Evenflow

The senses we as humans are blessed with are amazing... a smell, touch, sight, taste or sound can stay with us for days, weeks, years... hell, a lifetime even. We can catch that same sensory detail again years later & it can send us right back to where we were the first time it had us...

The other day, leaving work, got in the car and the radio started spitting out Pearl Jam's "Evenflow". For some reason I was sent hurtling back in time to the very first time I had heard that song. Now, I've probably heard this song 500 times (minimum) over the years & couldn't tell you what about this time kicked the memories into overdrive...

Summer 1991, working in a small packaging/processing warehouse near Downtown Los Angeles, CA... Usually, I'd be one of the poor souls standing at a bin of industrial knee pads pulling penny sized chunks out of the molded rubber to make the slots for the straps to slide into. There was no special tool to do this. Someone had used a pneumatic punch to make the imprints for the slots, but they needed actual human hands to make the holes. Just pinch between thumb & forefinger and pull. Repeat until fingers bleed & then switch to the other hand. When those fingers started bleeding... well, hopefully your shift was over before then. But not today... Today I found myself in a small room to the side stacking newsletters into an envelope stuffing machine. The hidden beauty of this was that being away from the main processing room the constant deafening drone of machinery was missing, and I could actually hear what was playing on the radio through my knock-off Walkman.

Being a teenage wanna be rocker in LA in the early '90s the station of choice was 100.3 FM "Pirate Radio". Sandwiched in between the customary AC/DC, Scorpions & Metallica came this raw guitar sliding into a primal riff like I had never heard (This was the album cut, not the live studio recording used in the video that started with Eddie's yell). Somewhere between the Jägermeister fueled blaze of Metallica & the pretty boy, hair rock ballads of the day was a groove that just plain rocked! The energy of the intro completely shut me down... I cupped my hands over the headphones trying to drive their foam covered, craptastic speakers into my ears so I could soak in every sound...What is this?!?!?!

Then Eddie started to sing... It hit me like someone's soul crawling up out of their mouth... Whatever he was talking about... he fucking meant every word! Sure, I couldn't understand more than one word at a time until the chorus, and even then all I got was "...like butterflies..." but this was passion, and it connected with me like nothing else ever had. Then came Mike McCready's guitar solo, and I was done... hooked... sign me up... 

Put Pearl Jam's "Ten" on my Desert Island Discs list right then & there.