Red Mosquito

"Ed took ill when the band was touring for Vitalogy, And Ed was so sick he thought he was going to die. The band had to cancel a few shows, and Ed had to stay in bed."

Concert Review: Pearl Jam @ Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA 6/24/95

Pearl Jam took the stage around 2:00 in the afternoon, and Eddie Vedder seemed shaky, messing up "Corduroy" and plowing through several other numbers (including "Go," "Animal" and "Not For You") in a sort of strangled croak. After saying "I want to tell you something from my heart," Vedder informed the crowd that he had the flu or maybe food poisoning and that he'd had to be taken to the emergency room at 3:30 that morning. He then went into more detail about his various bodily functions--vomiting, etc--than anyone needed to know. After promising to try to come back later in the show, and telling the crowd, "Lucky for you, Neil Young is here," he left the stage.

Young came out about twenty minutes later, backed by the other members of Pearl Jam. They played an extended set, performing everything from "Hey Hey, My My" and "Powderfinger" to newer material from the Young/Pearl Jam collaboration, "Mirror Ball." Young was wonderful, and the crowd of 53,000 was polite. Only scattered boos had greeted Vedder's announcement anyway, and everyone sat quietly through Young's set. Everybody figured that Vedder would eventually come back, an assumption based at least partly on Young's frequent teasing. "Let's go see if we can wake up Eddie." "Maybe Eddie's feeling better now." At one point, Young even said, "I saw Eddie lying backstage on his face. He didn't look so good." According to later news reports, at that point Vedder wasn't even at Golden Gate Park, but had gone back to his hotel. So why keep hinting that he would return? Anyone lying in a pool of their own vomit, as Vedder ostensibly was, is probably not going to come back for an encore. But it took two and a half hours before Young told the crowd what he must have always known, that Vedder wasn't going to return.