Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [167]
Just before the CD’s release, Pearl Jam appeared in concert in Memphis, a city where one radio DJ routinely mocked West Memphis Three supporters and where TV reporters received castigating calls from viewers if they aired news of the growing movement. At the end of Pearl Jam’s performance before a crowd of about ten thousand fans in Memphis’s Pyramid Arena, the band played two encores. Then Eddie Vedder, Pearl Jam’s lead singer, returned to the stage a third time. “This last song is for a friend I haven’t met yet,” he announced. “He’s from West Memphis. I’m going to meet him tomorrow.” With that, the band launched into a biting rendition of the Who’s “Teenage Wasteland.” The crowd roared, though few in the audience could have known to whom Vedder was referring. The next day, Vedder rode in a limousine across the Mississippi River into mid-Arkansas, to the state’s maximum security unit, where he visited with Damien. Later, Vedder told a reporter, “I went and visited Damien in this little God-forsaken place, this prison—he’s on death row—and everyone was treated like dirt there.”384
Soon after the CD’s release, however, Music City Record Distributors of Nashville, Tennessee, announced that it was removing the compilation from the shelves of its Cat’s Music stores.385In a letter sent to its stores, the company reported that the Pop Tunes and Best Buy chains had reached a similar decision. But in other parts of the country, reaction to the disk was different. TheVillage Voice called it “a weird and exciting little collection.”386The writer for theVillage Voice articulated an issue that burned both at the heart of the West Memphis case and in the motives of many of the inmates’ musical supporters. That was the amalgam of hope, confusion, sexual energy, and rebellion that pounded through rock and roll and through the lives of many teenagers who found themselves drawn to the music. Since its origins, in the same Mississippi delta that gave birth to the blues, rock and roll had been embraced and denounced as “bad.” Memphis’s historic Beale Street had become a tourist attraction, but in its heyday, the street was a string of riverfront dives where some of the country’s greatest musicians played—against a backdrop of scorn and condemnation from the city’s churchgoing elite. It was the same with Elvis Presley. His name graces nearly everything in Memphis today. But, in the early sixties, when he burst onto the scene, he outraged the city’s defenders of decency—and many continued to view him as bad until they realized he was good for the economy. Rock and roll plays with big taboos: sex, drugs, and—worst of all—subliminal notions of evil.387It’s risky. It blurs reality with theatricality. It expresses dangerous emotions—a quality that fans find liberating but that others find terrifying. What did the music of Metallica, Megadeth, and Slayer say about Damien and Jason? Did it represent, as Prosecutor Fogleman suggested, parts of a mosaic that pointed to satanism and murder? Or did it say, as the producers of the benefit CD believed, that the two were searching for music that gave voice to the fears and forces at the heart of their own lives? In an interview accompanying the disk’s release, Eddie Spaghetti of the Supersuckers said that his commitment to the project arose in part out of a sense of obligation to the “kids” who listened to the music he played—and apparently risked, in some cases, having that used against them in court.388As the publisher of a Little Rock weekly wrote, “What seems to frighten Spaghetti and similar musicians who explore the ‘dark side’ of music, is that anyone who buys his record and T-shirts could be considered a devil worshiper and become a scapegoat in a