Day 1: "Vs." - Pearl Jam (1993)

It's important for me that you understand that despite the highly scientific "piles" method employed in organising the office room, there's no real rhyme or reason to the order the CDs appear on these piles, so its possible that there are going to be some, let's say, abrupt shifts in tone as we go from day to day.

However, in my mind, we're starting things off on a great footing.

listen to me here.

I can't remember the first time I heard Pearl Jam.  It's odd, because I have very specific remembrances of the first time I heard other bands that would become part of my angst-filled adolescence, but not for these guys.  It's possible that after buying Soundgarden, Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilot and Faith No More CDs all around the same time, a copy of Pearl Jam's "Ten" just spontaneously manifested in my music collection as a kind of sympathetic vibration of the universe.  Stranger still is that I don't actual own a copy of "Ten" on CD;  I'm fairly sure I must have had it on cassette tape, and despite owning (as will become apparent) multiple other Pearl Jam albums, I somehow never got around to buying "Ten" for my collection.  

What is certain is that I played it to death.  It got heavy rotation in my 1986 Morris Mini, my first car. I have a terrible habit of playing albums I like so frequently I end up sick of every track on there, and I'm pretty sure that their first album ended up eventually on a list of albums I'd actively avoid listening to.

I was 17 in 1993, when "Vs." was released.  Back in the days before the idea of internet pre-orders, my general method of keeping up with modern music releases was to spend Saturdays with my friends mooching around the town centre, playing role-playing games in the Chesterfield Town Library's 'Activity Room', and going to the music store on the edge of the market square, who's name it upsets me to learn I can no longer remember.  Regardless, before the days when someone would even think to open an HMV in our little town, this place was my musical lifeline.  Half the store would be devoted to the few electric guitars, basses and a small assortment of the kind of weird percussion instruments every small music store has to stock by law;  the other half was eight or so bins full of Vinyl (back before it was cool), half as many bins of CDs arranged in a loose alphabetical order, and three or four rotating cassette racks.   I remember, in later years, they added a small display of mini-discs.  Goodness me, what a terrible format that was.  Who on earth was going to buy all their albums again on tiny, easy to lose/break floppy discs just because Sony said it was a good idea?

I had a Discman.  I don't make a lot of good decisions.

Anyway, it was in this store that, one Saturday, I saw this CD close enough to the "P" section of the CD racks for me to notice it.  I remember wondering at the time whether it was an early album of theirs, because I'd never heard of it, and I'd been surprised to learn there was a Nirvana album before "Nevermind" only a couple of months before on a different shopping spree.  Regardless, I knew I had to have it.  I used some of the money from my bank account my parents had opened for me which I shouldn't have had access to, but had seen and memorised the account details for cash emergencies such as this (when there was something I wanted to buy) and went home with the CD in my backpack along with my RPG books, confident my parents wouldn't be able to pick out any distinction between the noise I listened to, and slightly different, newer noise.

I can't help but think about the position Pearl Jam must have been in recording this album.  "Ten" had been such a blockbuster hit, this was the definition of the Difficult Second Album.  But now, as I listen back to it as I write this post (I'm about half-way through Rearviewmirror right now), I think now, as I did then, that this might just be a better album than "Ten".  Maybe that's the Sick-To-Death List rearing it's ugly head again, but with the exception of "W.M.A", every track on here has that kind of energetic, kinetic drive to it that makes me feel like I'm coming out of the end of an argument about something that I care about.  It's a kind of combative excitement which has me rocking in my chair as I type this, desperate to find someone to tell them that they totally don't understand what it's like being a nineties teenager.  I want to listen to this again, whereas if I were to put on "Ten" now, I'd be like "yeah, Jeremy, whatever" and probably only pay attention when "Black" and "Garden" came on.

I loved this album back in 1993.  Sure, some of the themes of the songs might be a little obvious (I'm looking at you "Rats", though you get some credit for your weird shoutout to Micheal Jackson's "Ben" at the end which I didn't understand for years after),  but stuff like "Dissident" and "Glorified G" made me think about stuff like protesting, oppression, and gun control and at least made me ask myself if I even had an opinion about them (17 year old me thought guns were super-cool and that I wanted only someone to rise up against the oppression of my parents).

Having listened to it again.  I still love it.  I still think it might be the best Pearl Jam album, and not just because I can play a passable version of "Rearviewmirror" on my guitar if I kind of fudge my way around the hard parts.  I'd recommend anyone listen to this really, there's something on there for everyone.

Tomorrow's album might not get such a glowing review...