wmldswlxh's blog: "wmldswlxh"

I'm a collector. I'll keep anything and everything. I'll keep a record, a receipt, a photo, a magazine, a card, a phone number long since disconnected. Everything. It's a bit of a burden, as any collector knows. At some point, the boxes own you. Moving is a horrific experience. And actually trying to find something in these towers of boxes is always a futile endeavour. But there they sit, the boxes, and every once in a while this pack-rat mentality can be a little bit profound. Like today, randomly coming across a dusty container marked: "Pearl Jam – Stuff/90s." Saved for a rainy day. And here it is. Raining. The timing is interesting. We've been in the editing room for about a year, working on Pearl Jam Twenty, burberry outlet a film celebrating this truly great Seattle band's first 20 years. I thought we'd searched every corner and crevice, called in every random news report and interview, transferred every essential piece of Super 8 from the band's visual archive – and now I find more stuff. It's too late for it to make the movie, though. The box is filled with tapes and bootlegs and music and notebooks. Digging deeper, there's a carefully adorned aeroplane sickbag with these words on it, drawn in a sparkly pen: "From Eddie." In it is a tape of early demos. I remember this tape. We were making the 1992 movie Singles, about twentysomethings in grunge-era Seattle, and we'd given the band jobs in and around the movie. Jeff Ament, the bass player, worked in the art department, and I borrowed much of his stuff to decorate the apartments in the movie. Jeff had the greatest synthesis of art, sports and film on his walls: from David Lynch to obscure metal, from Kings X to the SuperSonics basketball team. That mix of all that was important artistically and soulfully had a big effect on the ethic that would spawn Pearl Jam. Art is everything, Jeff seemed to be saying with his life choices. Jeff's taste, and that of his musical cohort guitarist, Stone Gossard, was inspiring, and genre-bending. It was OK to like disco, hard rock, Kiss, Queen and the blues. It all came out in their music, in the dark promise of their early band, Green River. And look, here's a photo of the Seattle sky, late 1980s. A dark blue horizon speckled with bright northern stars – that's what the music sounded like then: indigo, flashy, melodramatic and fun. With a sky like that, it's hard not to look up. And it's hard not to feel it, even locked away in a garage, slashing through chords and looking for the right mix of influences. It doesn't always rain in Seattle, but certainly music from the northwest has its roots in players who stay indoors and play and listen and listen and play. A lot. Thus, the tradition of musicians who have the time to feel it and get it right. Even from the beginning, there was a generosity about Pearl Jam. Jeff, Stone, guitarist Mike McCready and, later, singer Eddie Vedder all had an openness to music and the world, and an almost superstitious attention to the details of how this band would be different. The band itself sprang from a miracle. Stone and Jeff had been playing with a local luminary, Andrew Wood, a singer and writer of monumental charisma and talent. When Wood died from a heroin overdose on the eve of his band Mother Love Bone's first big tour, the loss was beyond seismic. But when a demo tape for Stone and Jeff's next musical project went forth into the world and found its way to a young San Diego surfer who connected immediately, no one could believe lightning could strike again, much less that fast. Before long, the shy surfer Eddie was sitting among us, staring down behind a sheet of wavy brown hair, barely speaking but trying to fit in. And every once in a while, he would pull the hair out from in front of him, and look at us with those flashing, mischievous eyes and … you knew. This was a guy who shared the same high-stakes love of all that was possible. One night, sitting cross-legged at a friend's house listening to Neil Young tapes, Eddie told me how he'd discovered his biological dad was actually a family friend who'd passed away. It was almost a confession about where some of the finely etched anger in his songs was coming from. But mostly we talked about Pete Townshend of the Who. Besides the Who, then unchallenged as the greatest band in rock, we both loved the Rolling Stone journalism of Townshend. Townshend still is rock's most articulate spokesman, surely the best rock journalist of them all, because he wrote from the inside out. He wrote about a healing belief in the power of rock. There was nothing jaded about his relationship with music. His love of rock was almost religious, and so fervent that when the famous anarchist-politician Abbie Hoffman tried to grab a microphone and say a few words in the middle of the Who's performance at Woodstock, Townshend famously swatted him from the stage with his guitar.