Ten

Time to Break the Seal

Hi Son,

I’ve held off long enough on talking about my first love in music. Even though I am “breaking the seal” on talking about this band, I will still go back and talk about albums before this one. I’ve just been in a writer’s block (somewhat of a shout out to Eddie Vedder’s dilemma on Binaural) and need to put out something to help with my own sanity given the state of current events. It’s possible I will go down this road every time I run into a writer’s block to help reorient me. I’m going to go through the following events as they happened in real time in my life. I promise it will all come back together like a casserole I made from a recipe found on Hy-Vee’s website.

I grew up in Kansas City, but my first real love when it came to sports was at the beginning of the 1990s. Starting in third grade I would look at the TV listings (again we are 2 generations apart, so I really feel old) and see the channel WGN putting on a Chicago Bulls game. When I noticed it, I would say to myself “let’s watch some Michael Jordan.” It would be a big part of my life throughout my formative years, although I can admit I was more of a Jordan fan than I was a Bulls fan. One team I always thought was a threat to the Bulls was the Atlanta Hawks. I remember Dominque Wilkins, Kevin Willis, John Koncak and Spud Webb. Looking back, the Hawks were really never a threat to the Eastern Conference crown, but they always seemed to play Chicago tough. In the third season of my Bulls journey (which would be the third of a three-peat) there was a point guard that Atlanta traded for in the off season named Mookie Blaylock. Mookie would play in Atlanta for seven seasons and was a very good point guard after starting his pro career with the New Jersey Nets who drafted him in 1989. I always considered Mookie as one of the better point guards in the 1990s and also learned that he was an Oklahoma Sooner the year Danny Manning and the Miracles won the national championship in 1988. I watched a pretty good amount of his basketball career.

Also in 1993 was probably my favorite era of Saturday Night Live. Chris Farley, Kevin Nealon, Phil Hartman, Chris Rock, Julia Sweeney, Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, Tim Meadows, David Spade and Rob Schneider. Season 18 of SNL also featured a relatively new featured player who spent Season 16 as a writer for the show. That individual would be Adam Sandler. One of the guest segments on the Weekend Update (featuring Kevin Nealon) was a character that Sandler did named “Opera Man.” That was hands down one of my favorite characters the show ever had. During one of the Weekend Updates, Opera Man went into an Eddie Vedder-like voice doing a spoof off of the song “Evenflow.” I had heard of Pearl Jam at that time and vaguely remember hearing Evenflow, but this always stood out in my mind.

Fast forward to 2002. Yes, almost 10 years since I had knowingly listened to Pearl Jam. I was a junior in college and would play Yahoo’s! radio stream while in the dorm room. This was the point where I had been into rock primarily, unlike the 1990s and had a channel on that played Alternative 90s Rock. The song “Alive” came on. I noticed it was Pearl Jam and thought the song sounded great. I’ve probably heard the song growing up, but again not knowingly realized it was Pearl Jam. At this point in my life I was really only listening to 90s Alternative Rock on either a streaming radio service or downloaded mp3s off of Napster. So “Alive” was the only song I would listen to on a regular basis of theirs for about 6 months or so. After my junior year, I did a summer internship doing chemical synthesis under my undergraduate advisor. I worked with someone that I went to high school with, but he was a year older than me and I only knew him because we had worked at Hy-Vee together (another callback to Hy-Vee). Brian was into a lot of the same music I was, but he had been current with the Alternative genre during the 1990s and considered Pearl Jam to be his favorite band (also his brother and Dad shared the same distinction). The only time we would listen to Pearl Jam in the lab was when he played a Bootleg from a show he saw in Kansas City. What was interesting is he would always skip Evenflow. The same song that Opera Man spoofed and was easily one of their most popular, some would consider it to be the most popular (it’s been played live more than any other song in their catalog). This really peaked my curiosity. The only way I was accessing albums (in CD form) was having to buy them from a retailer brand new at about $15-20 a piece. It didn’t matter how old the album was, the price was always roughly the same. I was not making a lot of money making sandwiches at Mr. Goodcents (the internship didn’t pay at all), so I had to find a cheaper way to buy CDs. Well I found one, Ebay.

Ebay was a site where you could auction off items. For some you could take a bunch of used stuff you didn’t want and resell it here. That was my opportunity to buy music cheaper than going to a retailer. I would find Pearl Jam’s first album “Ten” on eBay for only $2-3 (before shipping cost) which was more than 50% off if I bought it new. So I got my copy, then put it into my Discman, which was connected to the tape deck in my 1995 Pontiac Grand Prix with the windows down and the Moon Roof open. Since I didn’t have a CD player installed in my car, I had to use this apparatus which plugged into the headphone jack of my Discman and then put the cassette tape on the other end into my tape deck. It’s crazy to think how many wires it required to convert older technology to newer technology back then. Here I am having a “back in my day” moment. Music nowadays requires zero wires to listen to.

So I blasted the beginning of the CD while driving around the small downtown of Maryville, MO. The opening is an instrumental called “Master/Slave” that is split into two parts at the very beginning and very end of the album. After this mellow “slow burn” of an opening the song “Once” just hits you in the face. Eddie then starts to growl “I’ll admit it. What’s to say?” and continues in this tone while increasing the tempo to his lyrics. Then “Evenflow” comes on, and this is literally the first time I can remember listening to this song front-to-end. The third track was “Alive.” I was pretty familiar with Alive at this point, but still felt a ton of energy when the song began. I could probably go track-by-track and take up another 3-4 paragraphs, but I’m going to hold back on this. The entire record is quite an experience. The other two songs that became popular in Mainstream were “Black” and “Jeremy.” Both I caught on with and know the lyrics to the entirety of each. The last track is “Release” which has become one of the most popular songs amongst the Pearl Jam fan community. The song, while is beautiful, has never grabbed me in the same way it has with many fans. I keep wondering if I’m missing something or if I haven’t had the same experiences other fans have had to make that song so personal. The same experiences either good or bad with your grandfather. I’m not sure if you will connect with this song relative to me, but time will tell.

So I’m going to come back full circle to the beginning of this post. Why in the hell did I go on-and-on about Mookie Blaylock? Their original name took the basketball player’s name. The members of the band itself are pretty big NBA fans. They would buy packs of basketball cards while recording Ten. Jeff Ament, their bassist, described it in a Deadspin article.

"When we were recording our first record, we had a per diem of about $10. So when we got lunch at the store across the street, we'd always buy a pack of basketball cards. When we turned in our tape, we didn't have a name for the band yet so we put a Mookie Blaylock card in the case. We were about to go on a tour and still didn't have a name and needed one quickly. We were told it didn't need to be the name that we were going to use forever, just something for the tour. Someone saw the Mookie Blaylock card and said, ‘How about Mookie Blaylock?' We decided to go with it and did a 10-show tour with Alice in Chains as Mookie Blaylock. Mookie was cool about it, too—he didn't sue us. I actually got to meet him later on and shoot around a little bit. We also made a Pearl Jam T-shirt with a picture of him on it. I guess we owe Mookie a lot."

Mookie would get wind of their adoption of his name and did not want them to use it. So one of the biggest band of the 1990s changed their name to Pearl Jam. However, they still found a way to work Mookie into their catalog. If you look back up above, the jersey number Mookie wore (he was in his second year with the Nets when the guys wanted to use his name) was 10. The album name was a call out to his jersey number. If you ever want to listen to this band, I will probably spin Ten for you on the record player. For any person who wants to immerse themselves in this band, I will always suggest Ten. You’ll find out in future posts that Ten is not my favorite album of theirs, but the nostalgia and intense popularity of the album for it’s time is something you have to appreciate before getting into the rest of their catalog.

Love,

Dad