Your First Pearl Jam Recollection?

whispering hands

Hmm well I posted this once and it seemed to disturb peeps, but oh well. The first time I HEARD Pearl Jam I had a gun in my mouth and was trying to remind myself that I was supposed to pull the trigger in order for this suicide thing to work, when I heard the first few bars of Garden, ( no need to name an album fer that song :-) ). It was so solemn and haunting,,it reached right inside my wounded mind and somehow seemed the perfect sounding song to whch to end my life. Instead, I ended up waiting to hear the lyrics and what do ya know they just happened to make so much sense to me, that I started bawling. I was just SOBBING, so hard even that I chipped a tooth on the barrel of the gun. My younger sister came in and talked me out of the idea, I buried the gun in the back yard with the lyrics to Garden with an end note that read: " Only I have the power to end my own life, and after 15 years ( at that time I was 19, but remember my first suicide attempt was at 4 years old) with no success at dying,
I give up on dying. Now I am able to survive, for I have the safety of one whom seems to understand..possibly. To life..To Pearl Jam whom ever they turn out to be."

then God like oh just a few years ago when my brother got married, we ( older sis and I) flew out for his wedding and during the process of gettign drunk, my younger sis and I decided to drive the 45 minutes from Riverside area to hemet to our old house to see if the gun was still there. It was nolty.. they new owners had removed the tree AND the brick wall between which it was buried. We were too chicken-shit to knock and ask thouygh.. I always wonder what those people thought about that note..I wonder what they thought of our family...maybe they just assumed we were crack heads.. lol

Anyhow since that time, to this day I've only missed buying an album ON its release date, three times, it was Ten, Yeild and Binaural. I was nearly a year late buying Yeild, because I was living in an abandoned storage unit. So I clened a friend's house for the money and so I could buy food fer me dog. That album got me through a really tough year..awwww memories.. lol sorry fer me rant

CitizenRick

whispering hands wrote:

Hmm well I posted this once and it seemed to disturb peeps, but oh well. The first time I HEARD Pearl Jam I had a gun in my mouth and was trying to remind myself that I was supposed to pull the trigger in order for this suicide thing to work, when I heard the first few bars of Garden, ( no need to name an album fer that song :-) ). It was so solemn and haunting,,it reached right inside my wounded mind and somehow seemed the perfect sounding song to whch to end my life. Instead, I ended up waiting to hear the lyrics and what do ya know they just happened to make so much sense to me, that I started bawling. I was just SOBBING, so hard even that I chipped a tooth on the barrel of the gun. My younger sister came in and talked me out of the idea, I buried the gun in the back yard with the lyrics to Garden with an end note that read: " Only I have the power to end my own life, and after 15 years ( at that time I was 19, but remember my first suicide attempt was at 4 years old) with no success at dying,
I give up on dying. Now I am able to survive, for I have the safety of one whom seems to understand..possibly. To life..To Pearl Jam whom ever they turn out to be."

then God like oh just a few years ago when my brother got married, we ( older sis and I) flew out for his wedding and during the process of gettign drunk, my younger sis and I decided to drive the 45 minutes from Riverside area to hemet to our old house to see if the gun was still there. It was nolty.. they new owners had removed the tree AND the brick wall between which it was buried. We were too chicken-shit to knock and ask thouygh.. I always wonder what those people thought about that note..I wonder what they thought of our family...maybe they just assumed we were crack heads.. lol

Anyhow since that time, to this day I've only missed buying an album ON its release date, three times, it was Ten, Yeild and Binaural. I was nearly a year late buying Yeild, because I was living in an abandoned storage unit. So I clened a friend's house for the money and so I could buy food fer me dog. That album got me through a really tough year..awwww memories.. lol sorry fer me rant

Whoa! That's some heavy shit man!

Congrats on staying alive!

LikeAnOcean

Summer of '93.. my best friend forced me to listen to Ten.. Even flow caught my attention for the first time.. I'll never forget that moment.

svenstephy

Get_Right wrote:

Casual fan after ten
bigger fan after Vs
Vitalogy-wow this band kicks ass

Exactly!! I bought the jeremy single after i heard it on the radio...I was 9. My first "big" moment as a pj fan though was getting sent to the principal's office in 6th grade for disagreeing with a teacher on the meaning of Better Man. I'll never forget that

meme

My first recollection is looking at VS.'s CD cover, bought by my brother, in my living room in Milan.

Can you believe I didn't become a hard core fan until 11 years later?!

bettermanofthehour

In 91-92 we lived in the country. Nobody had cable, or satelite. So, we were behind the times a little. The only rock stations we got were 70's and 80's.. My best friend and I were really into bands like Zeppelin and Gn'R.

Anyway he got Ten. I'm not sure if it was a gift to him or what, but he hated it. So he gave it to me to see if I liked it. At this point I had never heard of Pearl Jam before. I put that CD in and I don't think it came out till VS. came out.

I remember I had that CD at home. In my car I had a tape deck. I think I went through four or five Ten cassettes.

Pearl Jam was the only band from the "grung" era that I ever really got into. To this day I hate Soundgarden. I do like a handfull of Nirvana songs. Plush was decent album, but I think that's because it reminded me of Pearl Jam's sound.

These days I still listen to Pearl Jam primarily. Plus other bands that I love because of Pearl Jam. ie Sleater-Kinney, Kings of Leon, Mother Love Bone, The Sonics, The Fastbacks, Green River, The Black Keys....the list goes on.

Sorry for babbling on and on there. I got caught up in the moment.

gozzo5058

1991, toronto in a friend of my bro in laws apartment, he had the ten cd, borrowed it...

HushBull

I'm sorta a youngin' amongst some of the other forum posters. But, my brother(6 years older) introduced me to them through our touching bedroom walls. Then, I began to actually seek out there music, I would take his cd's when he left the house...returning them eventually. This was after the Yield release. A year later Binaural was released and I had to have it the first day it came out. Within a years time, at the age of 13, Pearl Jam became my favorite band. Good memories!

deadnote

i found pearl jam in a ccircus magazzine article

they mentioned the doors and zepplin so i bought the album and thought that they did better than the legends

now pj are legends

great isstn it have a piece of pizza for me

Anon

It was early 1992 and our dining hall at my university had MTV on and there was Ed singing Alive...hooked right then and there!

LikeAnOpeningBandForTheSun

hearing Alive in my friend's room. hooked.

gobrowns19

svenstephy wrote:

Exactly!! I bought the jeremy single after i heard it on the radio...I was 9. My first "big" moment as a pj fan though was getting sent to the principal's office in 6th grade for disagreeing with a teacher on the meaning of Better Man. I'll never forget that

Lol, that's awesome! What were your different interpretations then?

bernmodi

Never cared much about grunge. A friend gave me a cassette with Nevermind on it and I kind of liked it, but not too much, and when I heard about a band Pearl Jam, I thought they were just another band from Seattle. Never really knew their music till Yield - my biggest musical thrill for the last 20 years.