, trading forums, Song X and the Concert Chronology on FiveHorizons.com. It helped that this world was populated by the kindest people you could ever hope to know. 

Among the Pearl Jam community were angels who would take the best handheld recording device they could afford to concerts, buy beers for the people sitting next to them in exchange for a promise not to scream, and then record the show. They wouldn’t just take that show home and listen to it. They would share it. There was a giant community of traders with an on-line list of shows. If you went a show and wanted a souvenir, or if you were like me and couldn’t make it to a show because your parents wouldn’t let you go to a concert that wasn’t Christian rock, you could pick a show, send that person blank cassettes, and they would dub the show onto those cassettes (using those giant shelf systems from paragraph one) and mail them back to you. So, in a time when Brian was struggling to find the music venue on Randall’s Island, and I was calling some backwater, third-party phone bank to get tickets to the Toledo, Ohio show only to have the phone lines melt from the call volume, twice, I was still able to drop a cassette into my Walkman and pretend that I was right there on the floor. 

When I finally saw Pearl Jam live, it was at Blossom Music Center in 1998, a gorgeous outdoor venue in the middle of what is now Cuyahoga Valley National Park, and it was an experience I wouldn’t trade with anyone. “Hail, Hail” still lights me up for no other reason that it is the first song I heard while looking Eddie Vedder in the eyes. Twelve rows back on Mike’s side, the best side because you get a two-fer with Jeff, I sang every lyric and never sat down. I had been listening to this band in whatever way I could, albums, cassettes, CD imports from Quonset Hut in Akron, an obscure song downloaded over a phone line probably via Napster, which meant it just ended abruptly about forty-three seconds before the end of the song, and finally, I got to hear them in the way they are meant to be heard, with 23,000 fellow fans screaming, “Hello,” to an “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town” and thrusting our hands in the air to sing “Hallelujah” when we sing with our choir. 

When I look over my Pearl Jam fandom, the band, to me, is always the thing I’m finding at the end of a long search. They were the music I was looking for at the end of a lot of musical experimentation. They were at the apex of a loving, sharing community of wonderful people. They were the live experience I wanted for years. They’re even the rare collectible I was bidding up on eBay. Riot Act was that angry voice I wanted to hear all through the Bush Administration. Lost Dogs was all those songs that I struggled to find via on-line forums. Pearl Jam is a never- ending puzzle that brings new surprises and magic every step of the way. The influential band they mentioned in an interview could take you down a months-long path of new albums. That list of books they shared on World Book Day 2017 led to hours of reading. It’s how I landed at TheSkyIScrape.com, first a community that loved Pearl Jam like I loved Pearl Jam, then a place to collect and categorize all the amazing ways that I and others have found to love this band. It even continues for me today. As we work on this last chapter, Dark Matter is a slow burn for me. I had my first listen in a movie theater, and maybe the sound wasn’t the best, but I had a hard time connecting. Even now, as the phrase, “best album since Yield” rings in my ears, I haven’t put it that high in my personal rankings, but I keep searching. I keep finding bass lines I missed and lyrics that hit right. My current favorite moment is at the beginning of “Something Special” where the song almost falls apart and doesn’t happen just before Ed starts sing. I’ve opened myself up to connect to this album, and because this album is actually about connection, it’s starting to happen, which makes it the perfect capstone to my Pearl Jam experience. 

… at least until album #13 gets here.