Day 20: "Vitalogy" - Pearl Jam (1994)
The more I write these, the more I come to realise that the way I associate music and memories doesn't always have a great deal of rationale behind it. When I saw this album was next on the list, I knew immediately what I would end up writing about for it, but when you get down to the point at which the memory and music intersect, I have to acknowledge that the connection here might seem a little arbitrary.
Listen to me here
This is a story about a girl.
My instinct in writing this is to be kind of vague about the identity of this person, but I can't really pin down the reason I am being so protective here. The story isn't particularly shameful, doesn't paint either of us in a bad light (I don't think), yet something about it makes me feel like outing them would be a mistake. Perhaps I'm afraid this blog post would somehow get back to them, and I'd get some message in the future telling me I read the entire thing wrong and I'm an idiot, which is entirely possible. Anyway, the story works outside of any external context, so I can feel comfortable in the choices I've made.
Let's call this girl Polly - because I've never known, and don't currently know a woman named Polly.
For reasons that make no logical sense, I have always associated the song "Satan's Bed" from this album with Polly. We've never discussed it, it has no special significance between us, and there's nothing in the lyrics or content of the song that relates to her particularly. It's possible there's some weird psycho-sexual association between her distant-but-desirable status in my mind at the time, and the fact the song opens with some whip-cracking noises? Anyway, I told you before it wasn't logical, so there you are.
I've mentioned before that in my younger days I ended up being something of a flirt. What I didn't mention is that I often did it with confidence to disguise the fact I had very little confidence about what to do if things became any more serious than that. Flirting was safe territory - I could do my best to be charming and make people laugh, secure in the knowledge that unless I was 100% sure I wouldn't get horribly rejected, it would never go further than that.
Polly was one of a group of young women that I knew; it was one of those social situations which crops up occasionally, especially in small towns, where this group of people I'd hang around with weren't always from what you'd call the same social circles; or at least, we didn't have the same approach to both our musical tastes or how our night out would end. Polly preferred to go dancing in trendy clubs; she was smart, and fashionable, worlds away from my down-at-heel goth-grunge look and enjoyment of spending evenings in dark, sweaty cellars thrashing around to loud music. In addition, I didn't really know her that well - we didn't hang around that often, so I often felt slightly intimidated around her. She was slightly inscrutable and mysterious, which made her a very safe flirting partner - she was, in my opinion, Out Of My League.
And that, I assumed was our relationship. We were casual more-than-acquaintances-but-less-than-friends, and we could flirt safely with each other because nothing would ever happen beyond that.
Except it did.
We were out together one night, as part of a larger group of people. We were celebrating something, and as a result, we'd ended up in the same late-night venue for the first time in what I remember was a long time. It was gone midnight, and we both ended up going up to the bar at the same time, around the corner from the group of friends we were with.
And while we were at the bar, for reasons that I can't fathom (though no doubt the drinks we'd both already consumed had an effect) she said something flirty at the bar, and I just kissed her. And then she kissed me back, and for 10 minutes, we stood off to the side of the bar, behind a pillar, trying to do our best to make 'passionate making out' an Olympic sport. Then we stopped, got our drinks, and went back to our friends. The party was already showing signs of winding up by the time we got back, so we drank our drinks as people drifted off, as she told her friends she would catch up with them to get a taxi as they went off to get chips from a local fourthmeal establishment.
We left the venue together, and she asked me to give her a piggyback ride up the street, which I did admirably considering my slightly inebriated and unsteady state. When I put her down, we kissed again, with renewed vigor, then she drew away and said goodbye, and went off to meet her friends.
Nothing ever happened after that between us. It was maybe a month or so after that night before I saw her again, and when we did, there was no acknowledgement of the events of the previous month by either side. Looking back now, I still don't know if that was meant to be the start of something between us, if my perception of her as this confident and assured young women meant I didn't realise she might be just as nervous as I was about making a move; or was it just what it was, a spur of the moment thing, where an unspoken barrier between us had been violated and now neither of us could speak of it again for fear that that comfortable distance between us might end up being replaced by something unfamiliar and terrifying, as we have to redefine the terms of our relationship with each other.
Was I supposed to say something? Am I the asshole in this scenario?
That's always a safe assumption to make about young me - that somehow I was too nervous and wrapped up in myself and missed my signals, my cue, my prompt to make the first move. But as I said before, is possible Polly remembers this differently, if she remembers it at all. She might feel completely differently about the whole encounter, and was secretly relieved when I didn't try to take it any further. It's hard to say - as stories about The One That Got Away go, this one is far too filled with uncertainty to attach any meaning to it. Sometimes, stories have complex moral outcomes, and reveal something greater about the characters involved, and sometimes, they're just a bunch of stuff that happened. I'm not smart enough or self aware enough to figure out which one this is.
I should probably talk about the album, I guess, as that is ostensibly what this blog is about (Is it? Is it really? Probably not). Vitalogy marks almost exactly the point at which I started falling out of love with Pearl Jam. I don't own the follow up "No Code", and own but have barely listened to "Yield" and "Binaural" Their first two albums made such an impression on me, it would be almost impossible for them to maintain that kind of trajectory in my mental musical pantheon. The album is fine, and actually contains some of my favourite Pearl Jam songs (Nothingman, Better Man, Corduroy) but had enough weird tracks on it (like the very, very out of place Bugs) for it to mark the beginning of the end of my love for the band.
It also has another of those CD cases from the time excellently described by my friend Ed on Twitter as "The Golden Era of Overdesigned CD Cases". I'm glad I had a memory associated with this album, otherwise this entire post might have just been me bemoaning the end of something that I once passionately loved.
