I'm Still Alive: A Tribute to the Power of Music, the Healing Nature of Love, the Girl Who Never Broke My Heart, and the God Who Made it All Happen

The first time I heard Pearl Jam was on the last day of school before Christmas break, 1991. The most recent time I’ve listened to Pearl Jam was yesterday. Despite those sonic bookends being separated by thirty-five years, both times had the exact same impact on me — they literally made me pull over and just listen.

Way back in 1991 I had just gotten my drivers license — I was the first of my friends to get a license — and I was taking my lifelong friend and future college roommate Bryan Beets home. During homeroom that day he had been telling me about this band he was listening to and wanted me to hear. On the ride home he popped in the album “Ten” and it was already cued up to what would become their career launching song “Alive”. We hadn’t even made it out of the Giles County High School parking lot before I had to pull over and listen to this song — which we listened to a couple more times on the way to his house. I immediately had him make me a copy, which I proceeded to wear out until I bought the CD. The intro lick from the guitar in that song was like nothing I’d ever heard before, not to mention the sound, the lyrics, and once I saw the video on MTV, the look that Eddie Vedder had. I didn’t realize it at the moment, but a new musical sub-category was being born that would cause an about face in the music industry. 

Up to that point, the music I was into was what we now consider “hair metal” — think Poison, Bon Jovi, Skid Row — the stuff that got played at the skating rink on Friday nights. In sixth grade Bryan had introduced me to another band that won me over on first listen. Riding in the backseat of my parents car, he got my mom to pop in Guns N’ Roses “Appetite for Destruction”. The opening riff to “Sweet Child O’Mine” won me over on that day. In subsequent trips together, I can vividly remember us intentionally coughing very loudly whenever we knew a cuss word was coming up in the lyrics, naively thinking my mom wouldn’t hear it. Now, four years later, “hair metal” was struck dead by the lightning bolt arrival of “grunge”. 

Bands like Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Alice In Chains and Soundgarden didn’t just change the music industry, they changed the culture for millions of kids spread out over the “fly over” states of America’s heartland. By the time Summer ended — and my Junior year of high school began — gone were my Bugle Boy paints, Duckhead shorts, Ocean Pacific shirts and Dexter shoes. Now I was decked out in band t-shirts over long handle undershirts with a flannel shirt tied around the waist of my cargo shorts, with combat boots to finish off the look — ll of which had been salvaged from a “dig store” for just a couple of dollars. I had a new fashion, a new group of friends — all of whom were ‘skaters’ — and a new favorite band. 

I loved the band, the music, the sound, the look, the lyrics, the attitude, the vibe, but I especially loved the lead singer Eddie Vedder. Eddie had that distant and damaged, but dreamy air about him that teenager girls fawn over and I, well I had clothes that my mom picked out for me and a series of increasingly difficult to disguise neurological tics that got me labeled “nice” but not very datable. The more I read about this surfer from San Diego who moved to Seattle to become the lead singer of a band — that was at that time named ‘Mookie Blaylock” — the more I wanted to be like him. My bedroom was littered with posters of Eddie and the band  that I bought from Mark’s Imports in the Madison Square Mall in Huntsville. I would cut out pictures from Hit Parader magazine and try my best to copy every detail of his look. I loved that he was one of the biggest rock stars in the world and yet he acted like he couldn’t care less. He was chronically unimpressed by the whole fame thing. Eddie was the embodiment of cool that I could only dream of being, and yet, though we were so far apart in so many ways, when I listened to his lyrics it made me feel like we weren’t all that different. I rarely understood the meaning of his lyrics — often I couldn’t even understand them period (seriously, listen to Yellow Ledbetter and honestly tell me you know what he’s saying) — but the ones I did understand resonated with my heart like I was hearing an echo returning back to me.

When you are a teenager the volume of every emotion is turned up to eleven, and in my lonely, awkward, only child little world, mine were typically higher than that. Since I didn’t have siblings to referee normal vs weirdo behaviors, most of my emotional processing was derived from characters in movies that were typically melodramatic, melancholy, and always caricatures. My point, the following is quite cringeworthy to write about, but it’s just the operating system I had at that time. Until I was 16 years old I had never “broken up” with a girl — what can I say, I’m nothing if not loyal. Every girlfriend I ever had, every girl I ever dated, it always ended when they decided I wasn’t what they were looking for at the time. As a fifty year old man this is a source of cringe and comedy, but at fifteen it was a source of heartache, humiliation, and insecurity that sowed the seeds for feelings of inadequacy. What’s wrong with me, why doesn’t anyone want to be with me, were questions I felt like I wrestled with daily, so when Eddie Vedder agonizingly wailed, 

I'll wait up in the dark

For you to speak to me

I'll open up

Release me

I. Felt. Every. Word.

I was equally emotionally devastated the first time I heard him sing the slightly altered lyrics to their song ‘Black’ on MTV’s Unplugged. 

I know someday, you'll have a beautiful life

I know you'll be a star in somebody else's sky

But why, why, why can't it be

Oh, can't it be mine?

Maybe none hit closer to home than the lyrics to the song ‘Footsteps’, which was an unreleased B-side to their massive hit ‘Jeremy’.

I got scratches, all over my arms

One for each day, since I fell apart

I did...oh, what I had to do

 Those words felt familiar, which was especially powerful considering how cautiously I guarded the secret that I had started ‘cutting’ (a form of self harm where kids have difficulty tolerating emotional distress and try to escape from those feelings by focusing on their physical pain to reduces their psychological pain). I don’t know if that is what Eddie Vedder was referencing in this line, but it made me feel less like a weirdo loser to think maybe someone like him felt the way I felt.

Not everything in my teens years — to borrow a line from their song ‘Black’ — “had all been washed in black”. So many hilarious and memorable moments run parallel to Pearl Jam. There was the day that me, Brad Liddie, Rok, and I can’t remember who else, skipped school to drive to Nashville and wait in line at Tower Records on West End Avenue so we could purchase Pearl Jam’s second album ‘Vs’ the moment it was released. That day was the closest thing to a real life “Ferris Beuller’s Day Off” that I’ve ever experienced. There was the night when Brad, Rok and I snuck a large Sbarro’s pizza into the movie theater under our trench coat’s — the movie we were going to see….Singles, which featured music and performances of all our favorite Seattle based bands and had a cameo from Eddie Vedder. Then there was the night that Honey — the artist formerly known as my girlfriend Jade — and my best friend Jode and I, unplanned and unprompted, spontaneously burst into singing “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town” while on our way to a party at my cousin Greg’s house senior year.

And then there is my magnum opus, the pièce de résistance of my childhood, the year I pulled off what has to be the greatest parental persuasion since Ralphie Parker convinced his parents to get him an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle with a compass in the stock. Somehow I convinced my mother to let me skip school for a day and travel to Atlanta, Georgia with a car load of college girls — one of whom was my adored, cool, older ‘sister-cousin’ Denise — to see Pearl Jam as part of the Lollapalooza traveling festival. Today I am a 50 year old man who has spent time in a dozen countries, on primitive islands sleeping in grass huts in the Caribbean Sea, in a former Sandanistan compound in the mountains of Nicaragua, watched volcanoes erupt and spoken in front of audiences of thousands, and that experience when I was 16 is still one of the coolest days of my life. When I think about that trip I feel like Cameron Crowe in ‘Almost Famous’.

Back to the future — yesterday I relived that Winter day in the GCHS parking lot and realized — to borrow a line from Eddie Vedder — “everything has changed…absolutely nothings changed.” While driving to the little country church where I preach each week, I had to pull over and just listen as my Spotify shuffle landed on the Pearl Jam song “Future Days”.

If I ever were to lose you

I'd surely lose myself

Everything I have found dear

I've not found by myself

Try and sometimes you'll succeed

To make this man of me

All my stolen missing parts

I've no need for anymore

I believe

And I believe 'cause I can see

Our future days

Days of you and me

Back when I was feeling broken

I focused on a prayer

You came deep as any ocean

Did something out there hear?

All the complexities and games

No one wins, but somehow, they're still played

All the missing crooked hearts

They may die, but in us they live on

I believe

And I believe 'cause I can see

Our future days

Days of you and me

When hurricanes and cyclones raged

When wind turned dirt to dust

When floods they came or tides they raised

Ever closer became us

All the promises at sundown

I've meant them like the rest

All the demons used to come 'round

I'm grateful now they've left

So persistent in my ways

Hey angel, I am here to stay

No resistance, no alarms

Please, this is just too good to be gone

I believe

And I believe 'cause I can see

Our future days

Days of you and me

You and me

Days of you and me

In a moment I was reminded that the teenage boy with the perpetually broken heart, met a girl that treasured it and held it and healed it. I don’t think I could have ever convinced that boy that as powerful as all the pain could be, cannot compare to the all encompassing love this man lives in. As I listened to the song on a repeat a few times I came to another realization. This song could be a love song, or a worship song. I can sing along with Eddie and think of my life with my wife and I can sing along and think of my relationship with my God. Frankly, most days I can’t distinguish between how both have worked in concert to heal everything that was broken or wounded and leave overwhelming joy and gratitude in its place.

I used to think when you are a teenager — because of hormones changing and experiencing everything for the first time — all of your emotions are turned up to 11, but I’m beginning to realize that is equally true as you begin to exit mid-life; only this time it’s because your hormones are changing and you know you are beginning to experience many things for the last time. For years my boys have found humor in what we call “songs I cannot sing”. We refer to them like this because the lyrics are just too close and too real for me and I immediately get so choked up that my voice drowns in a sea of tears. Recently I’ve come to realize Pearl Jam’s song “Just Breathe” — which is equal parts loves song and praise song for me — is a song I simply cannot sing.

Yes I understand that every life must end, aw huh,..

As we sit alone, I know someday we must go, aw huh,..

I'm a lucky man to count on both hands

The ones I love,..

Some folks just have one,

Others they got none, aw huh,..

Stay with me,..

Let's just breathe.

Practiced are my sins,

Never gonna let me win, aw huh,..

Under everything, just another human being, aw huh,..

Yeah, I don't wanna hurt, there's so much in this world

To make me bleed.

Stay with me,..

You're all I see.

Did I say that I need you? 

Did I say that I want you? 

Oh, if I didn't now I'm a fool you see,..

No one knows this more than me.

As I come clean.

I wonder everyday 

As I look upon your face, aw huh,..

Everything you gave

And nothing you would take, aw huh,..

Nothing you would take,..

Everything you gave.

Did I say that I need you?

Oh, Did I say that I want you? 

Oh, if I didn't now I'm a fool you see,..

No one knows this more than me.

I come clean.

Nothing you would take,..

Everything you gave.

Hold me till I die,..

Meet you on the other side.

Although we’ve never met, Eddie Vedder and I sort of grew up together. In his 50’s, Eddie is still way cooler and better looking than I ever was, even in my teens, but he also just looks like a middle aged husband and dad like me, and his lyrics are still speaking to me with a beautiful, healing gratitude. Perhaps it’s only fitting that I end this with the closing lyrics to a song they recorded in my beloved New Orleans — ‘Tremor Christ’. Like so many of his lyrics, I have no idea what in the world this song is about, and I cannot figure out what ‘Tremor’ Christ symbolizes (perhaps a sometimes shaken faith that somehow endures), but it seems a perfect epilogue to our journey together.

Turns the bow back, tows and...drops the line...

Puts his faith in love and tremor Christ...