Friday, June 15, 2012

4

From the fall of 1991 until the end of 1992, Vedder took the concept of the stage dive to its endgame. He would climb on any structure that could be climbed--scaffolding, lighting rigs, whatever--finding the highest point in the venue, putting himself in intentional serious danger, terrifying everybody. (It is not known whether this practice subconsciously influenced my mid-2000's taste for drunkenly climbing trees. This habit once left me hanging upside-down by my knees, pants torn, in a friend's parents' suburban New Jersey home in the middle of winter. Eventually, cooler heads prevailed.) He would then, if at all possible, launch himself from that spot into the crowd. (This whole ritual is immortalized in the video for "Evenflow".) Every subsequent stage dive has seemed to me pale and canned by comparison.

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