I hereby declare a new mcgees.org tradition.  It’s Tuesday night.  So, you’ve gone and had your cheap tacos, your cheap beer, your free Redbox new release, whatever discounted Tuesday thing you have going.  You come home to settle in at your email, your Twitter account, or this very site.  And I’ll post the lyrics to a song by Mr. Ed, or Eddie, or Edward, or “Jerome Turner” Vedder, very famous frontman of Pearl Jam.  It will be a song that you may have heard, but probably never understood the lyrics to, because the best rock lyricist since Dylan sounds like he’s singing underwater most of the time.

OK, so, how do I know what he’s saying?  Yeah, good question.  Once in a while we are graced with lyrics in liner notes.  Otherwise, aggregates of other peoples’ guesses help.  Wikia brings the collective power of wikitude to the task.  Lots of live recordings with him emphasizing different words helps.  But his lyrics change over time, sometimes have simultaneous variants, and, in one dramatic case, (probably) different lyrics every time, and (possibly) Ed himself doesn’t know what he’s saying (an attempt at that transcription will never show up on this program.)  Then there is what I want him to be saying.  So, sometimes I’ll be wrong, and, if this is a successful series, sometimes you will be right, and maybe we can get spirited exegetical discussions going (I refer you — vaguely — to a throwaway line in Infinite Jest involving parents, parsing, Pearl Jam, and R.E.M..  Help, Dave?)

Criterion for selection?  Probably “what’s been playing in my head”.  I’m not front-loading this series; it gets decidedly better than this.

You with me?  Here we go.

I Got Shit

My lips are shaking, my nails are bit off
Been a month since I’ve heard myself talk
All the advances this life’s got on me:
Picture a cup in the middle of the sea

And I fight back in my mind
Never lets me be right
I got memories, I got shit
So much it don’t show

I walked the line
When you held me in that night
I walked the line
When you held my hand that night

An empty shell seems so easy to crack
Got all these questions, don’t know who I could even ask
So I’ll just lie alone and wait for the dream
Where I’m not ugly and you’re looking at me

And I’ll stay in bed
Oh, [???]
If just once, I could feel loved!
Oh, stare back at me!

I walked the line
When you held me in that night
I walked the line
When you held my hand that night
I walked the line
When you held me close that night
I paid the price; never held you in real life

The [???] may have the words “could’ve seen” in it.  Maybe a “you” towards the beginning.  He may be wishing that the other had seen something.  But I’ll stop now, because discussion belongs inside.

(I’m fucking around with Roman numerals — I’m going to be changing the “I” in the title to Unicode after the new post alerts get propagated — and I would be very interested to hear how the “I” in the title looks to you.)

All Vedder Tuesday episodes

Funny enough for a FPP, maybe:

I berated Ed Vedder for not using the subjunctive in the song Wishlist.  But every time I get self-righteous about the decline of the subjunctive mood, I consider these two sentences:

I see someone drowning and shout “He will die and no one shall save him!”

I am drowning and shout “I will die and no one shall save me!”

The former means “It is inevitable that he will die, and I am therefore distraught.”  The latter means “I insist that you allow me to die!”  And when you start to explain why the fuck that is, you start composing sentences like “Would and should are used in the same way as other preterite modal verbs in the apodosis clause when the conditional mood is being used”, and then it becomes a contest to see who should hit you with a brick, and who will.

I’m pretty sure the A/C adapter on my laptop is going bye-bye, and in an effort to not have it take my laptop with it, I’ve unplugged it.  My mom lent me a Mac which is simply awesome and is making me think of giving up Ubuntu.

Oh, wait, I think I meant kinda like a plastic toy with fewer keyboard shortcuts, but, still, THANKS MOM!

Diss diss diss Mac Mac Mac.  I know, I know.  Here it is in two sentences: “Everything the designers thought you should do is trivially easy.  Everything they didn’t want you to do is completely fucking impossible.”  If it’s a choice between “makes the easy stuff easy, the hard stuff impossible, and everything uniformly pretty” and “makes the easy stuff possible, the hard stuff possible, and every UI look like a different mongrel dog”, please sign me up for the latter.  Except — most of the easy stuff is easy now in Ubuntu, and it’s getting more handsome.

Anyway — I may not respond quickly to your attempts at contact.  But I love you anyway.  Some of you.  You know who you are.

Niall was asked about cabbages, and what they were.  Niall responded: “They are green vegetables that my Daddy likes to make jokes about.”

And I do.  It’s after Hofstadter: “This sentence contains cabbage six words”, from, I think, Metamagical Themas.  In college, where bizarre sentences abound, I would say, “Wow, that’s random.”  “Cabbage” became a superlative: “Wow, that’s cabbage-random.”

So I joke about cruciferous vegetables.  But I don’t, like, eat them as my sole dietary staple.  So where the fuck does this sulfur come from?

I was warned before I got a trailer that “my toilet would stink”.  But not until the temperature topped 90° (Centigrade, seemingly) and I left a septic tank to ferment, did I really understand that comment.  Unholy shit.  What the hell?  Where is all this sulfur coming from?  I am trying to think of how to snip-and-bind this sulfur, but I’m really lousy at stoichiometry, and there are probably “Enzyme tablets” or “Chemical toilet additives” or some such that a Google search will easily turn up.  But I wanted to post first, because Vedder was right.  Wanna join the club?

Ed Vedder’s soundtrack for the film Into the Wild is very, very good, and entirely worth buying even if only for the song Long Nights.

I thought Eddie Vedder was born in 1963.  That would mean that I was coming right upon the day where I would be the same age as he when Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten was released.  Turns out, I misremembered.  He was born in 1964.  That means I reached this age last year.  In fact, I’m older than all the artists on Ten were when it was released.  So, everyone who knows me, realize that all that accomplishment on Ten was by people younger than me.  Impressive.

If that’s not humbling enough, think about the fact that Robert Plant was just twenty years old when Led Zeppelin’s first album was released.

(Look at those low used prices below!  No, I don’t get a kickback when you buy used merch from Amazon.  Just, seriously, if you don’t own the CDs, shell out the seven dollars it would cost to pick them both up.)

Holy [something].  Or whatever the secular equivalent of holy is.  Majestic [something].

It’s not their Led Zeppelin IV — not an album for which each song could, individually, be coupled with fifty minutes of filler and still be historic — but it is amazing.  Yes, I’m saying this as a rabid PJ fan, but you might want to take my word this time anyway.

The single, World Wide Suicide, the mind-blowing Marker in the Sand, and Gone could each carry an album.  Severed Hand could carry a boxed set.  World Wide Suicide, Gone, and Severed Hand could top modern rock charts, and Marker in the Sand could top album rock charts.  Come Back may even be sadder than Thumbing My Way from Riot Act.  I was sobbing, and had to go wake up my wife, and it’s going to be a long time before I can listen to it without crying.  Big Wave is a wonderful, passionate Darwinian surfing song.

Unemployable and Army Reserve are both striking character portraits.  One wonders if Life Wasted is written to the same person as their previous works Save You and All Those Yesterdays, or if Ed has more than his fair share of self-destructive friends (either way, he, she, or they have my best wishes.)  Inside Job is a masterful, sprawling close to the album, and the band are unfathomably gracious, emotionally, not to make us end on Gone or Come Back, which they easily could have done.

The number of stylistic touches in Ed’s voice on the album, the range of musical influences inspiring the songs, the tightly woven unity of the different composers’ works — man, I’m rambling.  I cannot honestly say, “Even if you’ve never liked a Pearl Jam album, check this out.”  But I can certainly say, “If you’ve ever liked a Pearl Jam album, get it as soon as possible.”

And, as always, try to listen on good studio monitor headphones the first time.

If I don’t lose control
Explore and not explode
A preternatural other plane
With the power to maintain

Like a tear in all we know
Once dissolved, we are free to grow
“What is human, what is more?”
I’ll answer this when I get home.

Pearl Jam on Letterman Thursday, May 4th.

Pearl Jam on SNL April 15th.

Second [Pearl Jam] Forum Show Added: “That�s right. A second show has been added in LA. Stay tuned for further updates!

If you reserved rollover tickets for this show, your credit card will be charged. A confirmation email will be sent closer to the show date, but in the meantime, you can check your profile in the pearljam.com Goods section to view your orders.”

I thought Pearl Jam would send an email update when West Coast shows were announced, as they have with the East Coast shows. I was wrong, and missed the window to buy tix for the LA Forum show. There is a possible second show being added, on contingent presale from 10am to 10pm PST on 31 March (tomorrow).

Pearl Jam’s new news feed is http://www.pearljam.com/flat/pj-rss2.xml.  Use it in your favorite reader, such as the Google Reader I discussed recently.

X ROCK radio is reporting a new Pearl Jam album sometime in 2005.

Pearl Jam. Queensrÿche, unplugged. Mudhoney headlining with David Cross. And all proceeds to help fund progressive political causes. Interested? Only catch is they’re on weeknights in Seattle, which is a long way from L.A. But if you’re in the area, go.  And let me know how it was.

I somehow missed a great Onion A.V. Club interview of Eddie Vedder from November 2002.

The final setlist for Pearl Jam’s 12 November release “Riot Act”, courtesy of The [Official] Pearl Jam Rumor Pit.

1. Can’t Keep
2. Save You
3. Love Boat Captain
4. Cropduster
5. Ghost
6. I Am Mine
7. Thumbing My  Way
8. You Are
9. Get Right
10. Green Disease
11. helphelp
12. Bushleaguer
13. 1/2 Full
14. Arc
15. All or None

With less than two months to go, I am as always getting into my pre-release hyperventilation stage.  15 songs!  I hope that some are longer format and not of their recent sub-three minute pattern.

Apparently the single “I Am Mine” is allowed to be played officially tomorrow, 18 September.  The only problem with their traditional pre-release singles is that I listen to them so much that they never quite seem to fit into the album once released, as they have built an identy all their own.  It happened with “Who You Are”, it happened to “Given to Fly”, it happened, to a certain degree, to “Nothing As It Seems”.  Regarding “Given To Fly”, I am surprised when the song comes on every time I listen to Yield, which I admit is bizarre.

Saturday evening I visited Instrumental Music here in Thousand Oaks to pick up a new set of guitar strings.  After I picked them out, Jenn was very patient and waited while I played around like a kid in a toyshop.  My gaze had fixed on a gorgeous black Les Paul, and I pulled it down and plugged it in.  When I first started picking through a chord I heard one of the worst mis-tunings I have ever encountered, made worse by the (intentional) distortion on the amp.  I’m going to see if I can give this explanation in a few sentences rather than my normal multi-paragraphs.  A guitar, as you may know, is usually tuned E-A-D-G-B-E, low to high.  This means that on a tempered scale the dashes in the previous list represent 5, 5, 5, 4, and 5 half steps, respectively.  Someone, presumably a beginner shopping at the store, had tuned the guitar with 5, 5, 5, 5, and 5 half steps, leaving the final tuning E-A-D-G-C-F.  This makes an E Major-shaped chord resolve as E-B-E-G#-C-F, giving us E-F dissonance (twice) as well as B-C dissonance, and generating what is surely one of the most revolting sounds known to man.  After I fixed the tuning it out sounded great.

I’m still thinking about it; this guitar is a beauty.  It lists for $1K, the shop carried it for $800, and I am now waiting on Guitar Center‘s next “blowout sale”.  If I can get the price under $500 I can probably rationalize the purchase (Jenn, who will eventually read this post, might not agree that $500 is rationalizable.)

I have been surfing around reading more about these guitars, including a return visit to the indispensable Pearl Jam Rumor Pit, a site that is far more than its name would suggest.  Part of its role is apparently to give patronizing and dismissive non-answers to banal questions, as well as to questions that, while not banal, seem to suggest sarcastic answers.  Thus this rather amusing exchange from 3 August 1997:

Q: What type of strings does Stone [Gossard] use on his Les Paul?

A: Metal ones

While I’m on the topic, I want to share this passage from Ed’s gear page:

Q: I’m curious about Ed’s guitar setup and was wondering if you would mind
assisting me.  It’s widely reported that Ed doesn’t use effects pedals.  How does
he switch between clean and dirty tones in songs like “Not For You” and
“Corduroy”? …

A: You are correct that Ed typically does not use guitar effect pedals … At times [he] has experimented with using various distortion pedals, but one has never stuck – either because he wasn’t happy with the distortion, or because he doesn’t want to fuss with a foot pedal by his microphone stand.  On top of that, Ed’s really interested in guitars with distortion and/or effects built on-board the guitar, such as in the vintage, Italian-made Vox guitars that he owns.  With those guitars he can turn the distortion, and/or other effects, on and off at the flip of a switch right on the guitar itself.  It’s a pretty neat concept, but whereas the Vox guitars naturally sound O.K., they don’t sound great.  So far though, Ed’s never taken one of the Vox’s out on tour with him….

So if he uses no effect pedals live, and no Vox guitars live, then how does he get his distortion??  Well, it’s actually a little bit purer approach.  First of all, most of the time Ed plays his guitars using only the front (neck) pickup.  This pickup typically has a thicker, muddier tone due to its position along the length of the string.  And so with the positioning of that pickup, it’s a little easier to “overdrive” your amp with your strumming/picking technique.  Second, Ed sets his amp tone by first dialing in a loud, clean, full tone.  (Clean being the important word there.)  He adjusts his input gain right to the point where the “clean” tone is on the verge of distorting slightly.  Once this is set, his sound (clean or dirty) is controlled purely with his hands, changing with the intensity he chooses to strum the strings with.  If he picks more delicately, he can achieve a cleaner tone.  If he picks harder and more aggressively, he can achieve a distorted tone.  Cool, huh?