Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [260]
STONE GOSSARD Well, this particular show, the barrier was 30 meters away; it was dark and raining. They’d been serving beer all day long. People fell down; the band had no idea.
BRETT ELIASON A security guard had seen a hole where a kid had been and was smart enough to react. He said something to our stage manager, who ran to our production manager, Dick Adams, and said, “I think we have a problem out there.” Dick ran straight onto the stage and told Ed in the middle of “Daughter.” Ed stopped the band and he asked this huge crowd to take a step back, and they did. He asked them to take another step back, and they did. And that’s when they saw a bunch of bodies on the ground.
I remember watching Ed drop to his knees. At that point, Dick corralled the band and got them offstage.
BILLBOARD (“Loss of Life Fails to Halt Festival; Nine Killed as Crowd Rushes Stage During Pearl Jam Set,” by Kai R. Lofthus, July 15, 2000) OSLO—Danish police have confirmed that the organizers of Denmark’s Roskilde Festival will not face prosecution following the death of nine concertgoers at the event June 30. A spokesman for the authorities tells Billboard that they regard the tragedy as an accident and not a criminal case. The fans, aged between 17 and 26, died as a result of a crowd crush during Pearl Jam’s headline set. Another 30 people were hospitalized.
STONE GOSSARD We were part of an event that was disorganized on every level. Mostly I feel like we witnessed a car wreck. But on another level, we were involved. We played this show, and it happened. You can’t be there and not have some sense of being responsible. It’s just impossible. All of us spent two days in the hotel in Denmark crying and trying to understand what was going on.
NANCY WILSON I got a call in the afternoon from Kelly, who was freaking out, and he told me everything that happened firsthand—how they saw people being hauled off the stage right in front of them that were already dead. We were crying on the phone together because rock and roll is not supposed to be a war zone.
KELLY CURTIS The reason those people died was that no one could get word out what was happening. It was just chaos. There was a lot of Danish press that said we were inciting moshing. It wasn’t during a crazy part of the set; it was during “Daughter.”
EDDIE VEDDER The intensity of the whole event starts to seem surreal, and you want it to be real. So you sit there with it, and you cough it up and redigest it. You still want to pay respect to the people who were there or the people who died and their families. Respect for the people who cared about you. A friend of an Australian guy named Anthony Hurley asked if I would write something for the funeral. That was just hands-down the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do—not really knowing what was appropriate, not knowing how the family or friends felt; maybe I’m the last person they’d like to hear from. But it meant a lot to them, and it really helped me. I think it also helped the rest of the guys. Hurley had three younger siblings, and they said he really cared about our band, and that’s why he was in the front. And that he was actually doing something he loved during his last minutes. His sister and a friend of his—who was with Anthony that night—came to Seattle and saw our last two shows. And that was nice, spending time with them.…
JEFF AMENT Some of us thought maybe we should cancel the [North American] tour. I felt if we cancel, what are we running from? It made us deal with it every day on some level, and that was the most positive thing we could do. The shows were all reserved-seating, which made it a lot easier. At first, it was hard to look at the crowd. A couple of kids I saw at Roskilde, they’re burned in my memory forever. Sometimes, when you’re looking at a crowd, you can’t help but see those faces.
The Vegas show on the U.S. tour was pretty heavy. That afternoon was the first time we’d played the Mother Love Bone song “Crown of Thorns.” Kelly and Susan Silver