My Own 20

My first serious interests in music took hold in the early 80’s. I had been raised on a mix of AM radio, which back then was Gordon Lightfoot, James Taylor, and Carol King. Throw in a mix of my mom’s album collection that consisted of Barbara Streisand, Elvis Presley, Willie Nelson, and ABBA. I had a small stack of 45’s that was made up of top 40 hits of the late 70’s and very early 80’s. My dad’s influence was mostly the old stuff from the 50’s, although he really never had a taste for Elvis. I remember watching my dad always being affected by the Blues and early Jazz as well. He liked rhythm. And in 1976, my parents took me to my first concert, Elvis himself. I don’t think my dad really wanted to be there, nor did I. But my mom was ecstatic, as were all the other screaming women in the Memorial Coliseum that night. All I remember of the evening was a tiny glitter dot moving back and forth and hearing loud music with the occasional, “uh huh huh huh… thank you very much.” And I don’t mean that with any hint of cliché.

By 1980, Judas Priest was on the rise. My brother was a rocker… Priest, Iron Maiden, Scorpions, Ted Nugent, etc. My oldest sister was into New Wave… B-52’s, Blondie, DEVO, Boomtown Rats, etc. One day my brother and I were at a record store with my mom. She told us we could each pick out an album. My brother grabbed AC/DC’s newest, Back in Black. I chose Chipmunk Punk. We went home and I quickly realized I had chosen poorly after first listen. Shortly after that I gave my brother Priest’s British Steel for his birthday. And that was the album that locked it all in for me. I would spend the next ten years fixated on Euro and L.A. Metal. I went to the shows. My brother took me to my first Metal show when Judas Priest toured for Screaming for Vengaence. I wore the T-shirts. I had shaggy-ish hair. I listened to Metal day in and day out. If you didn’t listen to Metal, you didn’t matter to me. And when I turned sixteen years old I received my first guitar, eventually mastering the power chord.

The first half of the 80’s was one of the highest points in the history of Rock for me. But… and I didn’t know this until many years later… the second half of the 80’s were nearly ridiculous. Flooded with coat tail bands, excessive hair, male models posing as rock stars, and just really bad music… Metal was dead… except… one brief hope… Guns ‘N Roses. GNR pumped a little bit of life back into a dying genre. I, by chance, had met them as they were my sister’s downstairs neighbors at her apartment in L.A. during March of 1986. I would have forgotten about them until, a few months later, I stumbled upon a cassette of their initial EP at the local record store where I spent my lunch hours during high school. I bought the tape and was bored by it pretty quick. But then about a year later they released the masterpiece. Appetite For Destruction brought a level of anger and aggression into Rock that had been forgotten. Metal had gone happy and pretty. We were getting to the point where the very music our parents despised was now being heard in car commercials. GNR gave us hope again. Our parents hated it and that was a good thing. But then GNR released the Use Your Illusion albums and my hopes quickly faded with their over production, pianos, and epic videos. And GNR vanished as quickly as they blew up my speakers.

My best friend at the time had left for college in Tacoma/Seattle right after high school. He was majoring in a music business program in Tacoma and began an internship at a recording studio in Seattle. He started dropping names of these unknown bands to me. His musical tastes changed. His guitar playing was changing. He discovered Jane’s Addiction and our mutual passion for Metal came to an end. I couldn’t grasp onto Jane’s yet. My mind wasn’t ready. I stayed at home for my first couple years of college. My thought process was still on hold.

One Christmas break he had come home. It was New Years Eve and he told me, “We need to go to Satyricon tonight. There’s a band playing I think you’ll love.” Satryicon was a Punk/Underground music club that was Portland’s equivalent to New York’s CBGB’s. I was afraid of it. My brother and youngest sister practically lived there. And at that time in their lives, that told me it was a drug den. I was brought up under the shelter of the suburbs. Yes, I went to Metal shows, but always at the Coliseum where the aisles were lined with security guards. I always felt safe… aside from the one night I saw Motley Crue open for Ozzy Osbourne. A much older drunk guy in front of me threw his beer on me without provocation, just because he could. He challenged me to fight. I was, maybe, 15 or 16. He was probably 21. Yeah, a real tough guy. I held my ground, and his friends calmed him down. That was the most danger I had ever encountered at a show.

I was very hesitant to accept this invitation to go to the Satyricon. I didn’t want to hang out in a smoky place with all those junkies. I asked him who the band was. “Nirvana. They’re a Seattle band. I think they could be huge some day. There’s a lot of buzz about them and they’re pretty popular in Seattle. I think you’ll like them.” At this point it was 1989. My friends’ tastes were different. He was submerged in the world of drugs. He was listening to things that weren’t on the radio or MTV. And I didn’t want to deal with the crowd I was afraid of at the Satyricon.

“No, let’s just go hang out somewhere.” My friend was clearly bummed out.

Not much later my friend kept dropping names like Mother Love Bone, Screaming Trees, Mudhoney, and Soundgarden. You need to remember… there was no Internet. I couldn’t look these bands up. I couldn’t go to iTunes or YouTube to check them out. But, these mysterious new band names kept coming my way by word of mouth. Every once in a while he would give me a cassette that was a tape of a tape of a tape of a demo by this band or that band. It was fuzzy and distorted. It wasn’t Punk. It wasn’t Metal. My ears didn’t comprehend what was going on.

I remember my sisters, at this point, having a conversation about the show they had gone to recently. They were now in love with a singer named Chris Cornell. And “he had the best voice” they had ever heard.

During this time, my brother had just put together a band with a group of his friends, all local Metal survivors. But they instinctually knew something new needed to happen. They all grew up on Metal and a slice of Punk. And they were all Portlanders. They weren’t quite tapped in to what was happening a three hour drive north. Yet, Six Feet Underground was formed. I had never heard anything like it. It sounded like the greatest aural assault ever assembled. The bass and drums could crush a tank. The guitars would terrify the strongest of men. And the voice absolutely destroyed anyone who had ever grabbed a microphone before him. Yet, this was short lived due to their own deficits in life. Had they stuck around, I am convinced this little essay would be more about them than what is to come.

Mother Love Bone. Mother Love Bone. Mother Love Bone.

This name kept coming from my friend’s mouth. One day I was reading an interview with Nikki Sixx in Circus or Hit Parader magazine. He was asked about the future of Rock and Roll. “Mother Love Bone,” was his answer. Hmm? Perhaps my friend was on to something. Sixx went on to describe this new incredible sound coming out of the northwest. And then one day I received word. Mother Love Bone was gone. Their singer, Andrew Wood, had just overdosed just days prior to the release of their debut release. But, I was encouraged to pick up their CD anyway. I did. And it didn’t leave my CD player for weeks.

At this point my Ratt and Dokken CD’s became completely irrelevant. I then had the thought that if this MLB CD was this good, what would a Jane’s Addiction CD have to offer. My thoughts on music began to change. I then scoured all the local music magazines for any information on this new tide of music. The word “Grunge” was building steam.

At this point I was now in Eugene, scooting my way through college. I had even more exposure to new bands due to the diverse pool of new friends who came from all over from all sorts of backgrounds. I was in the middle of the college music scene. I then read about a couple of the guys from MLB were putting something new together. They were called Mookie Blaylock. They were also working on a tribute to their friend, the deceased Andrew Wood.

I was walking home from class one day and passed a small tavern that had live music from time to time. I saw a flyer in the window. Mookie Blaylock was coming to play there the upcoming weekend. As soon as I got back to my house I began telling my friends and begging them to come and see this with me. “I have home work. I’m going out of town. I’m tired. There’s a party.” I got a solid vote of “No”. My own insecurities would not allow me to go by myself. The night of the show I sat in my house, sad and desperate. I knew something big was happening just blocks away and I was missing it. The next morning I woke up and the white brick wall across the street from me had been spray painted… “Mookie Blaylock”.

Shortly after that I caught a blurb in a magazine about Mookie who was now calling themselves Pearl Jam. They talked about the struggle of trying to get their name out there, so they would resort to spray painting it every where after they played shows. They also mentioned they would be going into the studio soon. I waited patiently.

Shortly after, my neighbor turned me on to Alice in Chains. I immediately called my Seattle friend and asked him about them. He told me they were a band that used to be poppy Hair Metal, but had changed their sound as things in Seattle were taking off. At this point my friend had worked with or met a lot of these bands as they had recorded demo stuff at the recording studio he worked at. He was also going to all the shows.

Then it happened. Pearl Jam released Ten. Just prior, the MLB/Wood tribute had been released by Temple of the Dog, a supergroup comprised of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden members… and our introduction to Eddie Vedder. I had been listening to Temple over and over, the same way I had devoured MLB’s Apple. But now was the time for Ten.

From there the whole Seattle sound had put the rest of my CD collection into a state of amnesia. Metal had become the Island of Forgotten Toys. I became very aware of the back and forth between Pearl Jam and Nirvana. It seemed you were either in one camp or the other. I was with Pearl Jam. I had all the Nirvana CD’s. I liked them. But I wasn’t connecting with them. There was a level of anger and dirt I wasn’t grasping. I didn’t feel like I would ever want to hang with Curt Cobain the way I thought I could be friends with the guys in Pearl Jam. I understood PJ’s songs better. They meant more to me. There was more depth in them for me.

I was having a conversation with my Seattle friend and I made the statement, “I think Pearl Jam is our generation’s Led Zeppelin.” This was our time.

“No.” He denied me my belief on this. “No, it will end. Just like everything good in music ends. They don’t have the depth of the classic stuff.”

I tried to argue back, but by this point he had become quite bitter in life and wouldn’t allow himself to enjoy things anymore. Everything was bad. “Oh,” I thought to myself. It’s that Seattle thing. All these bands sounded like. But for whatever reason, PJ had attached to my core. I understood their negativity, but I also sensed hope or promise in their songs. And their frustration seemed real. Nirvana didn’t seem to have any hope. It had too much of a sense of whining in it. And that irritated me. Most of these bands sounded very down, but the music was fantastic.

It seemed to become a struggle to see PJ live living in Portland. I eventually caught them opening up for Neil Young. They had lived up to everything I had thought and hoped about them.

At this time I followed their every move for the first three or four albums, but began to lose my understanding of them in their attempt to de-rock star themselves. I began to wonder if my friend was right. I figured the break up would be right around the corner.

Two decades later I just sat and watched the Pearl Jam Twenty documentary. I saw all that footage of the early days. I watched the evolution through the behind the scenes clips. And it hit me… I was right. While PJ conducted the deliberate struggle to avoid the limelight for years, they were still in control. A year or so ago they had released a new album that showed they could still put out a radio friendly hit, they were smiling, and they, now, all looked grown up. They survived. And everything they accomplished twenty years ago was still relevant. Pearl Jam were… are… my Led Zeppelin.

And then I was sad. I was all “grown up” in my 40’s. I felt sad for today’s kids, the college students. What did they have? Who was rocking their world? There was nothing. They would not have musical memories like this. Music right now is dead. It had been dead for some time. There was nothing new. Foo Fighters are big, but they have been around. While it’s great music, it’s not new or groundbreaking. There was no new big thing. Absolutely nothing to be excited about. Twenty years from now what flood of fantastic Rock and Roll memories will these kids have? Nickelback?