Can’t Find a Vedder Man?

A little more light has been shed on Mets announcer Keith Hernandez, Eddie Vedder, and that band Vedder fronts [see previous post]. I contacted my cousin Tim Donnelly, who’s a rock journalist, and woke him up at his hotel somewhere near the Bonnaroo Festival in the muddy wilds of Tennessee. Tim has known the Pearl Jam guys for years, and his profile of the band is slated for the August issue of Relix magazine.

The solo Vedder, shares cousin Tim, has popped up on movie soundtracks such as Dead Man Walking (“The Long Road”) and I Am Sam (a cover of the Beatles’ “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”). And before concerts, he’ll sometimes strap the guitar on and do a solo song before introducing the warm-up act.

So perhaps Hernandez is intimately familiar with Vedder’s soundtrack work, and even caught, say, a lone-wolf version of “World Wide Suicide” prior to a Pearl Jam performance? Not likely, surmises Donnelly. “[Hernandez] was probably just talking out of his a**,” he says.

As an aside, Vedder may be a bigger fan of baseball than Keith Hernandez is of Eddie Vedder. Cousin Tim shares that Vedder recently called Red Sox GM Theo Epstein onstage in Boston to help out with the guitar work in Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.” And on Mother’s Day, Vedder sang “Take Met Out to the Ballgame” at a Cubbies game at Wrigley.
By Michael Malone