Louie,
As you know, in October of 1993 I was a junior in high
school and you were drunkenly running into walls as a freshman at NJIT. My musical tastes, as I’m sure yours, were
limited, scattered, and sometimes embarrassing.
Guns ‘N Roses, Tom Petty, Metallica, Def Leppard, Harry Connick, Jr., A
Tribe Called Quest…you get the idea. Of
that strange group only Tribe and Petty still warrant any playing on my boombox.
Pearl Jam had only entered into the mix a year earlier when
a funny guy who refused to wear pants in the winter, and made us laugh like no
one else before or since, loaned me a copy of Ten (and no, I didn’t make a recording of it by
placing two stereos together and playing one into the other). I should take poetic license here and tell
you that I remember how I felt when Ten was popular, but I don’t. I know that it rarely ever left the stereo in
our room and that people hailed it as a new era in music. But what I really remember are the little
things…wailing the lyrics to Alive on the short drive from home to the Highland
General Store before work, a friend thinking the lyrics to Jeremy were “Came
down on me, the wicked” instead of “King Jeremy, the wicked,” and
for the first time loving music like it were a girlfriend or a family
member. I have no points to argue with
you regarding your post on Pearl Jam’s first LP, it is a landmark on the musical
landscape. It is Thriller. It is The White Album.
And yet, when I listened to vs. in preparation for
this post, I sort of wondered what the hype was about for Ten. Their
second album is sonically richer and lyrically more strident. And unlike Ten, I have a strong
recollection for the purchasing of, and listening to, of vs. It was the first album that I ever bought in
which I gave significant thought to the packaging, a trend that Pearl Jam would
take to a whole new level on subsequent releases. The cover art depicting a crooked toothed
sheep with its face caught in a fence was just the right amount of disturbing,
violent, desolate, and badass to get a young man contemplating things. Now, when you read about the often combative
recording of the album, the cover makes perfect sense. I wonder if the band knew this at the time or
if they stumbled upon that little moment of photographic irony?
The cover art segues perfectly into the evil sounding bass
line and subsequent reverb that kicks off Go. You are instantly in the grip of
something powerful. This may be the best
opening effort in Pearl Jam’s history.
Like a good leadoff hitter, it sets the tone and lets you know what’s
ahead for the next forty-five minutes.
You should be prepared to pay attention.
I remember when the band played Animal on the MTV
Video Music awards. This was before it
really sunk in that seeing them there was ridiculous. Vs. started a decade of commercial
hiding and, more often than not, fighting.
After the craziness of the Jeremy video (I read in Spin that there was an uncensored version Eddie really wanted
released, in which you see the boy actually put the gun in his mouth), and the
chart longevity of Ten, the band released no videos for vs. Animal would not have been the one,
but in hind sight, just playing it on MTV must have entailed some kind of
wrangling amongst band and label.
When they released Daughter
as a single, you know before mp3’s, you had to listen to the radio to hear
it. I can see myself driving around the
lake by our house waiting for it to come on and being so pumped when
it finally did. I’m pretty sure I didn’t
run over any pets on those mile long loops, but you
really never know. There’s something to
be said for how much more you had to work to hear music back then. When was the last time you found yourself on
line (Online, hah! Get it?) waiting for the record store to open in order to buy
an album? I’ll bet the answer is Guns N’ Roses Use Your Illusion. Even now I order my hardcopy of Pearl Jam’s
albums from tenclub. They pop through
the mail slot in my door in a cushy manila package. I don’t even see the mailman.
We could sit here and talk about
every track on vs., top to bottom it is the most consistent album in the
band’s career. Yet we forge ahead to
what would later become the best live song I ever heard the band play. A song that, upon release on one little disc
in an entire tour worth of official “bootlegs,” was played no less than
10,000 times on my stereo. Rearviewmirror
is one of those transcendent songs that every Pearl Jam fan finds a certain
solace in, a musical escape. For me, that escape comes from the show at Jones Beach in August 2000, when Mike McCready’s guitar solo is more of a finger tapping
reverb-fest than a true solo and when Eddie squeezes in that little something
extra in the lyric "I am not about to give thanks, fuck off, or
apologize." That night everything
built up for what had to be five minutes before Eddie came back in behind
Jeff’s bass with the closing lines…Saw things, saw things, saw things…Nine
years later and—goose bumps.
Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small
Town (how’s that for a title
that sticks out in a catalogue) is a song that I somehow forget when listing
Pearl Jam’s best songs. It’s so simple
and straightforward. But does any other
song give you such a warm, comfortable feeling?
It’s a musical blanket, instantly recognizable with Eddie’s vocal intro,
and it unashamedly makes you think about your family. I wonder if they loved playing this song
along with Daughter during those recording sessions. They are the first two acoustic songs the
band ever released, and in relation to the anger that marks the rest of the
album, they provide a release for the listener; maybe the band too.
Vs. closes with two tracks that, upon casual listen,
seem buried. But for devoted fans
everywhere, Leash and Indifference hold their own special places
in our collective heart. I have a theory
that you are either a Leash person or an Indifference
person. You can like both, but you can't be
both. You either identify with the
simple “Get outta my fuckin’ face” attitude of Leash, or the more
nuanced fuck off attitude of Indifference... “Í will stare the sun down,
until my eyes go blind.” In the end,
they mean the same thing. Pearl Jam got
together in the midst of the chaos that was life after Ten and produced
something so angry, so hostile, so fuckoffable, yet so beautiful, that I defy
you to name a better album. Period.
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