Hey Darling Ones,

Do you know where you were on this very day 28 years ago? What were you doing that day? I was in Hibbard Hall at The Spectator office waiting for Sister #2 and my not-yet-brother-in-law to bring me the new Pearl Jam CD.

I must have had class on Tuesday morning because Sister #2 is the one who ventured to Best Buy (they opened earlier than the record store in Eau Claire) to get not one, but two copies of Pearl Jam’s hotly anticipated new CD Vs. It came in a fancy ecopak sans title since it hadn’t yet been finalized when these CDs went to press. I think, that’s how it went. I’m going on memory for this and refusing to use Google to fact check my ass.

To say it was the biggest thing to happen in October 1993 to my gaggle of friends is an understatement. It was a big enough deal not only did I remember the plan to get the CD, but we actually came up with a plan.

The only reason I know Pearl Jam’s best album came out October 19, 1993 is because I had to Google if there was a period in the title. I was Googling because my Twitter friend Erik had the audacity to forget what my all-time #1 favorite Pearl Jam song was (“Rearviewmirror”). I didn’t want to look like a jackass for not knowing whether the actual, factual title contained a period or not. It’s hard to stay up on your high horse when you type Vs when you should have typed Vs.

Man, having these types of conversations were way easier when we did them with our voices. Nobody would have had any idea if I was saying Vs. vs Vs in conversation. I promise not to subject you to another Pearl Jam reminiscence so hot on the heels of the last one. You all probably forgot it, but it’s fresh in my memory. Besides, I should save my good material for the 30th anniversary in 2023.

I Will Dare dot com in 2023 is gonna be rife with 30th anniversary reminiscing because that is, as far as I’m concerned, the best year of GenX’s musical life.

That’s all I got. I don’t have tons to say about this tonight because I’m too busy listening to Vs. on my headphones with all the lights off. Mostly, I just wanted to note the weird coincidence that found me talking about “Rearviewmirror” on the anniversary of the record’s release. I’m a simple woman. It does not take lots to delight me.

Your favorite elderly woman on a couch in a small town,
Jodi

P.S. I would like you all to know that I spelled reminiscence and reminiscing right on my first try. Amazing. See what I mean about not taking lots to delight me?

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What is going on, Darling Ones?

Happy 30th Anniversary of Pearl Jam’s Ten to all of you who celebrate. This is a momentous occasion for many reasons.

Top of that list of reasons is how goddamn pleasurable it has been to see my GenX brethren celebrating. It’s delighted me endlessly reading all the memories people have of this record in particular and Pearl Jam in general. There was a time in the nineties when you were either a Nirvana person or a Pearl Jam person and that was a personality-defining choice. It telegraphed something about you. Just like being a Beatles or a Stones person. And those people who refused to make a choice were insufferable and to be avoided.

I’ve written oodles about Pearl Jam throughout the twenty-one years of I Will Dare.com. You can see for yourself. I stopped clicking the Older Posts link after four times, because I found what I was looking for.

Even though, I personally stopped paying attention to Pearl Jam sometime around No Code and Vs. is my favorite of their records, they still have their own wing in the music mansion that is my heart. Primarily because they mean so much to most of my family and a lot of my other favorite people.

When she was in high school, Sister #2 was part of a triumvirate of girls who loved music and they hopped on the PJ bandwagon very early one. When Jill, an especially devoted fan-letter writing kind of young woman, was killed in a car accident in the winter of 1992/1993, Pearl Jam was very very kind to my sister and Betty, her surviving friend. They invited them as guests to their next First Ave show and even had a small meet-n-greet with them.

That level of kindness can never be forgotten.

Because Pearl Jam has played such a large role in Sister #2’s life, both her kids have an especially strong bond with the band’s music. My nephew Maxwell even has a Pearl Jam tattoo. When Jaycie & Max were in their late teens (maybe in 2014 or 2015?) Sister #2 planned to surprise them with Pearl Jam tickets for their birthdays (both of ’em were born in October). The problem was that she had to ruin the surprise when she heard them looking to buy their own tickets for the show.

And of course, there are my myriad personal connections to the band. I could write oceans and reams about those, but most of them are related to later albums.

When it comes to Ten the song “Alive” cleaved into my heart the very first time I heard the line, “what you thought was your daddy was nothing but a. . .” The song about Vedder finding out about his biological father hit very close to home. I was much younger when I found out about my biological father, but still related hard. I related even harder when I was home alone at age thirty-eight when my real daddy was dying. I never met him and only found out about his death two years after he had died.

What I love the most about “Alive” is when Eddie Vedder talks about how the fans’ love of this song changed the meaning of the song for him. I can’t watch him talk about it without bawling my eyes out. It moves me so much I can hardly articulate it. Is it his emotion when talking about the song? Is it the beauty of art bringing people together? Is it how healing music can be? All of it and something else chemical inside of me?

Is that the question? And if so who answers?
Jodi

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Hi Darling Ones,

Despite my emotion hangover brought about by yesterday’s letter, I decided I was gonna get shit done. Shit in this case means updating my portfolio, which is a task I hate more than taking out the garbage, writing press releases, and cleaning toilets.

However, your girl has not worked more than a few hours a week for months while continuously buying crap I don’t need that also does not make me feel better. It gets expensive. I have a line on a potential gig from a guy who remembers me from college. He claims he remembers me for good reasons and not that I was a giant, drunken ding-dong. So that is worthy of portfolio updating.

The updating is only going so-so because my stomach is staging a coup. It is upset that I’m trying to subsist on instant mashed potatoes, Girl Scout cookies, and breakfast burritos. It is not a fan. Apparently my stomach has also forgotten that in college I was, in fact, a giant, drunken ding-dong and we frequently made a breakfast of the leftover tacos & potato oles from the six pack & a a pound I’d procure on my way home from the bars. Did it ever complain then? No. I don’t know what its problem is today, but I am not a fan.

None of this is the point I wanted to make today, but I’m exhausted and rambly and have a stomachache.

To get closer to the point, I will tell you “Rearviewmirror” is my favorite Pearl Jam song of all the Pearl Jam songs. Vs. is my favorite of their records, and I often put it on when I need to get shit done. It’s been my get shit done record since 1993, which isn’t the same as my “I gotta write a bunch of words records” and “let’s pretend to work while really singing along to this record.” My life has infinite soundtracks for everything.

While I was using part of my brain to get shit done I was using the other part to contemplate “Rearviewmirror” and why I loved it so much. This is when I decided to look up the lyrics. That was a mistake. I have been singing this song for 28 years, but a lot of the lyrics were brand new information to me. I’m pretty sure for most of my life I was singing word-like noises that sounded right. Because until this very day I know I never sang the words enmity gauged or wounds in the mirror waved. For real? I don’t even know what enmity gauged means. What I have discovered is that I love “Rearviewmirror” because of the music and it has little do with the actual lyrics because like 75% of them are kinda melodramatic garbage. That does not stop me from doing a weird, wiggly, fist-pumping dance whenever I hear this song.

Also, you should know that with my headphones on and with the volume turned almost all the way up I can sing the shit out of “Indifference” and sound really good. I sang it twice to the Sadness Garden today.

Here’s to finishing getting the shit done tomorrow and continued existence despite not mattering,
Jodi

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Question for you Darling Ones,

Is the “I was into them before they were cool” or “I saw them at this bar with six other people, nobody showed” an asshole trait specific to GenX or are other generations afflicted with this disease? I ask because I saw some people of my generation complaining about the youth discovering Fleetwood Mac (like is that a bad thing?) and I was wondering do Millenials do this? GenZers? Or do they use a different form of gatekeeping?

Do you know? Please tell me.

I bring this up because I seem to have unlocked a very specific GenX Spinster achievement: watching Pearl Jam Unplugged while crocheting with a cat on my lap at 4 p.m. on a Thursday.

Yes, it’s okay if you’re a little jealous of my rock & roll lifestyle. It’s to be expected.

I will not bore you with all the reasons Pearl Jam means so much to me and while they’re not “my band,” their music is very much a part of my coming of age. There are 20 years* worth of posts about me yammering on about Pearl Jam. Have at it, Sport.

However, I will bore you with one reason. I know I’ve talked about this before and I don’t care, I’m gonna talk about it again. This has little to do with spinsterhood and a lot to do with the gatekeeping of music.

As you may know I was the editor of the Arts & Entertainment section of my college newspaper. Incidentally, I’m Twitter pals with the two people who were the editor before I was (Hi Amy & Marc!).

Because I was the arts editor I worked with a lot of Music Dudes^TM. It was mostly fun. However, I had to deal with a metric fuckton of mansplaining. And I can’t say this with 100% certainty but I’m pretty sure Music Dude^TM mansplaining is the worst of all the mansplaining. I mean, except for that one Marketing Dude^TM who said, “well, aren’t you confident?” when he found out that I call myself a supergenius and then explained how I do my job to me. Oh, and that one cat on Twitter who tried to tell me how many tampons a woman needs each month.

Men, you are so fun!

So back in 1993 I wrote the review of Pearl Jam’s “Vs” and I said something about Eddie Vedder having a distinctive voice. Maybe I said one of the most distinctive voices in rock & roll. Maybe I just yammered on about how cute Eddie Vedder is for like 12 column inches (I did not, and I would not, because even though he is very, very cute when women talk about the cuteness of rocksars Music DudesTM become super dicks).

The day the newspaper came out Jason Becker came into The Spectator office and lectured me about being too complementary. About “being careful” when I say “one of the most distinctive voices in rock and roll.”

“Nobody’s gonna know who Pearl Jam are twenty years from now,” he said in October of 1993.
And because I was a twenty-one-year-old ding dong I said, “Okay.”
What I should have said was, “Fuck all the way off, Yo La Tengo, nobody’s gonna know who you are twenty years from now!”

So yeah, I was right and he was wrong and don’t you forget it. Anyway, that Pearl Jam Unplugged was pretty fun to watch again after all these years.

Thoughts really do arrive like butterflies, don’t they?
Jodi

 
*Yes, I’m gonna constantly bring up the fact that this blog is twenty years old. Suck it.

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I would bet you dollars to donuts that I’ve written about this somewhere at some point before. And I even tried to go find what I might have said before, I got to about 2006 and was too bored to continue on.

Forgive me if I repeat myself. It’s going to happen. My life isn’t that exciting and also this blog is almost seventeen years old. That’s 119 in dog years and I have no idea how those convert to internet years.

This morning The Current’s Coffee Break was all grunge to commemorate the deaths of Kurt Cobain (1994) and Layne Staley (2002). And because I was 21 in April of 1994 when grunge was at its peak I had many, many random flashbacks to go along with each song they played.

However, it wasn’t until they got to Pearl Jam’s “Elderly Woman Behind The Counter in a Small Town” that I thought “Oh, I should write about that. Again. Probably.”

Whenever I hear this song out of context of the “Vs.” album, I think of two people: F.R. Chicken and Jason Becker. They kind of go hand in hand because if it wasn’t for F.R. then I wouldn’t have written the review of “Vs.” for the college newspaper and thus would never have been mansplained record reviews by Jason Becker.

F.R. Chicken was supposed to write the review of Pearl Jam’s second album. She called it, and there were a lot of people who wanted to write it. It was the album everybody wanted to hear in the fall of 1993. And the day it came out we gathered in the newspaper office to listen to it and talk about it in hushed tones of reverence. Sometime that afternoon F.R. walked in and said that she couldn’t write the review. Her reasoning was something like “I cannot find the words and also, “EWBTCiaST makes me randomly burst into tears whenever I hear it.”

So I wrote the review that was full of fawning and superlatives and whatever other kind of adoration fell from my 21-year-old fangirl fingers. If I had the intestinal fortitude I would go upstairs and dig around in the box filled with nostalgia and emotional landmines to find the review. I will spare you and me the disaster that I’m sure that review is. Besides, I don’t feel like dying of embarrassment right now.

Now, I always kinda liked Jason Becker, which wasn’t a popular sentiment around the newspaper office. My friend Trish called him a weasel. She really loathed him and in hindsight I can see that she was right. Jason was kind of a holier-than-though know-it-all, especially when it came to music.

After my laudatory review, Jason sat me down in the newspaper office to lecture me about being careful in my reviews, especially he part where I said something about Eddie Vedder’s distinctive voice. “Nobody’s going to know who Eddie Vedder is in twenty years,” he said.

HA!

At the time I didn’t think enough about the situation to be more than moderately annoyed. I was young and green and it would have never occurred to me that my opinion about Pearl Jam was just as valid as anything Jason Becker had to say. Nor would it have occurred to me that the weasel would have never, ever given a lecture to any of the dudes who wrote record reviews. Grrrr. I don’t remember my exact reaction but I’m sure I was meek and conciliatory. Now, of course, I would unleash hellfire and damnation upon him. Since I can’t go back in time to flick him in the ear and tell him to shut the fuck up, I just smile a bit whenever Pearl Jam floats into my consciousness because damnit, I was right and he was wrong.

I WAS RIGHT AND HE WAS WRONG!

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