My friend Marlan recently texted me a message that stopped me in my tracks: “Pearl Jam’s album ‘Ten’ turns 30 today. I’m still alive!” Almost immediately I cued up the album on my Rowe jukebox, another relic, and blasted Eddie Vedder and the guys into the countryside outside my detached garage.
Was it really 30 years ago that I was pushing this same disc into my first CD player in Mom and Dad’s basement? I can practically see the posters on the wall: a 1958 Corvette on the beach, Karl “The Mailman” Malone and the Michael Keaton Batman movie. The 14-year-old playing “Ten” didn’t know about the massive alternative music movement that was about to take over his teenage years, or that he’d later be traveling to different cities over the next three decades to see Pearl Jam perform the songs from that album in person.
Lately, it feels like I’m being reminded of a monumental anniversary of some sort every other day. My wonderful wife and I will celebrate 15 years of marriage next month (I better get her something nicer than just a mention in this column.) Last month marked 40 years since the debut of MTV (and 20 years since they actually played music.) Those are the fun ones. There are also the sad anniversaries. In a strange coincidence, Hurricane Ida made landfall on New Orleans on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. And it was 20 years ago when we witnessed the tragic events of 9/11, a day that touched so many.
Today, I picked up a shrink-wrapped package of magazines in the garage. (I have lots of magazines in my garage, as opposed to actual useful stuff.) Inside were copies of the November 2019 issue of LM. I turned to my column (oh nice, my photo is now celebrating its fourth anniversary) and saw that in that issue I was writing about the frenetic pace the LM team kept at the 2019 GIE+EXPO show. We took a crew of 16 people that year to report on the industry’s largest event. We came back with enough material to fill an entire magazine, and then some.
The next year, there were zero people at GIE+EXPO, not just from our publication, but for any company. It was 2020, the no-show year.
In this issue of LM our cover story focuses on the triumphant return of the 2021 GIE+EXPO show for its 38th anniversary in Louisville. We also have other useful content in this issue, like our groovy early order program guide, insights on getting into the holiday lighting game and the best-case scenario for regions that combat snow mold.
Multiple landscape pros, suppliers and manufacturers told us about how excited they are to put the shutdown year of 2020 behind them. And we are, too. As we stand weeks away from the doors opening on the 2021 GIE+EXPO show, we realized we had a fun anniversary story in the works. And on the one-year anniversary of the no-show, I find it extremely fitting that the keynote speaker, Admiral James Stavridis, will be speaking about resilience, a topic our industry knows a whole lot about, and is vital to making our return to normal.
Happy anniversary. We look forward to seeing you there in Louisville in October, for this 38th year and for many more to come. As John Perry, president of Greene County Fertilizer told us, “I’m more excited to just see the people I haven’t seen for the last couple of years.”
After the show ends let’s get down to Fourth Street Live!, find a place with a jukebox and put on Pearl Jam’s “Ten” and sing, “I’m still alive, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!”
Who is coming with me?
