In high school, Phil lived in the northwest corner of town, just a few blocks away from the school. At the beginning of the school year, when the weather was just right, I would get up early so I could ride my bike to his house and hang out and listen to music before school started. For a while we made a ritual of listening to “Here Comes The Flood” by Peter Gabriel before we walked to school. He’d made a tape of the song repeating over and over, with the Rolling Stones’ “Get Off Of My Cloud” inexplicably inserted at the end of each side, because he is Phil.

Usually, Mark and Wes joined us. After a while, “Here Comes The Flood” was replaced by Pearl Jam’s live cover of “Baba O’Riley”. The movie Singles had just come out, and MTV had a movie premiere party with artists from the soundtrack performing live. And it wasn’t just any soundtrack. Think about the bands involved: Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, the Screaming Trees, Smashing Pumpkins—in 1992. It was the rare sort of intersection of art and commerce that creates an improbable touchstone for the zeitgeist, at least in the eyes of a musically naïve tenth-grader who’s taken to wearing flannel shirts and Chuck Taylors every day.

So, we listened to Pearl Jam’s cover of “Baba O’Riley”—with Stone Gossard doing an admirable job of duplicating the opening synth part, and new hire Dave Abbruzzese on drums—to get us fired up in the morning before the four of us walked the brief distance to school, and submitted to an environment where Pearl Jam and Soundgarden were actually still counterculture.