Alive by Pearl Jam

Share the first song you ever heard from your favorite artist. A long long time ago, music used to be made into physical items. Black discs of grooved vinyl that you would buy from a shop to take home to listen to. This song was not exactly one of those. For starters, I didn’t buy it. Each week the hospital radio station I was involved in got a donation of the latest singles in the top 20. Usually a few small discs of black vinyl were picked up and added to the music library. The library was just a set of shelves. It held about 6000 singles and 1000 albums —very sturdy shelves— all catalogued so we knew where to find things. We took turns doing this, and part of the fun was listening to the new singles. The track in question stood out as it wasn’t on black vinyl, but white. It was from a band I hadn’t heard of but I guess the song had been popular enough to get into the Top 20 (I checked, it peaked at 16). And that was it. One play, one listen to that opening swoon of guitar, then…