So-o-on, she said, have I got a little story for you
Splitting logs and gatekeeping and defining moments
My cousin Mark and I are out by the garage, a couple of high schoolers splitting logs and stacking them for firewood. Mark brought a cassette single—I think from the Soundgarden fan club or something—that we’re playing over and over again. Three songs on the tape: a moody song called “Wash”, a cover of the Beatles’ “I’ve Got A Feeling”, and the main song “Alive.” Split a few logs, stack the pieces, flip the tape, repeat. We debate the merits and demerits of the band’s name, never quite feeling comfortable saying it out loud, not knowing at the time that it would be one of the most uttered rock band names for the next decade or more.
Pearl Jam?
Mark has consistently introduced me to new favorites—Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, The Cardigans’ Long Gone Before Daylight, Jon Brion, Rachael Yamagata, Norah Jones, Phantogram, Calexico, Liz Phair, My Morning Jacket, and the list winds wildly on. Anybody who loves music needs a Mark or two in their lives, a trusted portal to new worlds, a pair of ears surveying the music world and drawing maps for you. Mark’s track record is stellar.
The millisecond that Stone Gossard’s “Alive” riff came scratching through the old tape player’s speakers into my ears for the first time, it just felt…different. It wasn’t the pentatonic poutiness of Led Zeppelin licks or the devil thunder riffage of Black Sabbath or the strutty crunch of AC/DC. I can tell you what it wasn’t, but, to this day, still can’t really articulate what it was. Whatever it was, I’m pretty sure it reset rock music for me. Maybe I’m the only one who feels like it’s different from the pack, that it’s an outlier in rock guitar riffs, but something about it feels like it’s miles from the classic rock riffs I knew and the hair rock that was dominating radio at the time. (I’m aware that the cooler and more historically acceptable thing is to say that Nirvana broke all of that and that’s fine and probably true, but I heard “Alive” months before “Smells Like Teen Spirit” hit, so it’s my personal Destroyer of Hair Rock. It was, for me, a foreshock of the inevitable, global seismicity of Nirvana.)
We must’ve turned that tape over a dozen times1.
Months later, I was at my go-to CD store, Sound Off down on 7th East, the day that Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten finally came out. I couldn’t give them money fast enough to let me hear whatever else this “Pearl Jam” had up their sleeve. I devoured the liner notes, soon figuring out how to play—rudimentarily—most of the songs on the album on guitar, each song taking its turn as The Favorite (though “Jeremy” never really took a turn; currently probably “Porch”, which—fair warning—drops an f-word in the first three words). I even began fashioning my own handwriting after Jeff Ament’s iconic handwritten script. My friend Jesse Ficks, another of those blessed musical gatekeeper-like-Mark types, made me a mixtape that fall that was timed perfectly, introducing me to an entirely new swath of great music: Mudhoney, Screaming Trees, solo Mark Lanegan, Soundgarden, Mr. Bungle, Beat Happening, and more. He and Mark beat the wave by quite a bit (Jesse actually got crap from all the jocks, a year or two before this, for wearing a Screaming Trees shirt in gym class, so hats off to Jesse who was way, way, way ahead of the rest of us), but the thing erupted that year. You couldn’t avoid it and, eventually and unfortunately, you also couldn’t avoid the grumbling hordes of soundalikes and trend-chasers that would ultimately ruin2 it all.
Today, the album’s over 30 years old. That’s older—relative to now—than the records that were classic rock and dominating my eardrums (I doubt I was purposely listening to anything from 1961 in 1991) when I first heard Pearl Jam. They were sort of my bridge to the next era of modern music, alt-rock, whatever you want to call it. I eased into a world of Pearl Jams and Smashing Pumpkins and Fugazis.
I never fully shed the classic rock3. But hearing Pearl Jam was a moment of broadening, of opening, not unlike the first time I heard Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and jazz finally made sense. Or the time I heard Keith Jarrett’s live album Koln and jazz made even more sense. Or hearing the Louvin Brothers or Blue Sky Boys for the first time and really feeling country/bluegrass in the goosebumps. Or finally hearing Aretha’s Amazing Grace for the first time and suddenly feeling an insatiable craving for more gospel music.
Great art can affect your interior landscape in ways that nothing else can touch.
(Save your “but is Pearl Jam’s first album great art?” arguments for Reddit, please.)
Proof: I can still sing verbatim a whole verse of “Wash”, a song that never appeared on an actual Pearl Jam album. Just from that morning splitting logs by the garage. “What’s clean is pure but, hey, I’m white on the outside…” whatever all that means. Further proof: one of my high school bands covered the Pearl Jam version of “I’ve Got A Feeling”, basically ignoring the Beatles’ arrangement, which seems heretical now that I actually write it down. Final proof: I was in two bands that covered “Alive.” I couldn’t get enough of it. (Not sure I ever played it right, though.)
Recently on her podcast Bandsplain, host Yasi Salek asked whether an all-time great band ever inspired worse music than Nirvana. She called them the bizarro Velvet Underground (whose lore says that only 20 people ever heard them, but all 20 of those people started bands). The Nirvana (and Pearl Jam) clones are objectively bad.
Just last night, playing background music in a hotel lobby, I had a 60-something come up and tell me he loved my taste in music, which was intended as a compliment but sent me mentally scurrying for more modern songs to balance out my repertoire.