Avocado Week 2020 #3
by Henrik Tuxen
“Just like in New York four years earlier. First a solo interview with Eddie and then shooting the shit with Stone and Mike. Unsolicited, Eddie gave me his telephone number and e-mail address – and he also wanted to take a quick photo of me with his old Polaroid camera before I left. First, a close-up of one eye and then the other; then he asked me to hold up the Polaroids in front of my eyes before the last shot. Exactly the same way that all of the band members (and a dog) are photographed on PJ’s rarity album Lost Dogs. In a way, it was like joining ‘Club Eddie’.” (from Chapter 8)
Photo: Eddie Vedder.
I kind of came a bit backwards into Pearl Jam. When grunge appeared, it was all Nirvana for me. I realized that Rearviewmirror from Vs was awesome, but totally fell in love with Soundgarden’s Superunknown at time of Kurt Cobain’s death.
When a friend a year later enthusiastically played me Vitalogy I didn’t get it at first. But when I heard the first chords of Wash in Barcelona November 22nd, 1996, it was instant love. I was pretty much there since I’ve been making some minor attempts as a music writer, and my friend Kurt Bloch and his band The Fastbacks, were supporting Pearl Jam in Europe, and Kurt had somehow managed to squeeze me in as ‘substitute roadie – with a pen’.
Pearl Jam surpassed any live band I had ever seen, and Eddie spent the full reminder of the evening/night with me and The Fastbacks, as well as pretty much the next couple of days I was on the tour. I got Pearl Jammed, that is all I can say, suddenly it all made sense, the music, the words, the band, the style, the activism, everything. When I took the train from San Sebastian to Barcelona to fly back home, I had this conviction; ’I’m going to be friends with Eddie Vedder’. At times this seemed seriously far stretched and extremely unlikely to happen, but events pulled us together; not at least the devastating tragedy at Roskilde Music Festival in 2000, when I was on side of the stage, when the band was playing.
Many other events and occurrences followed, but to be greeted by Eddie, at this time after a full decade as a true fan, in the very HQ of Pearl Jam in Seattle, was certainly something special. Suddenly there was no shortage of sharing personal contacts, and I was ritually photographed by the man, as like you see it on Lost Dogs. Kind of like becoming a member of an Exclusive ‘Club Eddie’. What seemed like a pure fictional fantasy ten years earlier, was now literally a reality; we had become friends”.
This interview with Edved back in 2006 is one of my all-time favorite days on the job. Here are a few examples:
You know the dark, but refuse to be dragged down again and have made it through to the other side with renewed insight and strength?
Eddie – It is almost like there is an energy which is emerging when someone else has passed away, for instance when you are attending a ceremony. In surfing we do a thing where we are 50 guys paddling out, passing the waves, holding each other’s hands, and dropping the ashes. I was involved in such a ceremony last week. We formed our surfboards in a huge circle and said our words to him. This one was intense cause the guy who passed away was a great environmentalist, especially for the oceans and a passionate surfer. He was a young guy who was taken by disease and we all paddled out early in the morning. It was this great gathering and this guy had him in a backpack. I saw this wave coming right in the back of him, and he caught it, so he gave him one last wave, and then paddled out to the rest of us, with no hands on the board and sat in the center and we all said our things, poured the ashes in the ocean, and then we all surfed in. Beautiful day. But you leave a ceremony like this and you are reminded of how fragile life is, and that is when you start thinking about these things. Life wasted. You’re given this kind of lust for life when you’ve been this close to death, that you just don’t want to waste a second, and yet that energy can be caught up with responsibility, your daily life and all sorts of things that easily pull you back into the grind. As powerful as that energy is, it seems to have a shelf life of less than a month sometimes. So, this song is a reminder.
On the same note, there’s a story going around that you and Jack Johnson’s father were caught by a huge wave in a canoe off the Hawaiian coast a couple of years ago, and that you were extremely fortunate to be rescued by a fishing boat several hours later. Is that a true story?
Eddie – Jack’s father and I were paddling between two Hawaiian Islands and the weather got hard. The trail winds were out and during trying to get this canoe up-wind, a wave a couple of miles from the shore caught the boat and turned it around. We were six people altogether, and three hung onto the boat whereas three of us were left in the ocean, me and two women. We were out there for what seemed like quite a while, because there were big ocean swells out there. This was in 2001 – I just never told anyone about it.
So, referring to what we were just talking about, did this near-death experience give you a renewed appetite for life?
Eddie – I had been living a jungle lifestyle for about a year when that happened. Cause when we got back after the [Binaural] tour and Denmark and all the personal things [Eddie went through a divorce from childhood sweetheart Beth Liebling shortly before Roskilde Festival], I just disappeared for about a year. While I was in a place where no one could find me, I was really becoming… well, part of my process surviving that whole period, the choices I made put me in a position where I stripped myself down to the basic animal type human being, living of the land. So, when that happened, I just felt a connection with nature, I did not really panic. If I had been in Seattle working and took a little vacation, and an accident like that would have happened, it would have been completely different, as opposed to being out in the wild for a long stretch of time. I was feeling really at peace and trying to figure out how to get out of the situation. It was a fishing boat that saved us – the only fishing boat that was out that day because of the weather. It just happened to see us and only because we had paddles. The two girls had their paddles, they waved them, and the fisherman’s daughter saw us, because otherwise we were just heading on water, like coconuts you could not see. It was like when something happens, do not react, respond! It was not until about two weeks later that I took a little boat out to visit the scene of the crime, to see how far we were out and the situation we had been in. When I did that, that was when I felt the urge to vomit, because it was probably way worse than I had imagined. When some of the Hawaiian fishermen heard of where it was and what had happened, they were saying “It’s time for you to go back and do more benefits cause your karma has been spent.”
