Happy Birthday, Pearl Jam! I was wondering what to write, and how to fully capture what the band has meant to me over these last 35 years. And then I remembered I did just that in the epilogue of 'I Am No Guide - Pearl Jam Song by Song'. So in honor of this momentous day, here it is:
I discovered Pearl Jam through Weird Al Yankovich. In 1992 I was 15 years old (days away from 16) and my musical tastes were still firmly in the1980s. Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Bon Jovi, Poison. But my heart belonged to Weird Al Yankovich, and in April of 1992 I saw the “Smells Like Nirvana” for the first time. I laughed so hard I could barely breathe. Loved that video. And I knew that there was a band called Nirvana, but I knew none of their music. But Smells Like Nirvana was a great song, so I thought I’d take a risk and try Nirvana solely based on Weird Al’s recommendation. I went to the mall and used my allowance to buy a cassette tape of Nevermind.
And that was it. I totally understand the ‘grunge killed hair metal’ narrative because that was my story. Within seconds of putting that tape on that was it. It wasn’t that I now had a new band. There was some part of my that understood there was no going back. This was it. This was music. There was a before, and an after waiting to be discovered. I played that cassette of Nevermind basically for an entire summer. I don’t know that I listened to anything else. Maybe the rest of Weird Al’s Off the Deep End.
That fall I got my first job, and with that money my first CD player. Now I needed CDs. I decided to join Columbia House to start my collection. I got Nevermind, obviously. Madonna and Prince’s greatest hits records. Probably some Weird Al albums. And I got Ten, because I heard Pearl Jam was like Nirvana.
I will never forget the first time I heard Ten. It would have been September 1992. I was in my room, doing math homework. I put the record in for background music. Once sounded pretty cool – I liked the aggression. And then “Even Flow” and that was it. Two times in one year. A before, and an after. While Nevermind felt primal, Ten felt infinite. This was the band. I would never need another. And while my musical tastes have evolved over time, Pearl Jam has never been dislodged from its position. My all-caps FAVORITE band. The one that would soundtrack my life and help me make sense of the world.
I was almost immediately drawn to the lyrics. Possibly because the early albums were so withholding – Eddie’s handwritten scrawl, the partially typed lyrics. It added to the mystery, and my sense of ownership. No one knew what Eddie was really saying. No one could confidently decipher him. But I knew, just knew, that whatever he was saying was important. That the wisdom of the ages, or at least the cheat codes a white suburban teenager needed to find his place in the world, was hiding in plain sight. I just had to look closer. I spent hours with headphones carefully transcribing everything I thought he said. I typed up my own lyric books that I made my poor dad print out at work. I was laughably wrong in some cases. Truth be told, I’m still not 100% sure about some of the lyrics in “Corduroy” to this day. There are a few cases where I got so attached to what I thought he was saying that it was a bit of a letdown to learn what he was actually saying.
I finally saw Pearl Jam for the first time in 1996. Randall’s Island night one. Getting tickets was a hideous pain in the ass (I was dutifully mad at Ticketmaster, but the Yield tour was a relief). I was offered $600 in the parking lot for my ticket, but there was no amount of money I would have traded it for. It was one of the most intense, transcendent moments of my life. From the opening notes of “Last Exit” through the end of “Indifference” I was so locked into every moment I had no idea it had even started to rain. I’ve always preferred the studio albums to the bootlegs, but there is nothing, absolutely nothing, better than seeing them live. I’ve seen them just under thirty times, and Uniondale in 2003 remains my favorite show. And for those who have built their lives around seeing them live, I get it. It’s not the choice I made. But it is absolutely one I understand.
My fandom has gone through phases. There was my obnoxious, imperial phase that lasted pretty much through college where I would argue, with all seriousness, that “Bugs” had better lyrics than any Beatles song. There was the phase where I wanted my Pearl Jam serious and deep, and struggled to make space in my heart for songs like “Who You Are.” There were times when I resented the songs that Jeff or Matt or Stone wrote lyrics for, since it meant I was deprived of something Eddie could have written. There were comparative highs and lows.
Vitalogy, my favorite album ever, was followed by No Code, an album that only recently moved out of the basement and now enjoys the honor of being my second to least favorite Pearl Jam record (still good, though). The Ten era remains my favorite era for Eddie’s vocals. The No Code to Binaural run probably the least. Eventually I settled into a comfortable relationship with the band’s music and learned to appreciate just about every song as a piece of a larger puzzle. And while I have my favorite songs and favorite moments, I experience no Pearl Jam song in a vacuum. Each is informed by the nearly two hundred songs surrounding it in the catalog and the meanings of these songs, or at least what they mean to me, has grown and evolved as my life has grown and evolved in tandem with the band. At almost every critical juncture of my life Pearl Jam has been there. Not just to help me process that moment, or to soundtrack my life, but to create that continuity between the person I was then, and the person I am now. To bridge past, present, and future. It’s a privilege, really, to open your heart up to a band, and to be able to take them with you as a living, breathing, changing thing. It lets you hold onto that youthful sense of anything being possible without having sacrificed the wisdom that follows from having lived a life I’ve loved. Not everyone gets to have that experience. It means everything. It’s been everything. And after thirty plus years of fandom, more than anything what Pearl Jam means to me is gratitude.
