January/February 2007

Reading
Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert Pirsig
Brooklyn Follies – Paul Auster
America – Franz Kafka
The Art of Stealing – Chris Brookmeyer
The Invention of Solitude – Paul Auster
Oracle Night – Paul Auster
Chis y Garabis – Paloma Bordons
Eats, Shoots and Leaves – Lynne Truss
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman – Ernest J. Gaines
Ghost Stories – Roald Dahl
The New Spaniards – John Hopper

Listening
Everything All the Time – Band of Horses
Irresistible Bliss – Soul Coughing
Kicking Television – Wilco
Dingly Dell – Lindisfarne
I’m Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass – Yo La Teng
Pearl Jam – Live at Benaroya Hall
The Shins – Wincing Away the Night
Norah Jones – Not Too Late
Modest Mouse – Good News for People Who Love Bad News (archives)

In order to properly tell why Live at Benaroya Hall by Pearl Jam was a significant find for me, I’ll need to go back a number of years and introduce a new character. Go back to the late fall or early winter of 1992. I had recently acquired my driver’s license and had gone to Relics Records (when it was originally run by Jerry and the other guy whose name is escaping me) with D Moore. After doing some browsing we met back together to share our finds. D had come up with a Black Sabbath bootleg with some old Ozzy tunes and I had uncovered a Pearl Jam bootleg called “Black” which was the MTV unplugged performance. For reasons at which I’ve long lost track, I willingly swapped the Pearl Jam bootleg for the Black Sabbath bootleg. I think my logic was something to do with the fact that Ozzy was no longer with Black Sabbath and Pearl Jam at this time was still a bunch of young pups, so naturally the Sabbath disc would be better. We went back to D’s house where we listened earnestly to our new purchases, while undoubtedly thumbing through his collection of horror comic books or perhaps discussing the logistical differences in musicianship between Hank Sherman of Mercyful Fate and Andy LaRocque of King Diamond, or something equally tantalizing. The Black Sabbath album had turned out to be crap; the sound quality was terrible. D’s Pearl Jam album however had proven to be the better buy. At that point in time I had been minimally interested in Pearl Jam. I had bought the Ten album as was required by all angst ridden, long haired, pimply young lads. It was listening to it in D’s bedroom stripped away of from the studio magic and hearing the band rage through “State of Love and Trust” and “Alive” acoustically that made me sit up and take notice. The clincher was that particular version of “Black”, which on Ten had been one of the songs that was too slow and I would skip through. There was something raw about the acoustic version that got to me.
I immediately took my leave of D and drove through the snow and sub-zero temperatures the 20 minutes back downtown to Relics Records. I tried to exchange my Black Sabbath record for another copy of the Pearl Jam bootleg. As it turned out that was the only copy that they had, but he would happily buy back the Sabbath disc for 1/5 of what I had paid for it.
That was 1992 and as silly as it seems I have been seeking a proper Pearl Jam acoustic disc since then. I had come across a few other bootlegs over the years, but they were bad quality. Now, fast forward to late winter 2007 in Valencia, Spain where a happy-go-lucky, long haired, no longer pimply faced, man-child is browsing the shelves of El Corte Ingles’s Musical Pyramid shop in Nuevo Centro. I was looking specifically for either Modest Mouse or The Shins’ new albums. On my way from the M’s to the S’s, I saw the bright yellow and orange album cover under Pearl Jam. It wasn’t the 7 disc that D had bought several years back. This was a double disc with 26 songs, recorded in October of 2003. While its version of the song “Black” may not be quite as ambitious and fresh as it had been in ’92, but the acoustic versions “Nothing As it Seems”, “Man of the Hour”, “Sleight of Hand”, “Fatal” included alongside covers of Victoria Williams’s “Crazy Mary”, Johnny Cash’s “25 Minutes to Go” and Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” more than makes up for it.