Losing My Religion

Pearl Jam is in town this week, and by in town I mean at the crappy Tweeter Center in Mansfield. Actually I take that back, it’s now the crappy Comcast center in Mansfield, I think Tweeter is all done. Not sure if they went out of business, but Comcast is kinda a big deal. If Comcast were a person it would have many leather-bound books and its den would smell of rich mahogany. But back to the point, Pearl Jam was in town, and similar to the last time they were in town, I’m not going. Why is this newsworthy? Because, in 1993 I was prepared to start my own cult, and that cult would be based solely on the teachings of one Edward Vedder, and his cronies in Pearl Jam. I have been known to make ridiculous claims, sometimes I say that Pearl Jam saved my life, on other more reasonable days I simply say that Pearl Jam changed my life and gave me one step closer to enlightenment. So why am I missing their tour for the second straight year? The short answer is, because I’m old. At 30, going to a Pearl Jam concert is no longer what it once was. I felt the pain, as did many of my friends, when they were going concert free and fighting Ticket Master. I even had their back, and I fought through the pain of not seeing them. I ended up seeing them in concert four times, and the God’s honest truth was that it was a very disappointing set of experiences. Not because Pearl Jam didn’t rock, because they definitely did, it was because I was surrounded by a bunch of drunken assholes. No one there truly appreciated the music, they were just there to get drunk with their asshole friends and then do stupid things like moshing or crowd surfing,. Then some girl would crowd surf and many of the drunken animals would try to cop a feel. Anyway, I’m now too old for that shit. Maybe I’m just not cut out for rock concerts, but Pearl Jam for a few years was my religion, it was what I identified with, and Pearl jam is still my favorite band. I bought Riot Act and Binaural the day they came out (those are what I refer to as the slim years) I have way too many of their bootlegs for it to be deemed appropriate, and some might refer to it as an obsession, and lastly I still can’t accept that Eddie didn’t win an Oscar for his songs from Into The Wild. I just know that at 30, music just can’t possibly mean as much to me as it did when I was fifteen. I will always appreciate that time in my life, but that time is no longer.