| A Faithfull Believer
The Man Who Mistook His Bootleg Collection For His Wife How's this for a meathead musical fantasy: I was pumping iron when those now-famous melodies first stuck in my brain. Yes, attempting to rectify a genetic predisposition toward a tall and thin frame, I had begun joining two far more muscular friends of mine to lift weights after school at some crappy nautilus facility. As a few weeks rolled by, it turned out I wasn't much for lat pulls and sit-ups. The swarthy owner of the place even decided I had overstayed my "trial membership" too long for his liking and attempted to extort money out of me. The whole affair would have been a monumental waste of time, if not for a discovery. The discovery of a band called Pearl Jam.
The radio station that was always playing in the gym had a promotion called "Two-fer Tuesdays" - pretty self-explanatory. I had to sit through umpteen airings of "Black Hole Sun," "I'll Stay Away" and other grunge staples, but it was via those Tuesday lifting sessions that I became accustomed to the songs from Pearl Jam's Ten album. For whatever reason, Temple Of The Dog had never really crossed my radar. I can recall taking note of "Hunger Strike," but I am pretty sure "Jeremy" is what finally stayed with me. As I dutifully completed my tricep curls, there was "Black." Then there was "Alive." And "Even Flow." Before long, I could hear what all the fuss was about.
Back then, Eddie Vedder and company cut quite a figure amid the bullshit pop music of Color Me Badd and the like. Their songs could burn out of control and make you cry, all in the course of a few minutes. Bemoaning how the goddess in English Lit wouldn't even look in your direction? A nice blaring of "Black" was the antidote. Couldn't remember the lyrics to "Smells Like Teen Spirit?" No problem. It was easy to rattle off Vedder's snarls like "harmless little fuck" and "son, she said / have I got a story for you." They were your own, even if you yourself didn't have much to rebel against.
So the months passed, and Pearl Jam and Nirvana sparred for the grunge heavyweight prize, with no clear victor in sight. I liked Nirvana, but for me, the battle was already over. I can remember the day Vs. was released. I sat shotgun in my friend's convertible, as he slammed the accelerator to get us out of the school parking lot as quickly as possible. The fire-and-brimstone riffing of "Go" fumed through the speakers and our heads went into convulsions as the car hit 70 down a residential street. Now this was rock music. This was an experience.
Despite all this, Pearl Jam didn't become a truly pivotal part of my life until I started college. All of the sudden I had a constant connection to the burgeoning Internet to educate me on every scrap of Pearl Jam information that existed. I became a regular in the American Online message board. At the time, I'd never been confronted with a band so willing to change its setlist from night to night. So I began collecting bootlegs, an activity buoyed by a local CD store which would actually let you "rent" the things for three days and then "return" them, no questions asked. Later, I bought Vitalogy on vinyl two weeks before it came out on CD, even though I didn't even own a turntable.
Let me backtrack and try to detail the things that really put me over the edge. For me, Pearl Jam has always embodied the most desirable qualities of rock's classic acts. I view them as my generation's Led Zeppelin, the Who and Aerosmith all rolled into one. They've outlasted all of their original grunge contemporaries with their integrity intact and produced a body of work that stands up to every inch of their rock mentors. They care about important causes - abortion rights, environmental issues, rape prevention, to name a few - and inspire activism without being preachy.
They also care about their fans to a level I have yet to see matched by any established band. For 10 bucks, you could join their fanclub and be automatically guaranteed first dibs on a pair of tickets to any show on whatever tour was upcoming. You also got a special Christmas single, the past ten of which have included everything from a live cover of Frank Sinatra's "My Way" to studio gems like "Angel" and "Let Me Sleep."
Tapping into the fan community I never knew existed naturally fanned the flames of my obsessions. It was comforting to know that, as hogwild as I'd become, there were scores of people who were much further over the edge. | 
The fire-and-brimstone riffing of "Go" fumed through the speakers and our heads went into convulsions as the car hit 70 down a residential street. Now this was rock music.
This was an experience. | But I did my best to keep up. A few months after Pearl Jam canceled an entire tour in its war with TicketMaster, the band announced it would be playing two charity gigs in Washington, D.C. The only way to get tickets was to send in postcards and hope your name and address were pulled from the hopper. That Christmas break, I sent in several hundred postcards. It didn't matter that I lived in Bloomington, Indiana - some 15 hours from our nation's capital. I was going to those shows, damn it.
Two weeks after the postcard frenzy, I got a call in my dorm room. It was a man telling me that my postcard had been selected, and that I could purchase two tickets to either show if I so chose. A no-brainer on that one. In minutes, I'd booked a flight. I was going.
It turns out that I was able to attend a rare Eddie Vedder press conference the weekend of the show. I got to ask him a question, which he answered by looking me straight in the eye the entire time. Even though I was told not to, I shot a bunch of photos, one of which went on to be included in a book about the band years later. Then, I sheepishly slipped Eddie my business card as his handlers ushered him out the door when the q-and-a was complete. He never called.
The show itself - the band's first with Jack Irons, who at the time was their fourth drummer - was a watershed. I cried during the opening song, "Release." Later, I screamed my lungs out, just like Eddie. I snuck in a microcassette recorder and made my first - albeit unlistenable - bootleg. It really was something else to witness a band infuse every note and every lyric with such urgency. It was transcendent. This kind of thing has continued unabated ever since. In the summer of 1995, my brother and I blew off a family reunion to make our way to a classic show in Milwaukee. Later that year, I drove 14 hours to New Orleans to watch the band play in a college track stadium - the only "venue" in the city that wasn't under contract with TicketMaster and could reasonably hold a Pearl Jam concert - and then turned around and drove right back. I even wound up taking roadtrips to shows in other cities with total strangers. By this point I had also purchased a $600 DAT recorder expressly for the purpose of taping and trading Pearl Jam shows (I've accumulated hundreds). Lo and behold, Vedder announced on stage that fall that Pearl Jam would from that point forward be allowing taping. For a time, the band even set up its own pirate radio station to broadcast its gigs live. Who could ask for more?
Me, I found out. I had to know every piece of Pearl Jam news before anyone else. I just had to. I had to hear whatever there was to hear. It certainly helped that I was pursuing a career in music journalism, and in the summer of 1996, while I was interning at Alternative Press magazine in Cleveland, I experienced first-hand the merits of true insider-dom.
The band was working on its fourth album, and was floating interview opportunities to a select few media outlets. Despite the fact that Alternative Press had ripped to shreds everything Pearl Jam had previously released, they were one of the magazines contacted. Knowing this, I had to be careful not to "out" myself amid an office full of editors neck high in Guided By Voices and obscure French techno albums.
One day, I was sitting outside someone's office, filing photos or press releases, or whatever it was that interns do. I heard some music coming from the publisher's office, which sounded like Pearl Jam, but I couldn't be sure. After a few minutes, I was sure. I sucked it up and knocked on the guy's door. On his desk was the advance tape of No Code. I actually got shaky. Could I borrow it? "Sorry, it can't leave the office. But you can listen to it tomorrow," he replied.
That was not nearly good enough! I devised a scheme, one which I am proud of to this day. The A.P. offices were in a run-down old building, and all of the back issues were housed in a dank basement room nobody liked being banished to. With the tape in one hand, and a dual-deck boom box in the other, I told the other interns that I was "going downstairs to do some stuff," and promptly locked myself in that basement room, dubbed No Code on high-speed, and turned the volume to zero so I wouldn't spoil the listening session I'd already been planning. I actually had the tape in my possession for two days until I deemed the situation right for its debut.
Thanks to an entirely different set of insider connections (this one involving a bizarre chain of people, including Cameron Crowe and the owner of the Indianapolis Colts), I managed to get ahold of the band's next album, Yield, five months before it was released. I'll never forget the night it was premiered it to a "select" group of five friends after suitable preparations, and then played twice more in its entirety, just for good measure.
I guess one's connection to a band is really cemented for good if/when the band fulfills the fan's wildest fantasy. Pearl Jam did just that in the fall of 2000, when it announced that it would be releasing unedited, double-disc "bootlegs" of every show from its recent European tour. Twenty-five shows in all, some of them so long that mere seconds of unused disc space remained. To sweeten the pot, the band let fanclub members get first crack at the shows, for six dollars less than their eventual retail price.
The ante was upped even further later that year: not only would Pearl Jam issue the European shows in their entirety, but each of the 47 shows from its North American tour as well. For a fan, it's nothing short of a dream come true. It also gives one pause to reflect back on Pearl Jam's early days, when you would hear "Alive" alongside "Patience" on the metal station because there wasn't any other radio format to give it exposure. Even I would have been hard-pressed to predict that these guys would be the ones to survive the '90s sounding as strong as ever. Indeed, what at the time were viewed by many undistinguished power ballads wound up as some of the most memorable rock songs of the last decade.
For an obsessive son-of-a-bitch like me, seeing the band at the top of its game is like the renewal of an unspoken vow. JC loves Pearl Jam. Forever. |
