The show that made Pearl Jam never want to play again
Every rock and roll show is meant to be a celebration of music. While the atmosphere may seem intense, particularly in a massive mosh pit at a metal concert, the underlying essence is always about uniting a large crowd in the shared love for a specific genre of music. Pearl Jam had always flourished in this environment of positive energy. However, after the tragic events at Roskilde in the early 2000s, Eddie Vedder believed they were finished with touring for good.
Before anyone even knew who the band were, they had already tried making songs as a way of healing. Since most of the members had gotten the wind knocked out of them after the death of Andy Wood from Mother Love Bone, the decision to form Pearl Jam was partly to heal the raw wounds from their loss.
As much as the group could have gone with a tribute singer who sang Wood’s parts perfectly, Vedder’s trademark growl had much more depth than anyone else on the scene. While Vedder would also be patient zero for giving the world the post-grunge yarl that drives many fans up the wall, he practically has his voice down to a science, continuing to innovate his pipes across all of Pearl Jam’s classics.
By the time the band got famous, they had thought about pulling back from their mainstream appeal. Since Vedder didn’t like the idea of becoming the Jim Morrison of the 1990s, Vitalogy and No Code boasted songs that were bound to cause a lot more confused expressions than headbanging.
Even though they picked things back up on albums like Yield and Binaural, their trip to Roskilde in 2000 ended in infamy with the band. After a handful of songs, the group were notified that many fans were being trampled to death in the crowd, causing them to stop the show to make sure everyone took a step back to avoid any kind of surge.
Despite their efforts to calm the crowd, the damage had already been done. When talking about the day in the documentary Twenty, Stone Gossard remembered just how emotionally stunned he was on stage, saying, “It’s a dark feeling when they’re pulling people over the barricade that aren’t alive anymore.”
For a long time, Vedder considered the festival to be one of the last shows that Pearl Jam would ever play, not wanting to be seen onstage and cause something like that again. When talking about it later, Vedder questioned what they were even doing anymore, telling Louder, “There was at least one person in the band, I remember, that thought maybe we should never play again. We all had to process something that we all went through as individuals, but also with the help of each other.”
On the day that Pearl Jam took the stage once again, Vedder found music as a way to heal himself, writing the song ‘I Am Mine’ to assure himself that everything was going to be okay. Pearl Jam may have continued to kick ass onstage and in the studio, but a certain innocence was lost on that fateful day in 2000.
