My long history with Pearl Jam, Part One.

As I have said before, I like Pearl Jam. A lot. Anyone that knows me for any length of time knows that they are my favorite musical group. There isn't even a question as to whether or not I like another group more. It's been this way for almost twenty years.

I remember sitting in cafeteria at lunch during the second part of my sophomore year of high school talking with some of my friends, one of whom could not stop talking about a group named Pearl Jam and their new cassette Ten (what? They were still the dominant medium when I was 15) and he recommended buying it. Thankfully, I got paid to serve weddings at my church and had spare money to spend. I picked it up at the Wall to Wall Sound and Video (it's FYE, about two name changes ago, with electronics and TV's) on MacArthur Road in Whitehall, just outside of Allentown.

I took it home, put it into my crappy little stereo and got blown away. If I were to make a movie reference that even comes close, I would choose the scene where the central character in Almost Famous discovers the copy of Tommy his sister leaves behind after she ran away from home and he and gets that dumbfounded look on his face after putting the needle to the wax. I can't put into words what the album said, but I can honestly say, that it spoke to me. Something in those songs just jumped out and grabbed me. I don't know if it was the influence of the death of Andrew Wood on the proceedings, or the fact that I was a teenager, who looking back on it, was probably in my serious and brooding phase. Who knows?

Anyway, the album opened my eyes to the world of rock and roll, since my musical tastes I am ashamed to say before that had run the gamut of the popular stuff of the time from Taylor Dayne to Paula Abdul and those sorts of artists (and I have the tapes packed away somewhere to prove it), but I digress. The debut album held me over till near the start of my senior year, even though I got close to wearing the tape out.

They were also a part of history, as I had mentioned before in this blog. I moved into the world of compact discs, giving my mom money (they had dropped me at a school dadnce and were going to kill time at a newarby mall till it was time to pick me up) and a piece of paper with the title of the soundtrack to the movie Singles written on it. Among the other songs on the CD were two from Eddie and the boys, "Breath" and "State of Love and Trust."

In October 1993, I had gone on a college visit on Monday I had off from school (apparently Mom did not want me to blow the perfect attendance record). I went to see the campus of Moravian College in Bethlehem and get a look at their English program. On the way back home, we stopped at the MacArthur Road area, for what I don't remember, but I think my mother wanted to buy something. I, on the other hand, had to go to Camelot Music, and buy something--Vs. It had come out the previous Tuesday, and was selling like crazy, with over 950,000 units sold in the first week. I had moved into Cd's by this point, and actually own a hard to find version of the album--the Eco-Pak. Think the cardboard cases used by some bands today, combined with the traditional jewel case.

Again, I was blown away, and to be honest, I don't think the album came out of the cd player until sometime after New Year's. Pearl jam had put me through two or so years of high school, and now we would face the rigors of college together.

The rigors of which would be made easier by a welcome friend in early December 1994. After waiting the two weeks after it was released on vinyl to my CD version, I hit MacArthur Road one more time, this time at the Wall in the Lehigh Valley Mall, to get Vitalogy. It sticks out in my mind for one major reason--it looked different. The CD wasn't in the traditional jewel case, instead looking like a small black textbook. Incidentally, the version that was released isn't the original version of the book, since some of it was still under a copyright.

Another reason I remember this CD was that I eventually had to get it "replaced" by somewhat defrauding The Wall. If you lived in PA before Best Buy came in, you remember the stickers The Wall put on their Cd's so that you could replace them if they ever went bad. Well, I scratched mine up pretty bad taking it out of the packaging to put it into my stereo. Oh, and I made it worse by running up and down a cinder block wall, a fact I neglected to tell the employee at the South Mall in Allentown when I went to replace it. It was also around this time that a friend of mine actually helped me out by giving me Ten on CD for Christmas . At this point it had fallen a bit by the wayside as the group had more albums, and I sort of stopped using the tape player.

We had both done some growing up at this point, me heading towards graduation, them into a influential and increasingly political band, by this time starting their boycott of Ticketmaster. I was young and didn't care too much about that, because I had a new album called No Code to keep me happy. An album my friend Dave and I stood in line for at a local record store the night before it went on sale to be the first to get it. If I think about it, it was the first of many times we did that, but then again we were kids with nothing to spend our money on but music and that is exactly what we did. The album was also unique for it's packaging, which contained nine Polaroid photos with the lyrics to the songs on the back. That was also the night I got the Pearl Jam poster I had for many years. The store gave them away with every copy of the new cd purchased.

The boycott of Ticketmaster meant that they wouldn't be coming east, which made me a bit sad, but it also was the first time I decided to do something influenced by someone popular-- I too boycotted Ticketmaster, not attending a show they sold tickets for until 2000.

I'll tell you tommorrow who played that show.