Pearl Jam Locker Room Talk

In one week's time I'll be flying off to Thunder Bay to start my Pearl Jam adventure...and yes, it is becoming very difficult to concentrate on unrelated matter. This build-up to the Canadian tour is bringing out the best in Pearl Jam fans, a group of people who can only be reasonably referred to as utterly insane. Seriously, how someone hasn't made a Trekkies-style movie about Pearl Jam fans is beyond me; the hours I spent in box office queues during the 2003 tour convinced me that the people who follow Pearl Jam around the country (and yes, I count myself among their numbers) deserve their own documentary.

All this pent-up fandom leads to the Pearl Jam fan's equivalent of locker room talk. It usually boils down to bickering about one of two things: membership numbers and shows attended. Honestly, surf on over to the message board at the band's official website and you're pretty much guaranteed to find at least two or three threads bearing titles such as "you know you're a real fan if..." or "what's your TenClub #?" This leads, invariably, to people squbbling about the nature of their relationship with the band, and whether someone who's seen Pearl Jam eight times is a "better" fan than someone who's never seen them at all...if nothing else, it makes for an engrossing read:

Person X: "I've seen Pearl Jam twelve times!"

Person Y: "Oh yeah? Well, I was at MSG II in 1998."

Person X: "Oh yeah?? Well, I was at State College."

Person Y: "So? What's your fan club membership number?"

Poor Talia: yesterday she found herself mediating an MSN discussion between me and a guy from the Jack Johnson forum dealing--naturally--with the number of shows we'd attended. For the record, I'd seen twelve to his six (which will be nineteen to his twelve in two-and-a-half weeks' time). If we were less mature, we'd probably have dropped the middleman and gone straight to a one-on-one pissing contest in which the goal, ultimately, is to prove greater allegiance to the band. Before we know it, someone over at Synergy is actually going to devise a mathematical formula whose answer, invariably, is "I'm a bigger Pearl Jam fan than you are". Because apparently being a fan isn't good enough: you have to be the best fan, with the biggest bootleg collection, the lowest TenClub number and an impressive roster of shows attended. Something to reflect upon as I finish writing a blog entry in which I brag, tacitly, about how big of a fan I am.