We do not celebrate Thanksgiving here in Australia. But today I thought I'd write a little something about being thankful anyway.
I saw Pearl Jam on the weekend and I think it kinda changed my life? Or at least the way I remember my life.
I am a man comfortably in my mid-40s, and over that time have been to countless live shows. That's not a boast, I'm just old, stuff like this racks up as you go. I once saw Japanese hardcore legends Numb play in front of 20 people in a sweaty basement. I was on a boat for an Electric Wizard set that was incredibly called the Boat Of Doom. Me and three buddies once went and saw desert rock legends Ten East at a pub in Annandale and we were the only four people there. I lined up early to get Latyrx tickets when they played in Canberra and ended up being the only person lining up early to get tickets.
The thing all those shows had in common, along with nearly every other show I've ever been to regardless of genre, is that they were current shows. Like, when I saw them, the bands or artists playing were relevant, in their prime, doing their best work in the moment. That's why they were touring, and that's why I was seeing them!
I can count the number of throwback shows--older bands playing the hits for their older fans--I've seen on one hand. I saw Faith No More 20 years after they broke up, and it was fun, I guess! I saw The Police play in 2008, which was also fun! I even saw Icehouse, my favourite band from when I was like six (in 1986) in 2019 (when I was 39) and they ruled. For the most part though, I tend to pass on these kinds of tours, because seeing 60 year-old guys hobbling around trying to play the hits from when they were 26 more often than not ends up being a bit sad.
So when Pearl Jam announced they were touring Australia for the first time in over a decade, I wasn't feeling it. I'd once been a big fan, sure, but that band hadn't been relevant to me in decades, and tickets were selling in the region of $250 each. We're in the middle of a cost of living crisis! My wife kept bugging me about it though, saying stuff like "it'll be fun" and "you used to love Pearl Jam", so eventually I said fuck it, whatever, let's go. We hadn't been to a show together in years, it'll be a nice weekend away.
You need to know that beyond going to this show, there was some personal closure to be had here. When I was a kid, Peal Jam played a single show in my home town of Canberra, right when I was very much a huge Pearl Jam fan. Ten was the first CD I ever bought, and I will champion their MTV Unplugged set until the day I die. I wanted to go so bad, but being a kid at the time, and with fairly conservative parents, I hadn't been allowed to. This was a bummer, but wasn't a huge deal either, because I sagely figured that being only 15 at the time I'd have plenty of time to go see them later as I got older. Nope!
They toured Australia again in 1998, but I was living in the UK at the time, and as I found myself growing out of my teenage years and my tastes began to broaden once I got to university (and using the internet), I started getting into music that was newer, heavier, more political, or faster. As an insecure and impressionable young man in his early 20s, it was very cool to be into Refused and Mastodon and The Bronx and High on Fire and Converge. The grungy stadium rock bands with their flannel shirts and the mopey songs from the 90s were disappearing into my (and music's) rear view mirror. It was old shit. I was living for the new shit.
It's not like I privately disowned them. There have always been Pearl Jam tracks in my favourite playlists, and I’ve kept all my old albums in my garage, but there's not a chance in hell you'd have ever caught me wearing a Pearl Jam shirt or blasting Pearl Jam at a party in the 21st century. I had grown into someone who was simply too cool for that. I was going to cool shows for cool bands in cool basements and cool pubs.
What a stupid fucking thing to care about! I lived so many of my best years treating band shirts like RPG armour, as though their obscurity or heaviness would bestow me with status upgrades, and by the late 2000's it would have taken a waterboarding for me to publicly admit I knew all the lyrics to every song on Vitalogy. You do a lot of dumb shit when you're young and trying to find your way, but few of my own transgressions are as regrettable as pinning so much of my identity on the music I was into and other people's expression of their love for theirs.
When I got to the show on Saturday night, I did so with an open mind. I'd loved this band 30 years ago, and now I was finally seeing them; this should be fun in the same way all those other throwback shows were! When the set started with “Garden” and “Why Go”, I was into it. By the time they were hitting “Even Flow” and “Tremor Christ” 30 minutes in I was singing along. Then they played a double of “Immortality” and “Rearviewmirror”, two of my favourite Pearl Jam songs, and I just...lost it. I was standing there, a grown-ass man, shouting the words (which I probably hadn't done aloud for decades, but which could be instantly retrieved from deep storage) but also tearing up. I didn't cry throughout, this was a rock show, not a sad movie, but yeah, there were moments during the two-hour set where I genuinely lost my shit.
Turns out there are lines, riffs and entire Pearl Jam songs that had been filed deep in my memory banks because they existed alongside key points from my childhood, and seeing them live dredged them all up--the songs and the moments--in quick succession. It was like my life was flashing before my eyes, but only the parts of it when I was an awkward teenager who listened to too much grunge. I'd turned up to this show expecting a throwback, but dear reader, it was I who had been thrown back, back into my teenage years and waist-deep into moments I hadn't thought about in decades.
I'd met my first girlfriend to “Better Man” as the final song at a school dance. We broke up a few months later, only days after I'd bought her a copy of Merkinball for her birthday (which I kept and still have, it's great). I'd been to basketball practice where we played these songs. I played “Porch” one day after I came home so stressed from exams I was crying in the shower. The best karaoke I've ever done was an acoustic rendition of “Indifference” in the dying light of a graduation party. I moved out of home and to England to work as a sports coach at a boarding school when I was only 17, way too young to be doing that, and proved it by only thinking to take one cassette for my Walkman: Pearl Jam's MTV Unplugged set, which I played so often I wore the tape out.
At seemingly every pivotal, formative and often embarrassing moment of my youth, moments my slightly older self had clearly tried to protect myself from (probably out of sheer embarrassment), this band had been there. And me being the stupid young asshole I was, I'd tried to bury it all, the moments and the music. Now, as a middle-aged man, here they were, in person, right in front of me. Playing those same songs live, in my face, sent all those memories crashing right back to the forefront of my consciousness whether I wanted them or not.
And what's more, Pearl Jam killed it. The show wasn't just nostalgic, it was incredible. Their age was utterly irrelevant. Eddie Vedder's soaring vocals could still climb into the heavens, Mike McReady shredded everything he touched and Matt Cameron casually spent the night reminding us all he's still one of the best drummers on the planet. This show took place in 2024 but aside from the haircuts and lack of scaffolding-climbing you could squint--and I was pretty far back, so this wasn't hard--and pretend it was 2004. What a privilege it was now to be able to feel this, all of this, to get this kind of reconciliation.
I've spent the week since the show not just endlessly listening to live Pearl Jam recordings (a fantastic 1994 set just landed on Spotify), but also swimming in all the memories this show dragged up and what they meant to me now that I was decades later in my life. It shouldn't have been legal for me to move overseas and do that job at that age, it messed me up! My first girlfriend had been filed away as a "sad" memory, but that wasn't right; she broke up with me over the phone, while I was in a phone booth, and I'd had to walk home for ten minutes in the rain like an extended Arrested Development bit. That was sad when I was 15, but it's fucking hilarious now.
It's no great revelation to say that music has these powers. We've all experienced something like this, waves of nostalgia and glimpses of our lost youths through the songs of those times, but this was something else. I'd never been hit with feelings as hard or as revelatory as I had on Saturday night. I went to a rock show and ended up revisiting the entire 1990s, and even parts of the decade to follow. In that time I'd been an idiot, an asshole, a child and a young man, and it was wild revisiting the rawness of those years, having them thrust upon me by a band I thought I'd moved on from, but clearly never had.
Hopefully we--Pearl Jam, my memories, my regrets and my indiscretions--are all cool now, and we can all get along for the rest of my life without so much pointless baggage and drama.
