Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder took a moment to pay tribute to grunge pioneer Mark Lanegan, who died Tuesday at age 57, at his concert in Seattle last night, Feb. 22.
“I got here about four o’clock and all of a sudden my body started shaking a little bit,” Vedder told the audience (per a fan-shot video). “I started to feel really terrible and I think it was because I was having an allergic reaction to sadness. Because we lost … there’s a guy called Mark Lanegan. You know, there are a lot of really great musicians, some people know Seattle because of the musicians that have come out of the great Northwest. Some of those guys were one of a kind singers. Mark was certainly that and with such a strong voice.”
Vedder added: “It’s hard to come to terms, at least at this point. He’s gonna be deeply missed, and at least we will always have his voice to listen to and his words and his books to read, he wrote two incredible books in the last few years. Just wanted to process it and put it out there, let his wife and loved ones know that people in his old stomping grounds have been thinking about him and we love him.”
As frontman for Screaming Trees, Lanegan crossed paths with Pearl Jam in the Seattle grunge scene. Even after the group disbanded in 2000, Lanegan continued to write, record, and tour as a solo musician and with groups like Queens of the Stone Age. For the last few years, Lanegan had been living in Ireland, after moving there from Los Angeles. There, he made plans to work on more music and write more books to follow up the memoirs Sing Backwards and Weep and Devil in a Coma.
From Rolling Stone US
