Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Ten

Many years ago, when I was just thirteen years of age, a friend of mine from Australia called me on the phone and we were catching up. The usual was on the table: when he was coming back to visit and what was new. He told me about a band I should listen to and whose album I should get. I had to make him repeat the band’s name a few times as I didn’t quite get it. Pearl. Jam. Pearl Jam.

It was 1991 and very few people had heard of them. In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, I may have been one of the very first people to have ever heard of them.

I took his advice and the next time I was at the shopping center, I walked into the local music chain store and looked around to see if I could even find this album. Perusing the cassettes (remember those?), I found it. It was reddish. It had scrunched up condensed type. And a pyramid made up of arms held upwards and joined. A unison of hope. It was called Ten.

I went home, unsure of what to expect. The song titles were short and vague. After years of listening to 80’s pop and my sister’s R&B (of which became mine too), I had only discovered one other band whose breakthrough album was released in the same year: The Red Hot Chili Peppers BloodSugarSexMagik, mostly because of a skate film called Thrashin’ starring a very young Josh Brolin. This wasn’t the same thing.

When you first put on Ten, you hear a melange of odd, slightly-eerie, hypnotic, almost Indian-esque music that segues into the searing guitar riff that opens Once. And then that growling low voice. And then the chorus where that voice opens up into a roar. That moment and the songs that followed after gave my life a direction. I can’t say that it changed my life since I’m not sure if there was anything to change just yet. But suddenly I identified with something, someone and some music.

Pearl Jam’s Ten was recently released as a set of four reissues in various packages. The various packages include some collector type material, most of which I have in various forms. One of the best inclusions is their MTV Unplugged performance, which is my favourite by far. I’ve owned bootlegs in various formats for years so it’s great to see that some others might see and hear it for the first time ever.

Jen and I were recently in San Francisco and on the flights to and fro, I gave the new Brendan O’ Brien mix the headphones treatment. “The band loved the original mix of Ten, but were also interested in what it would sound like if I were to deconstruct and remix it. The original Ten sound is what millions of people bought, dug and loved, so I was initially hesitant to mess around with that. After years of persistent nudging from the band, I was able to wrap my head around the idea of offering it as a companion piece to the original – giving a fresh take on it, a more direct sound.”

I have to agree. Gone is some of the reverb that gave the album an enhanced epicness that it may not have needed and the instruments are now all front and center, as if the band were playing in a small club with the best accoustics ever rather than in a stadium with good sound. The layers of some of the songs now punch through — background vocals, small little guitar noodles that you only heard previously if you spent as much time as I did with the headphones pressed into your head so you could get closer to the music. The music now just sounds more human.

I’m looking forward to Vs.