It took me seven years of marriage to figure out that my wife is a hardcore Pearl Jam fan. I knew she had some of their albums stashed in our iTunes library, but I didn’t realize she had all of them. I figured they were records from her youth, a band she no longer listened to, but I was wrong.
I heard Pearl Jam for the first time while I was in college in Southwest Virginia. A guy who was dating a woman I’d had a crush on played them for me at a party. He was a rich kid who belonged to a rich-kid fraternity and wore braided belts from J. Crew. ‘This band is going to be huuuuuge’ he told me, his forehead beaded with sweat. Cocaine may have been involved. The song was ‘Even Flow’ from Pearl Jam’s first album Ten. I liked my music raw and fast. Pearl Jam didn’t qualify. They were too ponderous. Too slow.
My wife Nuvia and I are ten years apart. She was just thirteen years old when she heard ‘Even Flow’ for the first time. She remembers it vividly. She was driving with her family in their Chevy van from Los Angeles to Tijuana to go to the family dentist where she would be fitted with a retainer. Then they’d drive on to Ensenada to visit her grandfather at his rancho in Valle de Guadalupe.
As the youngest, she got to sit in the passenger seat where she was in charge of the radio. While passing through San Diego she was able to pick up the local alternative station, 91X, which she felt was edgier than world-famous KROQ in LA. That’s when she heard ‘Even Flow’. They were driving through Camp Pendleton, the long undeveloped stretch of coast between San Onofre and Oceanside where the freeway runs alongside the Pacific Ocean, a place where you can imagine what California would be like without all the people in it, a place Eddie Vedder, who’d grown up in San Diego, knew well. The song, the swells, the van, the land – it all crystallized for her. While her friends were transitioning from Janet Jackson to New Kids on the Block, Nuvia decided that Pearl Jam was her favourite band.
When Pearl Jam released their new album Lightning Bolt last year, I surprised my wife with tickets to their show at Viejas Arena at San Diego State University.
It had been decades since I’d been to a concert in an arena and I wasn’t sure what to expect. To help get me up to speed on what Pearl Jam has been up to for the last twenty years, my wife went online, found the set list from a recent show in Hartford, Connecticut, and made a playlist on iTunes from her collection.
It was three hours long. (...)
At the kind of shows I like to go to, I’m usually one of the older people in the audience. This fact was driven home when I went to see Wavves in L.A. at the Echo on Sunset Boulevard a few weeks before the Pearl Jam concert. Wavves write bright, beachy pop punk songs with huge hooks and subversive lyrics that enamour teenagers and annoy parents. Naturally, it was an all-ages show, and as I made my way to the back of the line, I talked to Nuvia on my mobile phone, laughing about how young everyone looked. I was easily twice as old as the kids in line.
But then I did the math.
If I was fifteen when I went to see The Ramones thirty years ago, and if some of these kids were fifteen, and they most certainly were, I was now three times as old as they were.
If nostalgia is the sensation of one’s past and present unexpectedly connecting in a way that reinforces the notion that you are exactly where you need to be, what I was feeling was the complete opposite of that. This was not a pleasant connection. This was a gruesome collision, my memories scattered all over the place. I felt like a character in a science fiction movie under psychic attack – not from my future, but my past. These weren’t my people and this wasn’t my scene. I didn’t belong here. It wasn’t a matter of being cool enough – or was it? Was I that guy in the horror movie who refuses to get the message that it’s time to go? It would have been somewhat satisfying if the kids in the crowd judged me. If they looked at me and said to each other, Oh, shit, Dad is here, that would have been okay. But that wasn’t the case. These kids who bum-rushed the merch table for overpriced T-shirts before the show even started didn’t see me at all. I like to think it was because they were too busy looking at their phones, their faces lit up like cherubs, but I knew the truth: I was the ghost of their uncool future.
by Jim Ruland, Granta | Read more:
Image: via:
I heard Pearl Jam for the first time while I was in college in Southwest Virginia. A guy who was dating a woman I’d had a crush on played them for me at a party. He was a rich kid who belonged to a rich-kid fraternity and wore braided belts from J. Crew. ‘This band is going to be huuuuuge’ he told me, his forehead beaded with sweat. Cocaine may have been involved. The song was ‘Even Flow’ from Pearl Jam’s first album Ten. I liked my music raw and fast. Pearl Jam didn’t qualify. They were too ponderous. Too slow.My wife Nuvia and I are ten years apart. She was just thirteen years old when she heard ‘Even Flow’ for the first time. She remembers it vividly. She was driving with her family in their Chevy van from Los Angeles to Tijuana to go to the family dentist where she would be fitted with a retainer. Then they’d drive on to Ensenada to visit her grandfather at his rancho in Valle de Guadalupe.
As the youngest, she got to sit in the passenger seat where she was in charge of the radio. While passing through San Diego she was able to pick up the local alternative station, 91X, which she felt was edgier than world-famous KROQ in LA. That’s when she heard ‘Even Flow’. They were driving through Camp Pendleton, the long undeveloped stretch of coast between San Onofre and Oceanside where the freeway runs alongside the Pacific Ocean, a place where you can imagine what California would be like without all the people in it, a place Eddie Vedder, who’d grown up in San Diego, knew well. The song, the swells, the van, the land – it all crystallized for her. While her friends were transitioning from Janet Jackson to New Kids on the Block, Nuvia decided that Pearl Jam was her favourite band.
When Pearl Jam released their new album Lightning Bolt last year, I surprised my wife with tickets to their show at Viejas Arena at San Diego State University.
It had been decades since I’d been to a concert in an arena and I wasn’t sure what to expect. To help get me up to speed on what Pearl Jam has been up to for the last twenty years, my wife went online, found the set list from a recent show in Hartford, Connecticut, and made a playlist on iTunes from her collection.
It was three hours long. (...)
At the kind of shows I like to go to, I’m usually one of the older people in the audience. This fact was driven home when I went to see Wavves in L.A. at the Echo on Sunset Boulevard a few weeks before the Pearl Jam concert. Wavves write bright, beachy pop punk songs with huge hooks and subversive lyrics that enamour teenagers and annoy parents. Naturally, it was an all-ages show, and as I made my way to the back of the line, I talked to Nuvia on my mobile phone, laughing about how young everyone looked. I was easily twice as old as the kids in line.
But then I did the math.
If I was fifteen when I went to see The Ramones thirty years ago, and if some of these kids were fifteen, and they most certainly were, I was now three times as old as they were.
If nostalgia is the sensation of one’s past and present unexpectedly connecting in a way that reinforces the notion that you are exactly where you need to be, what I was feeling was the complete opposite of that. This was not a pleasant connection. This was a gruesome collision, my memories scattered all over the place. I felt like a character in a science fiction movie under psychic attack – not from my future, but my past. These weren’t my people and this wasn’t my scene. I didn’t belong here. It wasn’t a matter of being cool enough – or was it? Was I that guy in the horror movie who refuses to get the message that it’s time to go? It would have been somewhat satisfying if the kids in the crowd judged me. If they looked at me and said to each other, Oh, shit, Dad is here, that would have been okay. But that wasn’t the case. These kids who bum-rushed the merch table for overpriced T-shirts before the show even started didn’t see me at all. I like to think it was because they were too busy looking at their phones, their faces lit up like cherubs, but I knew the truth: I was the ghost of their uncool future.
by Jim Ruland, Granta | Read more:
Image: via:
