Remembrance of Pearl Jam Past

If you’re of a certain age, you may remember the photo. It’s the one where Eddie Vedder is clinging to the scaffolding high above a stage, climbing it like a schoolyard kid scaling monkey bars.

Vedder hangs from the rafters in Seattle's Magnuson Park at a September 1992 concert.

Lance Mercer

There were actually a few photos of him clambering to heights or diving into crowds — alas, there’s no photo of the time he climbed like King Kong to the top of the Space Needle to unscrew a light bulb and mail it to a reporter. But the one that sticks in my memory is from Pearl Jam’s epochal 1992 performance at Seattle’s Moore Theatre. That’s where they recorded the video for “Even Flow.” For many of us, it’s the video that launched the grunge era, and one we watched on MTV more times than we care to count. 

I was in the mosh pit that night, watching ecstatically as Vedder climbed off the stage and onto the walls. My Seattle music photographer friend Lance Mercer, now 57, captured an iconic image of the audience reaching up to Vedder in a spotlight. I remember that night so vividly, and the excitement of watching Vedder become a grunge Spider-Man, without a care for his safety. At the time, we were all so young and blissfully unaware of our own mortality. My only thought was, “Yeah, that f---ing rocks!” 

I look at Vedder’s climbing photos today, in my 60s, and it’s hard not to cringe. One slip of the fingers and he would’ve dropped, and possibly become paralyzed. These are thoughts that you only have at middle age. In your 20s, you think you’re indestructible.

At one point during the show, Vedder jumped from the wall — maybe eight feet from the ground — and hit his shin on a seat. Ignoring the pain, he limped back to the stage and finished the concert. After it was all over, Vedder told me that when he’d crowd-surfed the balcony, fans passed him from hand to hand, and he could feel the strong hands and the weak ones, the male and female, and their energy kept him aloft. Paul McCartney once said it was the British music scene’s energy and genius that produced the Beatles, not vice versa. That night, Vedder felt the same vibe.

When I look back on those beautiful years — and it’s been over three decades now — I don’t think of Seattle’s grunge scene as it’s often remembered, with scowling kids in plaid belting out tunes about their misery. I think of joy. That musical era wasn’t as dark as its reputation. It was often fun and silly. When bands took the stage after too many cocktails, fumbling drunkenly through their songs, crowds would sometimes playfully throw paper beer cups at them in protest. Mudhoney once mocked Soundgarden (a more commercially successful band) by playing a gig under the name “Beer Garden.” Another band, with the decidedly nonmainstream name The Thrown Ups, played a show while wearing “zit pants” — garbage-bag sweatpants that, when squeezed, splattered the audience with shaving cream.