Eddie Vedder has revealed how he reunited with the cameraman who aided one of his most famous stage dives.
As Pearl Jam played PinkPop Festival in 1992, Vedder climbed onto a camera crane that was filming their performance – before undertaking a death defying dive into the crowd.
And as Vedder returned to the festival with Pearl Jam last weekend, he explained how he finally received the chance to reunite with the camera man earlier this year.
“Someone sent me a postcard with the picture of me jumping from that little thing, and in the picture, there is the cameraman who looks at me like he wants to fuckin’ kill me, and I realize he has every right to do so. I’ve never seen him since, and I see this thing in the hallway of my house and it reminds me of that day, and I wonder what happened to that guy. Is he still pissed off?”, Vedder explained.
“So when we were in Amsterdam the other night I met a local and asked if there was any way to find him. And we did! And he’s here, he retired in January.”
But while Vedder was convinced that he’d angered the cameraman, he in fact saw a very different view of things.
“Here is the thing, he told me a completely different story than I had in my mind this whole time. I thought he was so angry at me, but he was having other guys hold that thing to hold the back, the ballast, otherwise when I jumped on and we just would have gone down. So he wasn’t yelling at me, but to other guys to hold us up”, Vedder said of their meeting.
“So then to go to the front but not quite, and then when I try to make it, which I felt like I was going to be that short, and forever be this short. When he’s yelling, he’s not yelling at me, he’s yelling into the mic for the guys to jump off the back, because once I jumped he would have gone shooting into the fucking atmosphere. So the whole time, we were working in tandem but we had no clue whatsoever. He hasn’t been angry at me this whole time, and I just feel so fuckin’ forgiven.”
