My junior year in high school, during the last week before Christmas break, I overheard some extraordinary news in history class: Pearl Jam and Nirvana were playing a show at Pier 48 in Seattle. The price of admission? Canned goods for a food drive.
After school, my girls and I anxiously drove straight to the waterfront in search of the action. Forget homework - or common sense. We had to get in to this show!
We waited outside in the cold for at least an hour or two, in a line that snaked alongside a derelict part of town. Each of us took turns running to a nearby mini-mart to buy some soup for the food drive.
There was no guarantee of admission - and so we hoped and prayed. At last the line shuffled inside. We eagerly handed off our cans and entered an old warehouse.
We were in!
At some point during the afternoon - I believe it was once we were inside, if memory serves - we learned that Pearl Jam wouldn't play after all. Singer Eddie Vedder was apparently ill. I, among others at the gig, speculated it a symptom of the rivalry between PJ and Nirvana. I surmised that somewhere, EdVed was lurking in the audience, watching the show go down, seeing if this guy Kurt Cobain was for real.
My evening was already ruined by this point. I couldn't give two craps about the other bands on the bill - The Breeders and and Cyprus Hill (even with PJ's Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament, and Dave Abbruzzese on one song) were not my thing. And, being a die hard PJ fan, I sided with them in any fictitious battle and sour-faced my way through Nirvana's set.
I thought they stunk.
Two weeks later, when MTV finally aired the Live and Loud concert on New Year's Eve 1993, I was stunned. The band - loose and terse on stage - were crisp. Buoyant, even. Was this the same show?
Maybe MTV's sound engineers scrambled to "fix" the recording before it aired. Maybe I'd been standing in a poor-acoustics section of the warehouse. Maybe my bad mood marred my impressions.
All I know is, now, looking back, I'm amazed and indebted that I was at this gig.
Only a few months later, in April 1994, Kurt would be found dead. I'd hear of his death in that same history classroom. This show was the last time I saw him -- living loud and live.
It probably was your mood...:\ I have so often found that when I go back to read a book I loved, I don't love it time two... Or the other way around (though it's more rare to read a book a second time if I didn't love it the first time, but sometimes someone double dares me...)But I've had this happen with bands too... fallen in love later, or the opposite. It's too bad you weren't in synch that night, though, just for the sake of your own memories... I have to say, Nirvana etc never really did it for me, even looking at this now I don't quite get it. Oh well. :) Thanks much for sharing this and letting me think about seminal concerts... I'm thinking about U2 at an Amnesty International show in a basketball arena in Denver, early 80s, before U2 was a headliner or a stadium show. I didn't even like them or think they were a big deal. I think they played somewhere in the middle of the set, just another of a lot of pretty cool bands. Changed a lot of things for a lot of people there that night.
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