Howard Zinn interviews Eddie Vedder

[Adenoid_Hynkel]

Interview magazine, March 1999

HZ: Was it your reading that got you so interested in the world beyond music, in social issues? Or was it something else?

EV: I think for me, it stems from having had nothing, and knowing how scary that can be, and knowing that no one is going to help you and that you're gonna raise your hand and no one will call on you. We were hard-working, ambitious young folks, and I remember thinking, Man, there might not be any way out of here. I don't know how we're gonna get anything more, if we'll be able to afford to travel. How big is our world going to be? Is it going to be the apartment to the bus to the job and back again? How much of life will we get to experience?

HZ: So in your case, thinking about other people who had little emerged from the fact that you yourself had so little.

EV: Yeah. I still remember how it feels.

HZ: I think that's the thing: remembering how it feels. There are people who have had very little, but then become successful, prosperous, well known, and they forget - or maybe they choose to forget, maybe that's easier - what it was like, what it is like for other people. My parents were poor; we lived in the slums of New York. My father was a waiter with a fourth-grade education; my mother had a seventh-grade education and she was the educated one in the family! Actually, she was a very smart woman, and my father was a hardworking man trying to keep his family alive. Being aware of that, looking at how hard my father worked, at my mother taking care of four sons, and then at the end, seeing them having nothing to show for it, nothing . . . From that paint on, for the rest of my lifo, I never believed anyone when they said - some of my students would say this to me, and my students came from well-off families - "Oh, my father made it; in this country if you work hard, you'll make it." The implication being, if you didn't make it, you didn't work hard. And I knew that wasn't true.

more at:http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1285/is_3_29/ai_54133680/

[cali]

1. except he didn't grow up having nothing.

[paulsby]

2. pearl jam is a great band

but in stuff like this eddie vedder starts to delve into bono territory, and i don't say that in a good way.

he just takes himself WAY WAY WAY too seriously. he's a guy from the pacific NW with a good voice, a kick-ass rock band, and a decent head on his shoulders. that's great.

but god knows, he's not a sage, and eddier vedder discussing politics is like jim morrison's poetry. it makes me cringe