Hearts and thoughts, they fade?

For those of you who don’t know, I grew up in Modesto, Calif. From my post, it was a fast-food, strip-mall suburbia that led to my utter boredom as a teenager.

I say “from my post” because I didn’t get the culture of the area until I returned after college for a two-year stint as a newspaper reporter. I didn’t understand that the area was feeding the country through the work of people who had risked their lives and left their families. I didn’t know about the Asian refugees who were trying to make sense of their new lives in America. (I also have friends who found true love and made happy homes there. That just wasn’t my experience.)

Some of my friends did live on farms. They wore cowboy boots and Wranglers. But I didn’t know what they did after school or during the summers. Most of us just lived in single-family track housing, one-story ranch style homes with popcorn ceilings in cul de sacs.

It was a big deal to drive over the Altamont Pass passed the windmills to San Francisco. The temperature dropped, the sky opened up and there were people with tattoos, piercings and attitudes. We knew something more was out there then. But we were isolated and frustrated, and there was nothing we could do about it. Bored out of our minds, we turned to certain recreational activities, fell in and out of love and stirred up trouble to break through the heat and dullness that was teenage life in the Central Valley.

Then there was this music that came in the early '90s. I think we discovered it as it discovered us. We did not really care, but it was dubbed grunge, and it was coming from Seattle. Until then, like those before us, we turned to the music of our parents’ generation, the Beatles, the Doors, Jimi, Pink Floyd, but it was too abstract and stood for things we weren’t involved in and couldn’t fully understand. It wasn’t ours—but until then, nothing was.

The lyrics and jarring sounds got under our skin. It was unstable and pissed off. Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit was called the anthem of an apathetic generation. We didn’t take offense.

There was a song for every one. As they kept coming, we gobbled them down from now-defunct music stores like the Wherehouse and Sam Goody. If you had shitty parents, a fucked a relationship with your mom or dad, problems fitting in, or were sick of pretending to fit in, this music spoke to you, it gave you a voice, and that felt like something when nothing else did.

I fell in love with Pearl Jam.

Sixteen years later, I relived those lyrics live in Golden Gate Park. It was one of the hottest nights of the year. It felt euphoric. Here's what it was:

It felt empowering to relive those songs and those moments so many years later, free from the issues that bound me to them in the first place, either by death, distance or resolve. I am older and wiser and less vulnerable. That night, I became acutely aware of this band's influence on the person I am today, how it helped me get through the bullshit that was growing up in a small town.

“I changed by not changing at all, small town predicts my fate...”

Except it didn’t.