Christmas morning, 1993. I was 13 years old and my parents and I were unwrapping presents by the tree.
“Here,” said my mom, handing me a small gift. “This one is from your dad.”
It was Vs. by Pearl Jam. Their second album, considered by many to be their best. It’s the one with the snarling goat on the cover. Later, I would listen to it in my room on my boom box (remember those?) and be utterly transfixed by what came through those tiny speakers. Vs. begins with a song called “Go” - a short squall of feedback gives way to a propulsive, hammering drum beat before the guitars come in, lacerating and feral, the sound of a wild animal trapped in a house.
I was hooked.I could write about this album for hours because it contains so many multitudes: angry punk thrashers, singalong stadium anthems, mournful roots rock numbers, even some attempts at political humor. My point is not that I was unique: Vs. went platinum seven times over. Quite to the contrary, what I heard in the music - and literally saw in the liner notes - was a community. Pearl Jam has famously had one of the most enduring and dedicated official fan clubs in all of popular music for decades. In those days, all it took to join was a self-addressed stamped envelope (remember those?) and $10. This was a tribe, a cult, a whole belief system. Putting on the CD was only part of the initiation ritual.
If there’s anything remarkable about my indoctrination into rock music, it’s that I’d actually read about this band before I heard them. Christopher John Farley had written about them for Time magazine in a now-infamous October 1993 cover story: “All the Rage.” For weeks, Eddie Vedder sat on our coffee table, gripping a microphone and howling.
There’s a lot about that article that I remember, because I read it over and over again for months. Whenever mainstream media outlets attempt to document emerging counterculture trends in real time, they tend to age poorly, and this one sort of does. At the time, however, it felt like someone had accidentally mailed me a treasure map: 5,000 words that helped me understand that the confusion and anxiety of adolescence need not be an isolating experience. In fact, a lot of kids had unhappy home lives. In fact, a lot of kids felt misunderstood in their small hometowns. In fact, a lot of kids were trying to figure out how to use those feelings and build something better out of them. Before I ever heard a note, I knew that this is what rock music was. I knew that this is what rock music did. And music writing wasn’t ancillary to the experience of being a fan, any more than the Bible is ancillary to being a disciple.
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Reading about Pearl Jam pushed me deeper into their influences and inspirations. Within a few years, my CD collection included not only their alt-rock peers but classics from the 1960s and 70s British invasion, 80s Southern California hardcore, and the insurgent-country and Britpop stuff that was flourishing in the late 90s. Seattle. London. San Pedro. Austin. It was a big world out there. I became a regular reader of Rolling Stone, and then Spin. Before long, I was reading Guitar World cover to cover (I only understood about 20% of it in a given month) as well as the legendarily intense British music press: Q, Mojo, Uncut, Vox. Opinionated, detailed, alluring. It was a big world out there, and getting bigger all the time.
Then, the real authors: Nick Tosches. Mikal Gilmore. Robert Christgau, who I’m still not smart enough to fully process. Richard Meltzer, whose writing is so powerful and honest that it frightens me. Stanley Booth, a literal time traveler whose empathy for his subjects remains the gold standard for all writing, regardless of topic.
As I worked my way through all of this, reading and listening, listening and reading, I tried to be aware of how I was consuming this stuff, where I was finding it, and most importantly, how I could get more of it. I grew up in a small town, 1,100 people, 40 minutes from the nearest record store and several hours from the nearest mall. Getting my hands on books and tapes and CDs and magazines was relegated to occasional trips to Fort Collins or Denver. I’d make my meager summer job salary stretch as far as it could. I learned about how bank account overdrafts worked at an early age.I was also listening to the radio. Late at night, headphones on, gently nudging the FM dial this way and that, trying to catch a clear signal from my beloved KBCO or KTCL. Songs and voices, coming from somewhere. Not so much sounds to receive as calls to follow and see where they might lead.
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To be very clear, I cannot play music at all. I know how to make the shapes of some basic chords on a guitar, but my sense of rhythm is sorely lacking and moreover, I’m tone deaf to a degree that’s somewhat alarming. For this reason, I’ve never done karaoke.But all rock kids invariably want to do what their idols do, so I tried my hand at writing. In high school, I’d go to concerts or festivals, and then come home and write several thousand words about what I’d seen, with no publisher or expectation they’d see the light of day. In college, I managed to get a few pieces in a now-defunct arts & entertainment weekly called Noisy Paper. After college, the (also now-defunct?) weekly newspaper of Midtown Memphis, The Lamplighter, was kind enough to print my interviews with people like Carrie Rodriguez, Dan Auberbach of the Black Keys, and Franz Nicolay of the Hold Steady. I had no aspirations to greatness, or even readership. I’ve never written professionally and never spent a day in journalism school - but hey, a lot of my favorite guitarists didn’t exactly graduate from the Berklee College of Music. Whatever I wrote, I was only trying to give back to something that had given me so, so much.
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When David told me about his idea for Food As A Verb, I’ll admit to being a bit nonplussed. Writing? About food? Every week? The idea didn’t exactly turn my crank, but I could tell he had a vision for it, so I was supportive as best as I could be.
What I didn’t understand until he launched the thing was exactly what he was trying to do: build a community through his writing, or maybe more precisely, find a community of people who were already there. Folks were craving a medium to learn from and about each other. In an era when loneliness is a bona fide public health epidemic and polarization is deepening by the day, this is no small assignment. Food — gritty, salty, succulent, messy food - is of course a verb.“We all have to eat, every day,” I remember him telling me. Indeed. When you stop and think about what you’re eating, you have to think about how you’re eating. Before you know it, you’re actually thinking about economic development and wages, nutrition and public health, education, the environment, politics, and any number of other things. What I find so exciting about Food As A Verb is how David manages to toggle, sometimes within a single sentence, between an understanding of the macro-policy choices that shape our food systems and the lived experience of how these choices affect real people in the Tennessee Valley. As a result, his writing has changed the way I shop and the way I eat. As with music and music criticism, I’m more aware now of where I’m getting information, and how I can get - and share - more of it.
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He and I have been talking about adding other categories to the “As A Verb” media empire for a few months. It may be more accurate to say that I’ve been talking at him about it, but he’s a very patient friend and a good listener, which is what makes him a good interviewer. I appreciate his invitation on this platform and I’m confident that others will follow (Sports As A Verb, anyone? How about Architecture As A Verb?)Simply put, what I’m going to try to do with Music As A Verb is approach music, and all of the people who make it happen for us, with the same curiosity and humility that David uses when writing about food. I want to talk to singers and songwriters, of course, but also producers and promoters, bartenders and bouncers, the guy who sells you a guitar and the high school band teacher who shows you how to play it, and the entrepreneurs who run the record studios, labels, and shops that put the goods to the table, so to speak. Even if I never leave the city limits of Chattanooga, it’s a big world out there.
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In the thirty-odd years since I got that first Pearl Jam CD, I’ve sometimes wondered if my father regretted buying it for me. My obsession with rock music often drove a wedge between us, particularly as my tastes grew darker and more esoteric later in my teenage years. He likely (and correctly) saw my devotion to music as a way to distract myself from a rural, small-town upbringing where I never felt comfortable and means by which I could escape it - and him. It has occurred to me, more recently, however, that my dad didn’t actually get that CD for me. When she handed me the gift, my mom was very insistent that I know it was from him, which I now interpret as a kind lie. It was more likely from her, but she wanted me to believe that he was capable of showing an interest in me and supporting the things I was into. This gesture was not wholly successful. My father and I had a complicated and frequently contentious relationship until he passed away several years ago. Nonetheless, the attempt on my mom’s part, if that’s what it was, remains a sweet gift all its own. That’s what music is. That’s what music does.
A few years after I got that CD, she granted me possession of her entire vinyl collection from when she was a teen: dozens of LPs and 45s by the Beatles, the Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan. What a trove! I still have them, and they sound great. (If you want advice on buying a turntable, talk to Ben at Yellow Racket Records. You won’t be disappointed.)
I don’t have kids of my own, so I don’t know who inherits this music or the music I’ve amassed since in boxes of CDs or cloud servers chock full of playlists. What I do know is that my tortured metaphor of music writing as a treasure map isn’t totally satisfying; finding great music certainly can feel like finding buried treasure, but once you’ve found it, you don’t hoard and hide it - you send another map of your own out into the world that shows the footsteps you took to get there. Some kid is always going to be looking to follow them.
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