“They sealed it”: How Sonic Youth forced Eddie Vedder tour again
While people on the outside often imagine touring to be a sparkling, glamorous experience, the reality is often the opposite. It’s painstaking, exhausting, and, for some bands, even traumatic. One moment can change or ruin everything, leaving a group never wanting to step on stage again. Eddie Vedder felt that. But really, all he needed was a little push.
It was June 30th, 2000. Pearl Jam were playing at Roskilde Festival, marking a moment when their 1990s fame had only built and built into something bigger. But, in their excitement, the fans became unsafe. The crowd surged as people tried to rush forward, resulting in a crush. From the stage, Vedder watched it happen. “The second they were pulled over the front [wall]. It was chaos. Some people were yelling, ‘Thank you!’ Others, who weren’t in bad shape, were running up and saying hi [shakes his head in disbelief]. Then someone was pulled over, laid out, and they were blue. We knew immediately it had gone to that other level,” he recalled.
Nine fans died that day in that crowd. One moment truly stuck with him; “There were still 40,000 people out there; they were ready for the show to start again. They started singing, ‘I’m still alive’. ‘Alive’ was going to be the next song. That was when my brain clicked a switch,” Vedder said, adding, “I knew I would never be the same.”
The band didn’t want to tour after that. They cancelled their remaining dates that summer, and serious conversations were had about whether the group would even stay together, or if members wanted to retire and retreat to normal lives to try and recover from the scenes they saw. “I thought that if anyone ever lost their lives at one of our shows, that would be it. I would never play again,” Vedder said, so when they did, he thought he’d never return to the stage.
But he did, launching a US tour a month later. The decision to get back out there, realistically, had nothing to do with them, though. Instead, the band received a gentle push and necessary encouragement back to the stage via the group that agreed to support them.
“The killer was Sonic Youth opening for us. That sealed it: the power and majestic beauty of their sound and the people they are,” Vedder said as their openers brought them back to playing live. It wasn’t even just the music, though; it was simply the energy Vedder knew they’d bring to the road, knowing they were good people.
He added, “Thurston [Moore] and Kim [Gordon] have a daughter, Coco, who took a shine to me. She didn’t know what happened; there was no need for her to know. But she would bring me a card she drew of flowers with smiley faces, and she would say she and I were the two flowers,” remembering this simple and innocent act of kindness from a child that meant so much in a fragile moment.
It was empowering, and it was exactly what they needed. “Playing, facing crowds, being together – it enabled us to start processing it,” he said, but without the supportive push from Sonic Youth, it might never have happened.
