While in the car with my mom, Pearl Jam’s “Yellow Ledbetter” comes on my iPod:
Mom: Boy, does this take me back! Driving you or your [younger] brother around in high school!
Joshua: It’s old enough to have been me. It was released as a B-side in 1992.
M: {amazed:} A B-side?! What the hell was the A-side?!
J: “Jeremy”.
M: {ponders:} Oh, yeah, OK. I can see that.
How cool is it that my mom can have this conversation?
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Very cool.
I love Yellow Ledbetter and I think that it may be the king of all B-Sides, but it’s a B-Side for a reason, and that reason is that it’s a mumbling, incoherent mess. I’ve been listening to that song for just shy of twenty years, and I still have no idea what the lyrics are, much less what they mean. By every account that I’ve heard, it came out of the guys dicking around during a jam session, and was never really refined into anything more focused than that. For the first release of a rookie band, it would have seemed insane to put it out as a feature track.
Still an amazing song, though.