Eddie Vedder inducts REM Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductions 2007

to induct remm into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame please welcome Eddie better good night uh yeah you know when you were a kid growing up in school if you ever daydreamed about be a musician with the most attractive aspects you can imagine. The idea of ​​getting paid to play music was that you would never have to write another article or give an oral presentation again, but here we are and I must say that I feel enormously honored that rm's music is truly comprehensive and that they used it. Every color on the palette they have, they have invented colors on their own and the story of how they came together couldn't be written, especially considering tonight.

You couldn't write more romantic and that's Michael Styp and Peter Buck. they first met at a record store where Peter was working their first conversation their first argument um was about Patty Smith's first four records uh drummer Bill Barry and point guard Etc. Mike Mills uh they met in high school they played together in high school band two pairs of friends meet at college in Athens. 27 years later, they are being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. You see how I cut the middle to move it forward, but there are a couple of things I need to address and The hardest one was Michael Sty and how do you explain the dialogue between Michael and The Listener?

A dialogue that grew and we grew with it. There is so much wisdom in the feelings of these songs that I think they helped us find things. that thing that we knew was inside of us and I think they helped us find things that we didn't know we had inside of us and I can say that personally there are things that I have and feel very deeply in here that Michael Styp put Right there, all of this happens without being able to understand nothing I was saying, these are the first records and, um, and it was, it's such a beautiful thing, so beautiful, and it's so open to interpretation, all of this, you know, I was very lucky.

In the summer of 1984 I got to see RM play live at a small venue in Chicago and it changed the way I listen to music and what I listen to because after that I started listening to them exclusively and at that time. They only had one and a half albums um and I've done the math so I'm not exaggerating but this album I mutter I must if it's 44 I mutter if I take 3 months during that summer of '84 and and I do the math and mutters last approximately 44 minutes. I think I listened to it 1,260 times and one of the reasons I listened to it so incessantly is because I had to know what he was saying, he's a real poet, he can, he can be direct, he can be completely. abstract, he can hit an emotion with pinpoint precision or he can be completely oblique and everything resonates, that's Michael.

I love him. Peter Buck plays guitar like a guy who works in a record store and when I say that, I mean that, it's not necessarily. derived from all this music is that he knows how to play the guitar, he knows his music very well, but it's more of a thing where he plays through the holes and invents things and hits points that haven't been covered yet and I think from that mode drives the progression of

rock

and

roll

uh I think about him and his beautiful daughters and what he's helped pave a way for alternative music uh for bands like Nirvana and radio head and and forever after that um from a store from records in Athens to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a tremendous journey.

Now if RM had a secret weapon I would say he was Mr. Mike Mills, he plays bass piano on several instruments and is the writer of a genius music composer, but I think he is the secret weapon. it's his voice um it's uh it's not really a background voice it's almost like a second lead voice to Vo and I think that's really what makes a lot of his songs absolutely haunting um and he's SEC he's stealthy , is it stealthy or, actually, actually. He was stealthy until about 14 years ago when he started wearing these really bright colored suits with huge embroidery and rhinestones and it's a brave moment because this, you know, grunge, was around the time when grunge was in, so this was now.

I don't know if you know this story about drummer Bill Barry, but right around that time, the era of the um suits or the Mike suits, uh, Bill Barry has a uh, heh, he's playing in Switzerland and in the middle of a show , an aneurysm. explodes on his head and he almost dies and um I think I read somewhere where a strobe light could have been activated by you but I was thinking it could have been one of Mike's suits, the orange one, maybe so in all seriousness uh Peter Bucka said that if they weren't in Switzerland at the time and they had fantastic doctors, he might not have lived and Bill is recovering after a couple of months of intense rehabilitation and then the hardest obstacle they've ever had to overcome. it was when when Bill had to say he didn't think he could keep playing with them and he did when he did he said but I need to know you're going to continue and in his own words he said I can't be the jerk who broke up RM and to his relief, They went on and did amazing things.

As a fan, it's an incredibly exciting feeling to see you here tonight, but what I'm saying is that it doesn't matter what we can give you. Back in the form of Dishonor, it will never equal what they have given us and this is not to mention social causes and activism, which should not be a postscript, they have taught us a lot about that too and in They urged us and that is why I am really in debt and I say this as a representative of so many and I say thank you for me and for the great number of people around the world who have been moved by them and by some strange power invested in I right now, I hereby induct Aran into the Hall of Rock and Roll Fame.