i can't find the words

One of my co-workers commented to me the other day that the man to whom I had just served coffee looked an awful lot like Eddie Vedder.

“No way,” I said. “That guy’s at least 6 feet 3; Eddie is maybe 5 feet 7 on a good day.” (Yes, it’s true; I know how tall he is.)

She was taken aback by this and asked several times if I was sure that Vedder could be that short.

In short, she couldn’t believe that it was possible for a rock star to be so small.

Even current rock stars have the same memories from the days when they were the ones paying to get into clubs.

Vedder himself had this problem when he was younger, and mentioned it when he inducted the Ramones into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year.

“Before the show even started, I was trying to get closer and closer and got up to the stage,” he mumbled during the rambling, 17-minute speech. “As I was getting closer I saw something really strange about the microphone stand in the middle. It was about 10 feet high. … I thought, ‘Who the f*** is going to sing at that microphone stand?’”

So what is it that makes these on-stage personas appear larger than life?

After much consideration, I point the blame squarely at the stage itself.

First off, if you go see any big-name arena rock band (say, Pearl Jam or R.E.M.), you’re most likely not going to be anywhere near the stage, and thus the people standing on it will seem quite small. Now, this may seem counterintuitive to my reasoning, but consider what you hear at such a show. The band is far away and tiny but at the same time earsplittingly loud.

This is obviously the work of amps no normal person could ever afford and some really, really big speakers. But if you let yourself get lost in the music, it just might seem like magic.

Oh, and those giant projection screens, too — Michael Stipe seems less diminutive after you’ve seen his head 15 feet tall.

Then there are those concerts at much smaller venues, places that trade off thousands of people’s worth of audience for a much more intimate feel.

The larger of these clubs usually have a decently tall stage — maybe four feet — and a barricade to put a couple of feet, along with a bald security guard, between you and the band’s shoes. So if you’re like me and always as close to the action as possible, a good portion of the night is spent neck craned up.

This results in everyone on the stage being bestowed with the classic hero shot, quite possibly the most flattering and grandeur-inspiring view of a person this side of Michelangelo’s “David” (think Citizen Kane at the lectern). Plus there’s that added end-of-the-night bonus feature of feeling like you showed up late to the movie theater and were stuck with lousy front row seats.

Then you have those small clubs that lack the funds for metal fences and an extra foot or two of stage height.

The performers at these shows are most likely a little more obscure, a little more accessible as real people, and yet you are still forced to look upward to watch them. It may not be as bad as with those other bands, but there’s still something about the height difference that places them on an entirely different importance level.

I was privileged enough to see Beulah in Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago. The show was at the quirkiest venue I’ve ever seen a band play at — the romp room (rec room or what-have-you) of a church. The “stage” was simply the area of the floor between all of the speakers; the bands were forced to play at the same level as their fans.

This was interesting to observe during the first opening band’s set, as everyone seemed content to sit on the floor and get the same old neck-ruining view.

Unfortunately for Matt Suggs and company, the hero shot was to no avail. Their songs just weren’t much good. And, as my friend Kristen so aptly put it, Suggs was a slovenly Stephen King look-alike and his guitarist resembled a “pretentious English teacher standing on an amp.”

The crowd was standing by the time Beulah took over, which brought about a new and unnerving situation. Kristen and I were front and center, as per usual, and I wasn’t exactly sure where to look. It was uncomfortable to be at eye level with, maybe even looking down a couple of inches at a rock star. So I just kind of glanced around the room nervously.

Singer Miles Kurosky was intrigued by the room’s setup and told us that we were allowed to step over the invisible line separating the band from the masses.

Not surprisingly, everyone stayed put. Well, save for the obligatory kid who put one foot on the previously forbidden side of a tangle of wires and waved his hands around in that “Look at me! I’m a rebel!” manner we all know and hate.

I can’t condone rock star glorification. Just because they appear to be seven feet tall doesn’t mean that they have super powers. They’re just normal people with the amazing (or not-so-amazing, depending on the band) ability to create music. Put them on a pedestal if you must, but they’re still prone to all of the same mistakes and shortcomings as the rest of us.

On that note, I’d like to mention singer-songwriter Elliott Smith’s recent suicide. He battled alcoholism, heroin addiction and depression to create some of the most gorgeous, intimate music of the past decade and now he’s gone. So remember, a knife to chest and the motivation behind it shed the same blood, whether it be a famous musician’s or yours or mine.

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Wahoo.

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Here is the picture of my new burn, as promised.

Tengo una casa para el año próximo. Es gigantesca, limpia y barata. También, está cerca de campus. Viviré con Kristen, Rachel, Alon y necesitamos encontrar a un quinto compañero de cuarto.

(I have a house for next year. It’s gigantic, clean and cheap. Also, it’s close to campus. I will be living with Kristen, Rachel, Alon and we need to find a fifth roommate.)

This is pretty much all my Spanish class is good for.

Kristen and I saw Beulah in Philly Wednesday night, which means that we also got to skip press night. I’m very happy about that.

The show was in some church’s rec room, so almost everyone was sitting during the first opener’s set (they weren’t good). And it was weird being on the same level as the bands, because I was actually taller than most of the people, so I was looking down at them. Plus, you know, I was front and center, so I could’ve reached out and slapped Miles Kurosky, had I wanted to.

The show started an hour late, so Beulah only got through 56% of their set and we got kicked out via creative use of the fire alarm, but otherwise it was a good time.

Other highlights included but were not limited to: getting lost three times (including once while still in Bethlehem), standing outside of the venue in the cold for a long time and having some obnoxious kid talk to us after dinner.

I always thought that the point of commercials was for you, Joe Consumer, to remember the name of the product being advertised.

Assuming this is true, heads at Nissan marketing should roll for the commercial I saw last week, because it took 15 minutes of research to tell me that the car being promoted was the Altima. All I could remember was the 30-second snippet of the song playing in the background.

It may have helped that I already knew the song, Beulah’s summery “A Good Man Is Easy to Kill,” but that little lyric-less section featured in the commercial is one of the most insanely catchy things I’ve ever heard.

It’s actually quite ironic — the nonchalant “bada, baba badada’s” seem like the perfect soundtrack for a car hugging curves in scenic California, but the song is about someone dying in a car accident.

And this is what (at least in some circles) Beulah is famous for: the ability to write an über-addictive pop song, oftentimes with seriously morose lyrics over cheery trumpet rock, two things that just shouldn’t peacefully coexist.

But Beulah had found a way to make it work, so imagine my surprise when I first heard that their latest effort, “Yoko,” was going to be quite a departure from the bursts of horns, flutes, dulcimers and other assorted novelty instruments that had become the Beulah cliché.

That being said, I had no idea what to expect when I picked the album up from Play It Again last month.

Not only is the trumpet all but gone, but the band also opted to record all of the tracks live instead of spending countless hours recording each instrument by itself. The reason for this is twofold, according to a post on the band’s Web site — it allows for a kind of energy that overdubbing can’t replicate and also cuts down on hours spent in the studio’s TV room.

Beulah’s lineup also underwent major changes, slimming down from a septet to an even six, with only four of the musicians from 2001’s “The Coast Is Never Clear” sticking around.

Rumors of “Yoko” being Beulah’s final record abounded, the hoopla fueled in part by the album’s ominous title. Whether the album has anything to do with its unpleasant band-destroying namesake has yet to be determined, but, if it’s any indication, most of the Beulahs have recently broken it off with their wives or long-term girlfriends.

Relationships are a major theme across the album, and its first two tracks combine for a one-two combo that gives both sides of the story in a breakup.

“A Man Like Me,” the album’s opener, is a no-frills ditty in which Miles Kurosky admits his screwups and begs his soon-to-be-ex for another chance.

On “Landslide Baby,” the next track, Kurosky intersperses quotes from the unnamed girlfriend with his own sullen take on the situation.

He laments to a backdrop of angry pop music, “And I knew you’d never stay forever/Holding it together, making songs for me.”

“You’re Only King Once,” which, when acronymed, becomes the album’s quasi-title track, showcases a festive-yet-depressing string arrangement while Kurosky mopes through the lyrics. A pedal steel guitar finds its way to the forefront during the bridge and recalls earlier, sunnier songs such as “Gravity’s Bringing Us Down.”

“My Side of the City” is surprisingly distortion-laden; it’s a fast, gritty, catchy ode to San Francisco that evolves into a loping carnival-ish instrumental before it’s through.

The breakup situation reappears in “Hovering,” with someone watching planes land as a metaphor for the feeling of limbo before the impending confrontation.

“I wish they would hang in the air forever/Holding their patterns for days/I hope they will be delayed forever,” Kurosky sings.

“Me and Jesus Don’t Talk Anymore” starts out as a piano-driven ballad, turns into a jangly country-influenced romp (perhaps what the Jayhawks would sound like if they were from California) and then affords trumpeter Bill Swan his longest solo of the album.

“Yoko” nearly comes to a stop with the despondent “Fooled with the Wrong Guy.” The lyrics are hauntingly saturnine — when Kurosky sings that “you fooled with the wrong guy,” it’s hard to believe him.

The distortion from just a few tracks earlier returns with the straightforward rock of “Your Mother Loves You Son” and expands to give Kurosky’s vocals a satisfyingly fuzzy quality.

“Don’t Forget to Breathe,” the radio-friendliest song on the album, begins with a riff reminiscent of Oasis’s “Wonderwall” and conveys post-breakup defiance with a simple “I don’t need your love.”

Last billing on “Yoko” goes to “Wipe Those Prints and Run,” a seven-and-a-half minute epic that screams the band’s farewell from the opening, “So it’s time for us to run” to the disjointed marimba and piano interludes, from the spacey guitar solo to Kurosky’s off-mic singing and whistling at the end of the song.

Oh, and before I forget, I’d like to give credit to Beulah, Velocette Records or whoever was in charge of the album’s packaging, for traveling the sans annoying bar code sticker route. It may not seem like a big deal, but it was still a welcome surprise.

The album didn’t quite hit me the first time through; “Yoko’s” hooks aren’t coated with crack like their predecessors on “Coast” and 1999’s “When Your Heartstrings Break.” But now, after several listens, I find myself, like John Lennon, calling, “Oh Yoko!” in the middle of the night.