Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder has broken his silence after the death of Chris Cornell. I’ve been avoiding most articles on this in the past few weeks. I’d rather remember him through the music. But, this…this, I had to read. And, I’m glad I did. This is pretty powerful stuff.
This was at his solo show at London’s Hammersmith Apollo Tuesday night. A fan transcribed the entire speech. It’s posted on the official Pearl Jam message board. At the end, the audience gave him a standing ovation.
Here’s what he said:
Sometimes it’s hard to concentrate these days. I was thinking about the history of this building and the Bowie history. So I started to think about that and my mind began to wander. It’s not a good…
So I haven’t really been talking about some things and I kind of… now it feels like it’s conspicuous because I lost a really close friend of mine, somebody who…(applause).
I’ll say this too, I grew up as 4 boys, 4 brothers and I lost my brother 2 years ago tragically like that in an accident and after that and losing a few other people, I’m not good at it, meaning I’m not…I have not been willing to accept the reality and that’s just how I’m dealing with it (applause starts).
No, no, no, no
So I want to be there for the family, be there for the community, be there for my brothers in my band, certainly the brothers in his band. But these things will take time but my friend is going to be gone forever and I will just have to…
These things take time and I just want to send this out to everyone who was affected by it and they all back home and here appreciate it so deeply the support and the good thoughts of a man who was a … you know he wasn’t just a friend he was someone I looked up to like my older brother.
About two days after the news, I think it was the second night we were sleeping in this little cabin near the water, a place he would’ve loved. And all these memories started coming in about 1:30am like woke me up. Like big memories, memories I would think about all the time. Like the memories were big muscles.
And then I couldn’t stop the memories. And trying to sleep it was like if the neighbors had the music playing and you couldn’t stop it. But then it was fine because then it got into little memories. It just kept going and going and going. And I realized how lucky I was to have hours worth of…you know if each of these memories was quick and I had hours of them. How fortunate was I?! And I didn’t want to be sad, wanted to be grateful not sad. I’m still thinking about those memories and I will live with those memories in my heart and I will…love him forever.
Consider this…Trash metal has it’s ‘Big 4’ with Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax, right? Seattle Grunge most definitely has one of those too… Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains. Eddie Vedder is the only voice left from what I’ll call the ‘Seattle 4’…and he knew all of those guys, personally. I can totally understand why he hasn’t said much until now.
-Suzanne