The most brutal concert Eddie Vedder ever had to play: “Everything changed”
Eddie Vedder has always believed that music is about more than just playing a couple of decent tunes with your friends.
At the best of times, music has been what healed all the members of Pearl Jam, and even when putting their first tunes together, they were already trying to make the best of a bad situation after Mother Love Bone broke up. Vedder was going to be the guy to help take them to the top of the world all over again, but that meant having the strength to deal with those times when the world seemed to go dark as well.
But it’s not like Vedder came to the band fully formed, either. Anyone else would have tried making half-hearted tributes to Andy Wood when they sent tapes to Stone Gossard, but the fact that Vedder had a gritty baritone was everything that the band was looking for. They needed someone with his own personality, but when they started jamming, it only took a couple of songs for Vedder to start questioning what he was doing.
He was laying himself bare in a lot of those early songs, and while ‘Release’ made for one of the most cathartic moments on any of their records, he wasn’t quite ready to play that kind of song in front of hundreds of people just yet. So when they became the biggest band in the world, and he didn’t have a choice, he was doing everything he could to try and minimise their impact however he could.
They didn’t need to be this mammoth band in the same way that Van Halen was or anything, but they could still hold onto their artistry along the way. Vedder didn’t bother trying to make music solely to get on the radio, but even when they were headlining massive festivals, he had to become a much different kind of frontman once he saw the carnage that went down at the Roskilde Festival in 2000.
Any band usually has to deal with rowdy fans every now and again, but seeing fans getting crushed right in front of the band would have been enough to do a number on anyone. There were more than a few people who walked into the venue that day and never got to walk out, and that was going to weigh on Vedder’s conscience for a long time after the band played their final notes that night.
Even looking back, Vedder considered that show to be one of the most harrowing nights that he ever had to go through, saying, “I never really spoke with anybody about Roskilde. It’s the most brutal experience we ever had. I’m still trying to come to grips with it. Right before we went on that night, we got a phone call. Chris Cornell and his wife, Susan, had a daughter that day.”
Adding, “And also a sound guy left a day early, ’cause he was going to have a child. It brought me to tears, I was so happy. We were walking out onstage that night with two new names in our heads. And in 45 minutes, everything changed.”
And while it would be a long time before he felt comfortable going back up onstage, their music did at least try to reflect what they were going through. No one was going to know what it’s like to lose their fans in that way, but a song like ‘Love Boat Captain’ and ‘I Am Mine’ were the best way for them to process that loss in real time, especially on the former, where Vedder talks about the friends that he’ll never get to know that night.
But when looking at Pearl Jam’s career, there’s a fork in the road that tends to come up when talking about Roskilde. They had already been through the wringer of whether or not they even wanted to be rockstars at the beginning of their career, but this was the reminder of why they needed to keep playing music for as long as they could. Because if there’s one thing that every Pearl Jam show needs from here on out, it’s a sense of hope that the music will help pull everyone together.
