Oh yeah yeah I used to have a copy of Live On Two Legs but fuck me if I remember where I bought it

My Pearl Jam story is kinda similar to Mike's, at least in terms of timing. I think the first song I actually heard was "Better Man," but I didn't know who the artist was or even the song name. It was just the song about dreaming in color, dreaming in red that was played sometimes on the popular music station that we listened to on the school bus in the mid-late '90s. When I first heard of Pearl Jam, the band, "Last Kiss" was getting heavy radio play, and I picked up that it was a cover, so my initial concept of the band was that they got popular doing covers of other artists' songs (it was a really weird extrapolation to make in hindsight).

Around this time I was getting heavy into Nirvana and I eventually learned that Pearl Jam actually got their start pretty contemporaneous to them. I started hearing "Alive," "Even Flow," and, most importantly, "Jeremy" on the rock radio station and I realized these guys might be almost as good as Nirvana. I got Ten from Walmart in 2001 or 2002 and I became obsessed. I later got Vitalogy from the same Walmart and Vs. from a pawn shop, though I don't recall which I obtained first. Either way, Vitalogy cemented them as my favorite band and showed me that they had a much broader palette than I initially realized as well as allowing me to put a name and artist to that song from the bus radio.

I do know that Binaural was the fourth album of theirs that I purchased, this one from a shop that sold secondhand CDs, comics, trading cards, tabletop gaming paraphernalia, etc. It was the first and only album of theirs that I entered entirely blind having heard nothing from it beforehand. Around the same time I had been reading up on the band wherever I could, mainly online, so I started to pick up on their history and some of the prevailing opinions about their work in various communities. Because of this, I mythologized No Code and Yield in my head before ever hearing them, and they were the last two I listened to in full shortly before or around when Avocado came out and at that time my fandom was beginning to wane. Riot Act was the last mainline album of theirs that I bought (in September or October of 2003) for several years. I finally picked up physical copies of No Code and Yield around 2010 or so when somebody on another forum was downsizing their physical collection, and I've yet to pick up legitimate copies of Avocado through Lightning Bolt.

So for me, while I definitely came at the band through their earliest albums first, it was also at a time when they had several other albums already out, and as much as I loved the power and drama of their music, I was even more drawn in by their ability to color outside the lines with their sound and find sonic spaces that most of their contemporaries could not.

as a child listening to radio TV

animal 93 MTV awards
daughter
spin the black circle
(i mainly watched music videos on rage)

as a teenager with a computer and job in 2001
Ten CD
Vs CD
Riot Act mp3s
then i bought all the other CDs

Just wanted to note that I was looking at the photos and coverage of Goose’s show last night at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester (first show with new drummer), and their keys player is wearing a stickman t-shirt.