Songwriters: Jim James, Tom Blankenship, Patrick Hallahan
Original Release: Z
Year: 2005
Definitive Version: None
When Laurie and I saw Pearl
Jam for the first time in May 2006, the warm-up act was My Morning Jacket.
Laurie knew them due to still listening to radio, but that was my first
exposure to the band. In fact, Laurie was almost as excited to see My Morning
Jacket as she was to see Pearl Jam. I didn’t understand that at the time, but
now … well, I don’t necessarily disagree.
The show was at the United
Center, and it was the first concert where I tried to buy tickets in three
years. Unfortunately, I had no luck with the tickets, even though I was
unemployed when they went on sale, so I could be online as soon as they were
available. Pearl Jam might not be as big as they used to be, but they’re still
a tough ticket. It could have been worse, I suppose: We were in the first row
of the upper bowl, which means we didn’t have anyone in front of us.
We met downtown before the
show and went to the Billy Goat Tavern—neither the original, nor the one under
Michigan Avenue that was made famous by SNL—for cheezborgers and cheeps.
My Morning Jacket was all
right. They had a nice psychedelic yet southern-fried feel to them, but the
thing that stood out about their show was their somewhat bizarre light show. It
wasn’t what they did as what they didn’t: Jim James, the main man, of course,
wasn’t illuminated.
It was something I’d never
experienced—the not only never had a spotlight on him, bet he also never had a
light of any kind. He looked like a faceless silhouette on stage. At the time,
James had a gigantic mane, and I started saying to Laurie, “Sasquatch, on lead
vocals.” After that, whenever we heard them on the radio, we took to calling
them My Morning Sasquatch.
But then a funny thing happened—I
started to like them. The reason was this song, or, more specifically, the
second half of this song. The first half, of course, is a pretty
straightforward rock song, but then it fades into a very ethereal jam totally
different from the first half. It soon got so whenever I heard this song on the
radio, I couldn’t wait to hear the second half of the song.
Yet … because radio does in
fact suck and it’s all about making money to the exclusion of all else, it was
a coin toss as to whether we’d hear the entire song on the radio or an edit
that faded just as it was about to get good. So it was really great when they’d
play the whole thing.
After awhile, I had to get
the album, Z, for this song, and I liked it pretty much all the way through. It
was interesting to me that—more than a year later—I had gotten into a band that
I had seen in concert but which made no real impression on me at the time other
than as a bit of a joke. Fortunately, I got another chance to see them again
(and I’ll see them a third time in a week), and ... they changed their lighting.
No more Sasquatch loose on
stage. Darn.
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