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Music That Inspires Me W/O: PJ At the Legendary Gahden 4/11/94Feb 02 '02 Write an essay on this topic.
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This entry is part of the "Music that Inspires You" write-off, hosted by the talented paulyoungotti. A full list of participants can be found at the bottom of this review. Also, this review is intensely personal. Some of you may find some of the things I say "sad" (as in "you're a loser"). Quite frankly, I don't give a f*ck. This is who I am and I'm proud of it. This is my band, in so much as you can actually consider a band "yours" when you're just a fan. If you don't know what this means or how I feel, then I doubt you'll understand the point of this write-off, so just stop reading this now, ok? The year was 1994. April 1994. Say that to a person familiar at all with music history and the first thing that comes to mind is the discovery of Kurt Cobain's body, dead from a single gunshot wound. To me though, April 1994 represents something much more important in my life. To be specific, April 11, 1994 changed my life forever. That was the night I first saw Pearl Jam perform. I was 14 at this time, young, confused, and deeply depressed. The only friend I had was my girlfriend of almost two years. Besides her, my best friend was my Vs. cd. When I found out I had tickets to the second night of Pearl Jam's mini-run at the legendary Boston Garden (or the Gahden to my fellow Bostonians), second row tickets at that, I just about freaked out. They were my favorite band, although I must admit that I was not as huge a fan then as I am today. More than anything, their music gave me hope, and probably most importantly of all, an inspiration to write poetry, which remains intact today. More than anything they inspired me to wake up every day, to get up out of bed and face everything I hated about my life, which was, well, everything. It was probably kind of ironic that the day was raw, wet, and drizzling. After all, nothing says Seattle like "raw, wet and drizzling." I guess that would kind of describe the general emotional state of the crowd that had come to the Boston Garden. Everyone was still in shock over Kurt's death, as his body had been discovered only 3 days earlier. I missed Mudhoney's opening set. Didn't care really. I was there for Pearl Jam. I wasn't sure how, but they would somehow make the confusion that resulted in me as a result of Kurt's death and the depression that my early teens had brought on ok. We took our spots in the second row and waited for the band to take the stage. House lights went down, crowd erupted in a cheer so loud it could only be the Garden. The stage was bathed in a very dark and kind of eerie bluish/purplish light. You couldn't really see the band, you could just make out who was who by the way they held themselves. The opening notes of Release hit, and well, at that point I was a blubbering mess. This song had for all intents and purposes saved my life a few months earlier, and for it to be the first song I ever experienced at a Pearl Jam concert was the most intense concert experience of my life. Everything about this song on this night was perfect. As I listen to it now on a tape that I've had since late 1994, I can't help but be brought back to this moment in time. As the song ended, Eddie gave a short speech about how playing these shows (the 3 Boston shows) was really hard and he included a Quadrophenia reference about "the real me" as well. Rearviewmirror was intense, with Eddie taking out a row of candles set up onstage with a baseball like slide towards the end. And the band just kept on pumping out song after song. Go and Animal sounded so tight and so damn good that you would think they should never be separated in concert again. Then Dissident started. The word dissident actually means "someone who disagrees." But the way it's used in this song, it's more along the lines of "someone who betrays." Betrayal is something I knew an awful lot about at 14, so this is another one of those songs I just absolutely related to. It was sweeping and majestic this night. It made the balcony at the Garden shake the way the Celtics and the Bruins had done for close to 60 years. By the time the band hit Breath (the last time they would play it for over four years until a fan sign campaign brought it back), it was like a breath of fresh air engulfing the audience. When Mike McCreedy threw in a bit of War Pigs in his guitar solo, the crowd just grooved as one big happy family. But it was during Alive, the band's first hit, that the truly remarkable happened. Somehow, a song about incest became a song that looked, sounded, and felt like it was about the title itself. A celebration of life. It underwent a transformation on this very night. As Mike soloed away, Eddie stepped forward, started pumping his fist, microphone in hand, perfectly in tune with the beat, and invoked the crowd to just start chanting as a united front: "yeah!, yeah!, yeah!, yeah!" It was as if Vedder was in some sort of weird trance, determined not to end up like Kurt, determined to live on as a big "f*ck you" to the stardom he has since come to grips with. A machine-gun like Porch closed out the band's regular set. The encore held two gems that would appear later that year on their third album, Vitalogy. I was one of the first people to hear Immortality (this was it's debut), but it was Corduroy that grabbed my ear more than anything else. Sure enough, Corduroy became a huge rock radio hit. But it was the double barreled assault that soon followed that whipped the crowd into the biggest frenzy. "It's about to turn 11 o'clock. You know what that means? We have to leave the stage at 11 o'clock." *cascades of boos* "It's union rules...the Celtics are playing tomorrow." I kid you not when I say that this would be the only time you'd hear 15,000 screaming maniacal Bostonians yell "f*ck the Celtics" in the Garden. "Oh wait, it's not tomorrow, it's the next night...so we're cool, we can play all night." *cheers erupt, Leash begins* Leash is just an angry angry song. It's also one of those songs that you just bang your head to, raise both middle fingers, and scream along to the chorus of "get out of my f*cking face, drop the leash, drop the leash!" As if that hadn't gotten the crowd into a big enough frenzy, the band then played a rollicking eight minute version of Neil Young's Rockin in the Free World. That normally wouldn't be headline news, as PJ still covers that song regularly in concert today. But what Eddie did was headline news. He took the mic stand, punched a hole into the stage, and slowly climbed down into it, waving goodbye to us just before he disappeared completely. The band came back out. They sang an impromptu Happy Trails before playing the closing Indifference. By this time, we were all completely happy and exhausted, but every person in the audience sang their lungs out anyway. At the end of the night, I went home, and inspired, wrote 5 poems in the span of like 40 minutes. I'd never felt so inspired to write and to get my feelings out, get my anger and hostility and resentment out somehow, as I have after this concert. If nothing else, the version of Alive I heard on this night taught me one thing: I was still alive, and I wasn't gonna end up like Kurt Cobain...fighting off depression is a never-ending battle that is exhausting. But all I have to do to get some new energy is listen to my tape of this show...care to join me? The other participants, check em out: Aerocat, Brothermansoul, cletta1201, cripper, DVON, elsa70, girlboxer5, jag2112, kuueleimomi, lynnzop, madtheory, search66, swanton00, tigger 500, xiphoid, and our fearless host, paulyoungotti.  |
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