Backspacer... Backtracing Mental Landscape with Pearl Jam

Rewind....

So, I’m listening to Pearl Jam's Vitalogy. I remember buying this album right around my birthday—on cassette. I remember so vividly. I loved (and still do) this album and defended it from its many critics. I believed (and still do) that it was a critical album in the career of Pearl Jam. It was December of 1994. I turned 23 that year. I was living in Santa Cruz and going to night school at Cabrillo Community College. I remember listening to the tape as I walked home from school. Just like the early Ani albums, Pearl Jam’s albums take me back to that time. Those years in Santa Cruz… I keep going back there with my music. There is a strong link between that time and what I’m feeling now.

“Don’t mean to push…but I’m being shoved!
I’m just like you, think we’ve had enough…

“I don’t believe a thing they want us to…
Oh, we all got our scars, they should have ‘em too...”
--“Whipping"

Except Pearl Jam takes me a bit further back. I started listening to them on the cusp of one of my first shifts in consciousness as a young adult. It was a big shift that can be told through the music I listened to during that time. I was a huge fan of heavy metal—cock rock—until right around 1990-1991. Bon Jovi, Motley Crue, Skid Row, Guns ‘n’ Roses…. Hair bands. But it took my fortuitous exposure to Mother Love Bone and Soundgarden to start to make me hear new things at a time when I was needing new answers to questions I had been asking my whole life. Soon after, Nirvana and Pearl Jam would make a tiny splash that would quickly make intense waves and undercurrents in my life—and in music.

Music is more than entertainment for me. It is a marker in my intellectual, emotional, and spiritual journeys. As a young child, my parents were huge music fans. They have a great album collection that provided me with eclectic tastes. Everything from Bob Dylan to Led Zepplin to War to Fleetwood Mac to Cream. Yet, as I grew up, music in my house generated intense anxiety and fear for me. When my dad cranked the music at home, it was nearly always followed by drunken violence of some sort. It would set a mood that would always start with frenetic fun and would eventually end in frenetic, chaotic, brutality. So, I tried to counter that by making my music an ordered part of my imagination. To fade out the bad stuff in the house. Like books, I would use music to construct my own little world, apart from my parents, my sister—everybody. It was my world and I would create it the way I wanted to. Music has the capacity to carry darkness and lightness within a single chord progression or chorus. It carries emotion in ways that words alone cannot. It gives me the space to contemplate the world in which I live. And at the time, it gave me the space to hide from the parts of the world that terrified and controlled me.

At age 16, I read No One Here Gets Out Alive, a biography of Jim Morrison and The Doors. I read it after I found out that I shared my birthday with Jim Morrison and that he died the year I was born. I convinced myself that it was fate. I became obsessed with Jim Morrison. I listened to all of his music with The Doors and read all the poetry he wrote. I read the authors who influenced him: Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley. I tried to revisit the places that influenced him when he was a young man living in the Bay Area. It was like I was trying to find my life in his.

From there, I detoured off into cock rock. It was heavy, loud, and nothing like anything my friends at school listened to. That was important. My friends were listening to Fine Young Cannibals and INXS. At the time, I think it was my way of revolting against the upper middle-class clicks I often belonged to…marginally. It was the way I asserted my identity as a girl from a poor working class family. I did like some of the bands my school friends liked, but I fell under the spell of big hair, spandex, heavy guitars, and pyrotechnics. I didn’t want the life that some of my friends were moving toward in their AP classes and drama club plays and parties. I dreamed of being the girlfriend of Jon Bon Jovi and Nikki Sixx. I knitted fairy tale yarns in my head that constructed these men as sensitive artists who would talk all night with me about music, books, and the meaning of life. My own talents would bloom in their presence and I would become an amazing songwriter and author. I would not be their muse; I would be their co-creator of music and art. We would be artistic power couples. I was so naïve. I blinded myself to the reality of who these men were/are and the ways in which they treated women.

[The CD changer just moved to Pearl Jam’s first album. Perfect timing.]

It was as I was waking from that cock rock dream that I tripped over Mother Love Bone and some other predecessors of grunge. It was a happy accident that I ran into these bands. I was working at one of my earliest dead end jobs right after high school—clerk at The Warehouse [a record store for those who may be too young to know]. And I stocked music and interacted with music geeks. It was my first step into the labyrinth of music freaks and geeks. But most importantly, it led to my early discovery of Pearl Jam. I think I liked the fact that they were still rockin’, but there was a different vibe to them. Their music meant something real at a time when I could no longer dream past the sheen of hair bands’ spandex tights. Pearl Jam’s lyrics addressed emotions I could identify with. The days in which I contorted myself into songs such as “She Goes Down” and “Lay Your Hands on Me” were gone.

I wasn’t just waking up from my fantasy about heavy metal musicians; I was waking up to my own life and the numerous disconnects between me and the life I wanted to live. I guess it makes sense. Eighteen or so years old and you start to realize that this is now your life—not your parents’, not your friends’. It was my life. Don’t get me wrong. I straddled between my grunge love and heavy metal fantasies for quite some time, but within a year or so after I first heard Pearl Jam’s album—I believe I first heard it the spring of 1991—I would disown my association with heavy metal. I would throw away the cassettes, hide all my concert t-shirts, and recreate myself.

When I hear songs from that first Pearl Jam album, I’m immediately transported to my black Jeep Wrangler. With the top off, that Jeep took me many places. It took me to beaches all along the California coast. Half Moon Bay, San Gregorio Beach, Santa Cruz, Pismo Beach. It was during that summer of 1991 that I started to see myself living near the ocean, getting out of Redwood City.

For me all of those songs represented freedom. It represented another layer peeling off of my skin and psyche. I could take deep clear breaths in that music. I could see miles beyond my windshield in that music. The world didn’t look so blurry and two-dimensional. I didn’t feel trapped.

“Maybe someday
another child
won’t feel as alone as she does…

“She seems to be stronger
but what they want her to be is weak…

"She could just pretend
She could play the game
She could be another clone
Why go home?”
--"Why Go"

I often think that Pearl Jam’s first album tells the story of my transitions between high school and working and then working and deciding to go to college. It helps me tell the story of a person who had to take a detour through some unexcavated mental landscape. I had to pull off the scabs of my childhood and let the wounds bleed. Just bleed without trying to stop the flow. Only then could the dirt wash out of those wounds, giving them a real chance to heal. Those years were raw. I was convinced I had it together. I had a good paying job, a new Jeep Wrangler, and other stuff. I also had a small mound of debt to show for my efforts. Material things weren’t helping me. During that period, I learned that I didn’t have anything I really wanted. In fact, I had a bunch of junk that meant nothing to me. Absolutely nothing. All it did was tie me down to a place I didn’t belong.

So, I had a small mental breakdown and then moved to Santa Cruz. I sold my Wrangler. I quit my job and enrolled in junior college. I got a temp job, filed bankruptcy, and started walking and/or riding my bike everywhere. In other words, I took the leap. I followed my gut. The first temp job I had turned into a permanent job. A job I would have until I moved to Seattle. I was incredibly lucky. I never had money, because rent was expensive. But I was going to school and I found a place that I fit into. I’d be lying if I said it all just came together. As with most things in my life, transitions are jagged. I struggled. But I felt like I was struggling for the right things, which is what made me feel I made the right decision to let go of the things that bogged me down.

**********
It was as I was listening to Vitalogy that December in 1994 that I was still trying to figure many things out. But I felt unattached to anything. Free to make decisions. That I had control over my own life. But, obviously, I had much more to learn. The process of letting go of one location and jumping into a new one in search for something better is still with me. Fleeing as a (fleeting) form of freedom. I did it in 1991 and again in 1996 and again in 1999 and again in 2005; the pattern starts to be its own prison. It’s not the way to find true freedom. I’m still learning that lesson.

Fast Forward.... Backspacer

“Practiced are my sins,
never gonna let me win
under everything, just another human being
Yeh, I don’t wanna hurt, there’s so much in this world
To make me bleed”
--"Just Breathe"

So now the cd player shifts to Pearl Jam’s newest album, Backspacer. I am looking at my lifetime through the long career of a band that has been sewn into most of my adult memories. My adult mistakes. My adult triumphs. The theme of the album is love. Not romantic love, as I dreamed about in those imaginary conversations with rockers, but that deeper love that comes from a life that learns running away or retaliating with unbridled anger is not always an effective way to evoke change and hope in the world. It is a love that takes practice. But I still fail at it. I still scream and scratch and claw to get out of a system that is unfair. That hurts. I still have that uncontrollable urge to run. That animalistic fight or flight reaction is still deeply ground inside of me. But it is through the practice of this other kind of love that I have learned to stay present through that initial reaction to high tail it out of dodge. It is not a passive staying that means you just lay down and take it or bend to the powers that be. Instead, it is an active stillness—like a yoga asana—that enables you to work through the desire to give up and run. It makes you stay in order to think about what fine tuning can be done to change your relationship to the situation—and then change the situation. Diffuse it. It means letting go of that rawness that was so much a part of my life when I put that first Pearl Jam tape in my cassette player. It feels more like the passionate echoes I hear in Backspacer.

“When somethings dark
lemme shed a little light on it

“When somethings cold
Lemme put a little fire on it…

“When somethings gone
I wanna fight to get it back again

“When somethings broke
I wanna put a bit of fixing on it…

“When somethings low
I wanna put a little high on it

“When somethings lost
I wanna fight to get it back again…

“If there’s no love
I wanna try to get it back again”

--"The Fixer"