No. 727 – Dissident

Performer: Pearl Jam

Songwriters: Stone Gossard, Mike McCready, Jeff Ament, Eddie Vedder

Original Release: Vs.

Year: 1993

Definitive Version: Dissident: Live in Atlanta, 1994

Most dumb ideas seem like good ideas at the time. Of course, they almost always lead to good stories. Well, I don’t know how good this story is, but this was one of those ideas.

When Scott graduated from Ball State in 1994, he was eager to start climbing the corporate ladder at Kinko’s, for whom he’d worked since high school. At the time, he thought the proper path was through sales.

In the winter of that year that he got the word that he was being transferred to Louisville, Ky., away from his fiancée and from Muncie, where he had lived for the past four-plus years to get a sales job. When you’re just starting out, you do what you got to do, but Scott liked that he was returning to the scene of the epic Pearl jam show from that spring (when they did in fact play this song).

I drove over from Columbus to help with the move. Scott also got Shani’s brother, John, and one of John’s friends, Chris, to lend a hand. The plan was to load up the rental truck that Scott had and John’s pickup and caravan down, unload everything and then drive back to Muncie. The next day Scott would make another trip and then drive his car down and be done.

We got up early on a Saturday and loaded up as much as we could—and there was plenty left over for another trip with the U-Haul—but the weather on the drive down was a bit rainy and the odd snow flurry.

The drive ended up taking a little longer than the 2-plus hours that we planned, because we could drive the truck only so fast. But it was sunny when we got to Louisville, and we got everything unloaded quickly. I kind of wanted to knock around the area a little and grab some lunch, but John and Chris wanted to be home early.

We did take enough time to stop in a local record store. The store had the Dissident single import behind the counter, and I saw that the gatefold had space for three CDs. Some of you might know that Pearl Jam broadcast an entire concert from Atlanta in April of that year. Scott had made a tape and sent me a copy. I played that tape all summer.

Anyway, Pearl Jam sold that concert abroad in three CDs marked Dissident, parts, 1, 2 and 3. (The first part, of course, had the original version from Vs. And now this record store had the CD with part 1 and room for two more discs. I didn’t buy it then, but I made a mental note to do so in Columbus after all three discs had been released.

When we got back to Muncie, John and Chris split. It was about 5, and a genius idea occurred to me: You know, it’s still early, and most of the big stuff is gone. I got nothing to do. Want to make another run tonight when it’s both of us driving? Scott immediately bought in. We loaded up the truck with almost all of the rest of Scott’s stuff as quick as we could and headed off.

The weather, which had been spotty in the afternoon, was turning downright nasty now that it was nightfall. It was still blowing and flurrying in parts, but it also was getting a little slick on the highway. That slowed the drive to a crawl in some places, and by the time we arrived in Louisville, it was 9.

We arrived to find that the fish that Scott had put into a bucket for the drive down had all seemingly died. Scott had had this happen before, so he put them in separate buckets in hopes of just leaving them be and letting them chill out and revive by the next day. Scott was most upset about Roy G. Biv, the wonder fish who had survived just about everything but apparently couldn’t handle a move to Louisville.

So that made for a fun drive home—on an icy freeway in the middle of the night when we were entering hour No. 12 on the road in a single day. But we made it back successfully to Muncie, around 2 in the morning. Whose brilliant idea was it to make two freakin’ trips in a rental truck in one day?

I drove down with Scott once more the next day (and drove home from Louisville), and it was fine this time—bright and sunny. I noted with some satisfaction that Scott’s place was less than a mile from Churchill Downs, which of course is the home of the Kentucky Derby. From the state of one great race to another.

And Roy G. Biv even was swimming around again as though nothing had happened.