10 Musicians Who Cheated Death
3. Eddie Vedder's Gymastics
Usually when we're talking about these serious injuries, it often comes down to someone not being on their A-game. No matter how many times people get hurt on the job, it's not like they are intending to put themselves in harms way. That is, unless the music is actually making you pull off death-defying stunts.
Granted, when Eddie Vedder first started singing for Pearl Jam, he was just a timid kid looking to fit in with the new crowd in Seattle. Once he actually hit his stride though, Vedder put his survival skills to good use on the stage. Being an outdoorsman by nature, Vedder would often walk away from the mic stand midway through a song like Porch and start scaling the rafters of the venue. Yeah, that wasn't just a cool shot from the Even Flow video...this really happened every night.
As much as this might have been great to watch, Stone Gossard has said that he was traumatized most of the time, given that he had already lost former singer Andy Wood a few years earlier. It would seem that Vedder has retired the gimmick too after a while, saying that he didn't realize the physical toll it took on him until he bathed and felt the thousands of scratch marks on his back. Hey, there's only so many times you can swing 50 feet above the stage before you realize that you might be hurting yourself.