“I was horrified”: The scariest performance Dave Grohl’s life
The entire concert experience isn’t for the faint of heart to take on. As much as people like to see a spectacle whenever they buy their tickets, the idea of someone running around for hours on end for years at a time is bound to do a number on someone’s physical health once the knees start to ache and their back starts to give out on them halfway through a show. While Dave Grohl kept up his persona as one of the wildest drummers in all of rock and roll, he admitted he was scared to death watching Seattle’s finest playing for the first time.
Then again, it’s not like Nirvana’s stage was the safest place to be at the best of times. Even though they had a reputation for their catchy tunes, their shows were the definition of what it meant to be punk rock, down to the fact that Kurt Cobain would throw himself into the audience with virtually no sense of self-preservation.
That was the mindset behind everything, though. The point of grunge was to respond to the phoniness of hair metal and relate to the audience on a deeper level, but once the crowds started getting bigger, people started expecting a little bit more than a bunch of guys getting onstage and playing a song.
That’s where Pearl Jam came in, though. Despite initially having Andy Wood as the singer of Mother Love Bone, Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament lucked into having an equally charismatic singer in Eddie Vedder, who seemed to be pulling demons out of his subconscious every single time he sang.
For someone who had grown up idolising The Who, though, singing a song would never be enough. As much as Vedder loved swinging the microphone like Roger Daltrey, he needed to do something a little different to wow the crowd, which included climbing the scaffolding of every stage they played on without relying on a net to catch him.
It was definitely a punk-adjacent thing to do, but even for Grohl, he thought that Vedder was out of his mind for climbing up the stage, saying, “I didn’t sit and watch them play until the show in San Diego, where Eddie climbed the fuckin’ lighting rig. I swear to God, he was like 250 feet up in the air. It was one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen live in my entire life. Honestly, I was horrified. I was really scared that he was gonna die.”
As insane as the stunt was, Vedder knew that he was doing something that no one had ever tried before, and the adrenaline rush of the music was more than enough to give him the strength to keep climbing every time they played. That’s not to say that he didn’t pay for it on occasion, like when he jumped into the crowd during a festival and ended up with deep scratches on his back from people trying to tear him apart.
But for as petrified as Grohl was watching Pearl Jam play, the ones having the worst time would have to have been Gossard and Ament. They had already lost their first singer to a drug overdose, and if they ended up watching the death of another one after a stunt gone wrong, it would make sense if none of them wanted to pick up a guitar again.
