Pearl Jam ~ Black
(written: 27 February 2004)
Man. I was going to avoid doing this but then when I was looking for things to smush together into an image for this entry and came up with this... er... creation (note: I lost that image and found one far more fitting, but rest assured my smushed image was badass), I couldn't think of a band and or song that fit in with the... well... "spirit" of it.
I have a pretty... checkered past shall we say, when it comes to music. Up until I started high school, my biggest influences music-wise were Mariah Carey (pre-skank), Paula Abdul (pre-Idol), Richard Marx (pre-haircut) and BoyzIIMen (pre-pubescent). The family member closest to my age was my cousin who was very much a Red Hot Chili Peppers fan. By default I was too, and bought my first non-pop album right before starting 3rd form. I bought a cassette of BloodSugarSexMagik and even asked my mother's permission because it featured a parental advisory sticker...
...
I was a square. Moreso.
Anyway, it gave me a tiny bit of diversity there sure. I was one of very few 13 year olds in my class who listened to anything involving lyrics about beavers. Bearing in mind at the time I thought there LITERALLY was a creamy beaver. Honestly. Square AND naive. Moreso.
The next christmas while staying with my aunty and uncle, my cousin decided it was time I let go of my sick love for Mariah (I so didn't draw pictures of her and then put them on my wall *cough*) and used my new love for a NZ band, Supergroove as a platform from which to PUSH ME INTO THE SEA OF ROCK N ROLL!
I was treated (subjected?) to about a week of intensive training, and while Megan tried to show me video after video of Pearl Jam, I was more interested in Supergroove. But there was something about that scruffy grumpy little man growling out those songs. Luckily, tough love was employed and Supergroove was temporarily banned. Over that holiday season we spent hours listening to the 3 albums Pearl Jam had out at the time, while Megan taught me what little she knew about their history and their names. She, and subsequently I had Stone and Jeff mixed up for the first few months of my obsession. Mainly because Jeff looked like a freak at the time and therefore was more likely to have the weird name.
It made sense to us.
Before I left she taped Ten for me. I listened to it on the car trip home, a few times. My new Mariah Carey Xmas cassette sat untouched and would continue to as I became swept up in the wonderful world of Pearl Jam. I loved every single song on that album, but one in particular struck me as being incredibly beautiful.
Obviously that song was Black. One of the first things I did when I was back at home was buy a copy of Ten, then a week later Vs. and Vitalogy. For a while I flirted with the belief that Rearviewmirror was my favourite song of all time, but Black still lurked in my head, Eddie's tortured pleas coaxing my love back towards it.
Cut to September 1995. September 9 to be exact. My 15th birthday and the night of the debut screening on NZ television of the unplugged show Pearl Jam did with MTV. I sat up through some lame Armande Assante movie as my finger twitched over the REC button on the remote.
A couple of songs in and my parents had left to go to sleep, entirely unmoved by that which had left me shaking and rocking almost nervously on the floor, the familiar guitar intro and then Ed's soft howl. I'd never in my entire life seen a performance of a song done with so much passion, intensity and honesty. Nearly suffocating through all the "Weeeeeee beloooong togeeeeetheeeer"s I was damn near tears by the end of the song. To this day I've not seen anything top that performance. Any band. Any song. Even through a TV screen, some 3 and a half years delayed.
Black saw me through my teenage years intact. It's made me cry, it's made me warm, it's made me sigh dreamily. It's the only song that has endured the test of time and I'm still as in love with it today and I was when I was 15. I've heard it through shitty car speakers, alone and in a group, a chorus of idiots screeching the DOO DOO DOO DOO DOO DOO DOOOOOOOOOOOOOO's. I've heard it curled up in my bed late at night with candles flickering (for ambience you understand). I've heard a million live versions of it on CD, video, DVD what-have-you. I've scrawled the lyrics on a hundred school books, desks, people's property. I've applied the line "I know someday you'll have a beautiful life, I know you'll be a star, in somebody else's sky but why can't it be in mine?" to several situations... well, once I figured out what it was he was singing. Pre-internet you see. I had to work these things out for myself.
All this and I've never seen it performed for my own eyes and ears.
So there we have LIFE GOAL # 37.
See Black live. Preferably by Pearl Jam.
Sappy! But that's how Black makes me feel. And now, back to the studio...