Sundays with Stretchy Pants

This morning as cd 101.1 was playing Yellow Ledbetter as the soundtrack to Maya’s snack time, I listened from the kitchen as she sang along. *sniffle* A little tear ran down my cheek as I whispered, “That’s my girl. That is my girl.” Though, I don’t really know what she was singing since the lyrics are famously indecipherable.

I spent much of the 90s trying to find the lyrics to this song. You know, before the internet and before Eddie Vedder would ever talk about any song. Ever! What does it mean? What is he saying? It was tough to sleep at night. I was certain the lyrics would give me a peek into the pain that made Eddie Vedder so damn irresistible. See, he mumbles because of the pain. The pain that could be healed by me, if only he’d let me. Left unsatisfied, I decided to get a tattoo of that little guy from the Alive single in order to experience physical pain that would match Eddie’s emotional pain.

I’m sure Maya knows on some child-like enlightenment-type level what that song is all about because she was actually at a Pearl Jam concert in utero. It was July 2003. I was 8 months pregnant and after 11 years of trying and failing to get tickets to a Pearl Jam concert, Bryan and I finally got some tickets. General admission lawn tickets, but still. I didn’t care that it was going to be outdoors in the sweltering Michigan humidity, with a bunch of sweaty, smelly idiots who were all so young that they didn’t even have one single piece of flannel hiding in their closets, and were only going to the concert to be all retro and stuff. Their favorite PJ songs were probably Alive and Jeremy and Black. Ugh. I hate those songs, like any true fan would. If it’s been played on the radio, then we don’t like it. We don’t. Because we’re better than the radio. Just ask us, we’ll tell you.

No, I didn’t care that I would have to share the hill with pseudo-fans. Well, I didn’t care until we actually got there and they took our blankets at the door because, “Pearl Jam concert goers tend to start fires so we don’t want blankets in there being piled on the fires,” and I looked at the huge, smelly crowd of people standing on the very steep, very muddy hill and said, “Huh.” I couldn’t imagine any scenario in which I would be able to lug my giant belly up that very crowded hill. I could, however, imagine that once I got up there it would only take the wind from a pothead’s exhale to send me tumbling through the crowd to the bottom of the hill, with my considerable girth leading the way. I said, “I’m not doing that. No.” And then we found a bouncer and told him that I was told on the phone that I’d be able to sit in the handicapped section. They slapped a handicapped bracelet on our wrists so fast, we didn’t even miss a single opening mumble. Eddie came out on stage and said, “Hey, mmbl fuble phrmbl DETROIT!” and we were there, in the comfort of folding chairs on level ground, in the very last row of real seating, 20 yards in front of the stupid hill! It was awesome! I felt like such a rebel and I decided that it was just as exciting to dupe the bouncers as it would have been to be in the mosh pit with a bunch of flannelless teenagers.

If you weren’t given the gift of lyric deciphering in utero by the gods of grunge, please enjoy this person’s guess. I think they’re as close as anybody can get:

Now watch this one and tell me you don’t want to lick the sweat off of his face. Ok, now I’m walking away from the computer because I just spent 2 hours going, “Watch this one you guys!” and Lena and Liberty are going to kill me. I’m going to go find my copy of Singles on VHS and rewind the scene with Eddie, Stone Gossard, and Jeff Ament in it over and over and over again.

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