Songwriters: Dave Abbruzzese, Eddie Vedder
Original Release: Vs.
Year: 1993
Definitive Version: Dissident / Live in Atlanta, 1994
Ten years. That’s how long I
waited after Us for Peter Gabriel’s follow-up: The Long Walk Home, which is the
longest I’ve waited for one of my favorite artists who still was active to
follow up with new material. But I’ve never waited more impatiently for a new
album than Pearl Jam’s follow-up in 1993.
After I found Ten in 1992, I
went all in on anything that had Pearl Jam material—Singles, Sweet Relief. I
had to have everything I could get my hands on. In Flint, I didn’t have access
to bootlegs like I would in Columbus, but Scott got me a bootleg of a 1992 show
that sounded like it was recorded from a toilet stall down the hall, and I
played it to death. When Pearl Jam played at the 1993 MTV video awards, I
recorded their two-song set and immediately transferred the new song, Animal,
to every tape I was listening to at the gym.
Finally, the announcement
came of the new album to arrive in October, in a simple ad in Rolling Stone
that I cut out and tacked to my bulletin board at work. The ad just said Pearl
Jam, the new album, and it had a profile picture of a sheep peering through a
chain-link fence on a desolate, partly snow-covered field.
The day of the release, Oct.
19, I couldn’t wait to get up and run over to the record store. By now, Best
Buy had come to Flint, near to the Genesee Valley Mall, and that’s where I was
buying all of my music. (In those days, of course, Best Buy used CDs as a loss
leader and would charge, say, $7 for a CD that would cost you $15 at Recordland
at the mall.)
Everyone knew this release
was going to be big (as we all know it set a first-week sales record that wasn’t
broken for five years), and the marketing reflected that. Ads for the new Pearl
Jam album, now known as Vs., were all over the record section, and the album
had its own aisle end cap. There wasn’t a line, but the record aisles in the
huge store were pretty busy that day.
I grabbed pretty much the
first copy I came upon and noted with some disappointment that the picture on
the front of the CD wasn’t the same as in the ad. It still featured a sheep and
the desolate farmland, but now the sheep looked as though it was ready to bite
your head off. I liked the other shot better.
Oct. 19, 1993, was a doubly
big day, of course. It was also the day that Rush was releasing its new album,
Counterparts, and after my complete and total Rush renaissance of the early ’90s,
I had to have that one, too.
But there really was only
one album for me, and I drove straight home, did not pass go and did not
collect $200. I had to hear Vs. RIGHT … NOW … before I did anything else.
I still remember putting it
on my CD player and loving it from the first notes of this song, the opening
track, all the way through to the final notes of Indifference. At one point, I
called Scott and just left a message on his answering machine of a little Rearviewmirror
and saying simply, “I got it, and I love it!”
It was as close as I ever
came to being a total fangirl squealing over Tiger Beat, but I couldn’t help
it. I hadn’t encountered music that made me feel this alive since I came upon
The Who when I was 15. My only regret is that the sensation didn’t last longer
than it did.
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