I first saw Eddie Vedder live in 1994, when he and the band he fronts, Pearl Jam, played the Mid-South Coliseum. The grunge band’s second album, Vs., had recently been released, and the concert was everything my 18-year-old heart could’ve hoped for. Pearl Jam played every song from their debut album, Ten, and all save one (“Rats”) from Vs.
And yet what I remember most of that show isn’t the music but the Vedder’s politics. At one point at the ’94 show, he asked the audience, “Is it okay to be gay in Memphis?” The crowd mostly booed back, “no.” To my present shame, I was one of them. (At least I would eventually outgrow my childlike homophobia.) Vedder had a comeback to the Memphis masses: “Then you’re all a bunch of fucking assholes.”
The musician has been famous for his politics and socially liberal lyrics in his career, culminating, in my mind, with songs from Pearl Jam’s Riot Act, released in 2002, an anti-Bush statement — pre-Iraq War, no less — at a time when it was very unpopular to be so in mainstream music. Vedder was ahead of the curve.