“May all your visions turn to gold”

Well.. because I’ve been thinking about it, I wanted to write more about Saturday night.

There’s just two things really… first, let me just say I think I’ve been listening to music lately, but not really paying attention to things going on… well, other than Chris Cornell/Rage/Civilian/Audioslave related minutia. And though it does seem like somewhere I had heard that Matt Cameron, formerly of Soundgarden, had joined Pearl Jam, it hadn’t really registered for me until Ed mentioned his name onstage. I was tickled when it happened. It made me think of what a tangled web all those old Seattle bands were in the first place and how cool it is that these talented people keep hooking up in one band or another over the years.

Then, of course, the second thing happened. They came back for an encore and broke into Crown of Thorns. There’s that tangled web again, what one, two members of Pearl Jam had been in MotherLoveBone, and the whole band along with Chris Cornell and Matt Cameron, then of Soundgarden, wrote and played songs on the Temple of the Dog tribute album for Andrew Wood. So, thinking of all these relationships of course led me to Brian and our “inside joke”, which is really just that he mixes up the band names MLB and ToTD. But, it also led me to think about something entirely more geeky…

Changeling…

The first I really heard of MLB was MTV reports about how Andrew had died, his influence, and about the ToTD tribute. Flashback to the hours of airplay the Hunger Strike video got. The whole story influenced me to order “Screaming Life”, the photo record of the Seattle music scene and how all these people knew each other. It was intriguing to me how they all came together, in my brain, I attributed the phenomenon to one, deceased, Andrew Wood. Former glam rock singer, manages to get MLB together for one transitional “alternative/glam” release, then dies tragically, inspiring TofTD and future Soundgarden and Pearl Jam releases… among other bands.

And, well, he had been pretty freaking cute. So, of course, I adopted his “life story” and his “death story” into a character for the roleplaying game, Changeling, and it seemed perfect. He was a Satyr, of course, since all his “life” he’d been singing about sex and being the sex god and had Satyricon stickers on his gear. His tragic death was elaborately “faked” so he could remove himself from the world of mortal musicians, to live out his true fae life with other satyrs, making the magical music that would inspire musicians to remember him…. even these thirteen years after his death.

He’s no Elvis Presley. He’s no Jim Morrison. He’s no Jimmy Hendrix. But he is a legend to me. Andrew Wood, captain hightop, the love commander, living still, nearly ageless in his mansion/studio nestled in some enchanted fairy glen in a realm that isn’t quite California.

Man of Golden Words

Wanna show you something like
The joy inside my heart
Seems I’ve been living in the temple of the dog
Where would I live, if I were a man of golden words?
And would I live, at all?

And it seemed plenty of the crowd sang along to Crown of Thorns. I don’t know how often they ever cover that tune in concert. I even ordered the bootleg of that concert just to get a copy of Pearl Jam doing that song.

Of course, there’s always the drunk guy in the crowd that will yell, “Play something that doesn’t suck!” Grrrr. Well, they segued into Black after that, which sure didn’t suck… but I don’t think drunk guy was having a much better time clapping along to it either. “Too much slow crap.”