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Mike In Crohns Disease Live Webcast

HealthTalk.com, a leading health information web site for patients and caregivers, proudly presents a free educational Webcast with Crohn's patient and rock star Mike McCready.

"Imagine yourself playing music for thousands of screaming fans and you suddenly need to run offstage to go to the bathroom. This nightmare has been my reality many times," says Pearl Jam's lead guitarist Mike McCready.

Find out how he slowed his flares by sacrificing his rock star habits in favor of exercise and eating right and biologic medicine. Get a positive and realistic perspective on life with Crohn's disease from someone who has been through it all.

Join the conversation online, broadcast live from the HealthTalk.com Studio, at 7:00 PM EDT/6:00 CT/4:00 PM PT on October 9, 2007, with Mike McCready as he shares his stories about life as a celebrity coping with Crohn's disease.

Green River Are Back... For One Night Only!

Stone Gossard says rumors his pre-Pearl Jam band Green River will reunite in the summer of 2008 for a Sub Pop 20th anniversary concert are indeed true!

"Pearl Jam has toured with Mudhoney, so we played with [former Green River members] Mark [Arm] and Steve [Turner]," he reports. "But we haven't played with Alex [Vincent] and Bruce [Fairweather] in quite a while. They're both excited about it, from everything I've heard."

And as for Pearl Jam, the group is taking a break following a summer European tour.

A live DVD filmed by photographer Danny Clinch, "Immagine in Cornice," was released last week. "We're in that period of time where we actually allow ourselves to not know what's going to happen next, which is great," Gossard says.

Brad Announce Comeback Shows

Brad will come back together for a special evening in New York City.

A Celebration of Woody and Marjorie Guthrie To Benefit Huntington's Disease Society of America (HDSA) will feature Brad and Billy Bragg and is hosted by Tim Robbins, with some very special guests.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007 at 7pm at the intimate Webster Hall 125 E 11th Street.

Ten Club members are invited to take part in the private pre-sale for this event going on now. Click here for tickets! The special pre-sale password is: HDSA

The event hits particularly close to home for Brad/Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard, whose wife's mother, brother and grandfather have suffered with Huntington's. Woody Guthrie is the most prominent name associated with the disease, a rare neurological disorder that is somewhat akin to Parkinson's disease or multiple sclerosis.

There is no cure for Huntington's, but symptoms can be managed with medication.

"There are so many people in the HD community that don't have the care they need," Gossard told www.Billboard.com. "We wanted to support both the care that people get for HD through local chapters and any scientific breakthroughs that may be on the horizon."

While in New York, Brad will play a separate headlining show on Oct. 16 at the Highline Ballroom.

Gossard has also finished tweaking a batch of material the band recorded in 2004 but is just now ready to release, comprising the songs "Every Whisper," "Rush Hour," "No Regrets," "Price of Love," "One Love Remains," "Low," "Bless Me Father," "Believe in Yourself," "Oh Goodness," "Luxury Car" and "Holiday."

In addition, the band has acquired the rights to its first two albums for Epic, plus albums from connected groups such as Satchel and Malkfunksun, and is hoping to reissue the projects at some point in the future. "We're trying to figure out how to play a little bit more often," Gossard says. "We want to keep the band alive."

Weekly News Round-Up

- Ed's Solo Album, Into The Wild, was released in the US on Tuesday! If you haven't bought a copy yet, what have you been doing with your life? Get down to your local record store now! ;)

- If you can't be bothered to leave the house, then you can still get your hands on an extended version on itunes, with 4 bonus tracks:

1. No More
2. Photographs (Instrumental)
3. Here's To The State (Live At VH1 Storytellers)
4. No More (Live In Nijmegan)

- In other Into The Wild news, Ed will appear with Sean Penn on The Charlie Rose Show on Monday at 1:30 on WNED. Check out Charlies website at http://www.charlierose.com/home

- Ed has also fuelled rumors of an impending solo tour of clubs by talking in surfing metaphors in Rolling Stone, saying:

"If you surf fifty-foot waves all the time, you can't try too many new things, because fifty-foot waves are kind of life and death. Playing big shows is like that. So you want to take on some smaller waves to rework or refine what you do, and then take it back to the big surf."

- And finally, Ed continues his mission to single handedly bankrupt us all before Christmas, with the news a release date has been set for the DVD release of the Johnny Ramone documentary, Too Tough To Die. Its 3rd December, and you can pre-order it from almost any major online retailer.

- Remember, next Monday/Tuesday (depending where you live) is the release of the new PJ DVD, Immagine In Cornice, so be sure to grab a copy! If you live in the UK, Into The Wild is released on the same day!

Immagine In Cornice Spoilers

- Ed's solo version of Immortality from the Verona soundcheck is featured.

- A studio version of Picture In A Frame cover plays while Eddie sweeps the ruins of the Pistoia tower (image from the DVD cover).

- There are loads of cameras all over the place during the concert, including one staged just under the roof of the stage. There are slow-motion shots as well.

- There are shots of Eddie and his daughter, band spontanouesly changing the setlist backstage, Mike talking to the fans in front of a Bologna hotel, Mike explaining his tattoos, Eddie talking to an Italian translator, Jeff riding his skateboard, Eddie and Boom talking with the Principal of the local music school...

- Eddie and Mike play an acoustic version of Lukin laughing their asses off.

- Betterman is incomplete.

- Boom plays his own composition "Heaven Can You Here Me Now?"

- A new interpretation of "Alive" will be featured called "Donato's Dance", by Rami Jaffee of The Wallflowers, also a touring member of the Foo Fighters on their Skin & Bones tour and upcoming Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace tour, on the accordion.

- There is an accompanying 24-page booklet with photos.

- Most of the behind-the-scenes footage is dedicated to Eddie; Matt and Stone are barely featured

- The DVD is 113 minutes long (not sure if this includes the bonus features as well).

- Danny Clinch devoted a lot of time to the fans as well; there are footage of various fans from Israel, Sweden, Finland...

YouTube Video Of The Week

This week, as we count down the days until the release of Immagine In Cornice, we get a sneek peak at what to expect, including Jeff discussing how setlists are drawn up, Mike revealing the meaning behind his tattoos, the band arriving in Pistoia, Ed & Mike playing Lukin acoustic on the streets of Milan, and a clip of the band playing Life Wasted!



To us, it seems 'Immagine' is going to mix all the good bits of the performance DVDs like LATG and the documentary style behind the scenes style of Single Video Theory - all in all, this is gonna be awesome!

Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment, let us know :)

Time Magazine & Entertainment Weekly Ed Interviews

Entertainment Weekly:

After 17 years fronting Pearl Jam, the Seattleite is stepping out on his own this fall, contributing songs to two very socially conscious films.

How did Sean Penn, who directed Into the Wild, get you to participate?
We'd just finished touring with Pearl Jam, and Sean called my second day off. I remember watching the movie the first time--it was just me and Sean sitting on the floor with a pack of smokes--and the whole thing was incredibly moving.

You hadn't read the book?
No. Everyone else I knew had. It's one of those you read in college and then decide you're going to throw away your whole stupid life and run off to the woods and die. Yeah--or live. Learn from his mistakes. I think it will not only affect people who did that stuff, but people who didn't do it, and are wondering why they didn't, having lost that chance.

Did you set out to compose so much of the soundtrack?
Sean just said, "Whatever you wanna do. Maybe it's music, maybe it's a song." So I spent three days giving him colors that I could paint with, 25 minutes of music. I didn't think anything was gonna come out of it. [But] Sean called and was like, "I've already put two pieces in, if you give me five or six more, it could be the interior voice of the character." As a parent, it's gotta be hard to see Wild--watching this kid turn his back on his family. I think parents will learn a lot from this, even if they haven't done anything wrong...yet. It's hard to get through a kid's life without f---ing them up. And no matter how good you are, at some point your kids have to create their own independence. These are troubled times, too. Do you force your kids to pay attention to what's going on, or do you let them live outside of it? My hope is that my child is a strong activist. That would make me most proud.

What if she rebels against your liberal politics and becomes a neo-con?
[Laughs] Aaaah... It would be shocking. It's certainly not in her nature now. She's 3 years old. That's like the height of liberalism. Liberalism comes naturally.

You also worked on Body of War about paralyzed Iraq vet Tomas Young, with codirector Phil Donohue. What stood out to you about the doc?
Plenty of stories have been told about what's criminal about this war. There's the political side, there's the monetary side, it's all intertwined. But this is the human side. It's incredibly violent to me, just watching what Tomas has to go through because he signed up on Sept. 13 and went over to fight the good fight, and he's paralyzed almost upon arrival. One casualty, of which I think now we have over 25,000.

So you surely have vast plans for election season?
Um, I'm gonna vote. [Laughs] I'd like people to be educated on the voting machines, making sure our democracy isn't being hijacked by computer technology. We had Diebold machines when I worked at a gas station in 1989, so trucking companies could keep track of the gas they used. I know these machines really well. And there's no reason why they can't have a paper trail.

Will there be any Vote for Change-type activity this time around?
Maybe we'll just play Ohio. For a month. Ohio and Florida.

Time Magazine (Ed w/Sean Penn):

They're both rich and famous, they're both notoriously earnest and left-leaning, they both have reputations for being emotionally tortured. So it makes a kind of cosmic sense that Sean Penn and Pearl Jam front man Eddie Vedder would be friends; they have been since 1995, when Vedder wrote music for Dead Man Walking, in which Penn starred. Both are currently experiencing second acts, Penn as a director and Vedder as a film composer.

The duo have now collaborated: Vedder has written the sound track for Penn's movie Into the Wild, based on the book by Jon Krakauer. Later this month Vedder will release a CD of songs written for or inspired by the movie, the closest thing to a solo album he's ever done.

Into the Wild is the true story of Chris McCandless, a good kid from a prosperous but unhappy family, who left home, burned his money, changed his name to Alexander Supertramp and in 1992 walked off into the Alaskan wilderness. He died there of starvation 16 weeks after he arrived. What was he looking for? Penn and Vedder--who are a lot funnier than they get credit for--talked to Lev Grossman about this and other profound questions, like how you keep a huge grizzly bear happy on a movie set.

What made you pick up Krakauer's book?
PENN: The cover grabbed me--the bus, the image of the bus with the title Into the Wild on it. I've made a lot of decisions in my life that you could call judging a book by its cover. And I've become a real advocate of it. So I took the book home, and I read it cover to cover twice, and I went to sleep in the wee hours and immediately got up in the morning, and I saw in essence the movie that you saw last night.

What was it about what McCandless did that got to you?
PENN: I really think that we shouldn't just accept rites-of-passage opportunities as they come, because what we'll find is that they don't come in our world anymore. And we shouldn't look at them as a kind of luxury or romantic dream but as something vital to being alive. McCandless quotes somebody else in the movie: "If just once you put yourself in the most ancient of circumstances ..." This is where nature comes into it--and I think that Eddie and I share this feeling--that every sober-minded person of any belief would probably agree that the biggest issue is quality of life. You've gotta feel your own life to have a quality of life, and our own inauthenticity, our corruptions, get in the way of that. The wilderness is relentlessly authentic.

Have you ever gone through anything like that? A rite of passage?
PENN: Formatively the experience I had, where I found the beginning of the map to figure out how to feel my own life, would have come from surfing as a kid. My wilderness is the ocean, and my experience with risk and conquering fear was the ocean.
Being alone like that can help people find themselves, but it can also make them fall apart.

VEDDER: See, I love it. I need it. I'm a better person because of it. I mean, I feel really blessed even to have had the opportunity of disappearing on an island or something and not seeing anybody for weeks. It makes me somebody that somebody else could live with. That's another thing, when you talk about the environment and how precious it is: it makes us better people.

How did you get into doing sound tracks, what with being a huge rock star and all? Is it a lot different from doing Pearl Jam?
VEDDER: Yeah, it's easy. Really. I almost don't remember a thing. It was like I kinda went into some weird space for a week or two, and then I woke up out of this daze, and it was done. I don't really remember it.

That doesn't even sound like work.
VEDDER: I was thinking about it yesterday. I don't trust art that was made easy. If there's not some kind of pain involved, then I don't trust it. And I thought, Well, how can I be honest and tell people that it was easy? But what I figured out is that the hard part was 25 years ago, when I went through what this kid went through. I went through pain, but it was just a long time ago. And I guess what's a little bit worrisome to me is how easy it was to access it. You know? That I just had to barely put my finger in. It was right there on the surface. I thought I'd grown up much more. I'm glad there was a use for it, but now I've got to tuck it away again.

So how does it work? Sean, do you just go to Eddie and say, "Here's a bit with a guy hitchhiking. Write a song that would sound good with that"?
PENN: Well, I'd written the script originally structured for songs. I love that kind of thing in movies. I was born in 1960, so you can do the math and figure out that I was just coming into my own with Harold and Maude, and earlier than that, Simon and Garfunkel and The Graduate, and Coming Home. It just added something, letting your songwriter be a co-author of the script in many ways.

VEDDER: It was like a factory, where I would sit in a chair and they'd hand me instruments. We'd just keep going, and I didn't have to teach anybody the part or talk them into the idea, the theory, the soul of whatever the piece was. I'd just sit in the chair, and they'd hand me a fretless bass, and they'd hand me a mandolin, and they'd take a second to do the rough mix, and then I'd write the vocal, and it was just quick. It was as in the moment as you could be, and in that way it's like a great feeling of being alive. You'd hear two pieces at the end of the day--or three--and feel like you were actually doing something on this planet while you were here.

Some of the vocals were wordless, just these howling chants ...
VEDDER: That was all stuff I did not-to-picture. In a way--like the music for the scene on the mountaintop--I don't think I would have done that [if I had seen the footage]. I would have felt too--like if you could be both vulnerable and pretentious at the same time?

PENN: [Laughs.] Leave that to me!

Emile Hirsch [who plays McCandless] goes through a truly shocking physical transformation to show McCandless starving to death. How'd you achieve that?
PENN: Turns out he has phenomenal willpower. A 21-year-old kid, who just got the right to go drinking with the guys in the bar, and he is by choice sober. By choice a monk for eight months. He was in a room watching his feet roll under him on a treadmill or doing pushups or eating another glass of water with lemon in it for dinner every night for eight months. You know, that's really, really hard.

He has a scene with a bear that got some audible gasps.
PENN: He was an 8-ft. 6-in. grizzly bear, and if he wasn't a good bear, I wouldn't be here right now. But no flinching from Emile--he just stood there, six inches away from that thing.

What do you do when the bear's not being a good bear?
PENN: You say, "Good boy," all day long. Or the trainer does. And he gives him a lot of chocolate whipped cream.

McCandless doesn't come off as a saint in the movie. I mean, he won't call his parents even though they're desperate to hear from him. He's angry.
PENN: You know, this is subject to a lot of personal stuff on anybody's part--yours, mine. My answer to "He should have called his parents" is "Who says?" I understand it, but I walked in my shoes, not his shoes. What I do know is that if you're not feeling your life, you are obligated first to do everything it takes to feel your life. I've done many things without the intention of hurting people that have hurt people. And I'm saying this knowing that I've got two kids that are coming up to that age myself right now.

Eddie, you talked before about how much you have in common with McCandless. [Vedder has a famously difficult relationship with his stepfather, as McCandless did with his father.] Did doing the movie help you get over that pain at all?
VEDDER: Not enough. But it'll do for now. I don't think it's gonna go away. I think in the last 10 to 15 years, I've just been able to not let that person and that part of me be in charge--that guy is in the car, but we just don't let him drive. That's something Springsteen told me once, and it really works. He'll be talking in your ear in the backseat, but just don't let him get behind the wheel. And you can be proud of it. I've talked to the people that raised me, and I've thanked them for giving me a lifetime's worth of material. I was talking to Bono in Australia last year, and we mentioned something about family histories, and he was like, Wow, they really gave you some good stuff to write about. It was like he wanted to hug them and thank them.

PENN: My mother was reading this article about me in Esquire last month, and she called me up, and she said [Penn does his mother's voice], "Well, I thought it was an interesting article, but you know, the one thing, every time I'm sitting with you, you have a Diet Coke. Why is it that you're an alcoholic? I'm the alcoholic!" It was as though I'd stolen her mantle!

The thing I can't figure out about Into the Wild is if it's a happy story or a sad one. McCandless experiences so much joy, but then he dies in the end ...
PENN: Let me tell you what I think. My Uncle Bill, who was dying--with 13 cousins that he had all with my Aunt Joan, they had a great, happy marriage for all their years. So there he is on his deathbed. He'd been in a coma a couple of days, and a priest has come in to give last rites. This was the first time, Irish that they are, that my aunt let a tear fall, trusting that his coma would make him unaware of it. Well, open come the eyes, and he sees. He catches her--she can't get away with it. And his last words were "What're ya crying about? You're gonna die too." Chris McCandless lived too short, that's true, but he, in my view, put an entire life from birth to the wisdom of age into those years.

Weekly News Round-Up

- It seems PJ can claim victory in their battle against AT&T, as a spokeswoman for the company said they would no longer be censoring their webcasts, but rather display a message at the bottom of the screen during them, advising viewer discretion

- Ed has been doing the rounds this week, kicking off with a performance at the Into The Wild premiere in Toronto, he played a short 4 song set. He then played two songs at the Body Of War premiere, check out one of them here:



- Eddie is also to appear in yet more movies, this time he will appear in the next Tom Petty DVD, a four-hour documentary titled "Runnin' Down a Dream", in which director Peter Bogdanovich tells the Heartbreakers' story. Vedder, along with other artists such as Stevie Nicks, Dave Grohl and others, will talk about Tom Petty & his historical group's legacy. It hits in October.

- He also appears in Michael Moore's new documentary "Captain Mike Across America", which follows Moore going from stadium to stadium in 62 cities in the dying days of the 2004 presidential campaign for his "Slacker Uprising Tour 2004", bashing US President George W. Bush. Pearl Jam's Ed Vedder and other artists such as Steve Earle, Tom Morello and Joan Baez break up the film with their live performances during several dates of this tour.

- Ed also appeared on Michael Stipe's (R.E.M.) photography website as the photo of the day, rather cheese-tastic, don't you think?



- Chris Cornell has not closed the door on recording a follow-up to Temple Of The Dog, it seems:

"I think some combination of those people making a record is always going to appeal to me. I don't know if it'll be called Temple of the Dog but some collaboration with any combination of those guys, I'll always be open to because it was such a great experience. Quite literally Temple of the Dog is the reason why Audioslave happened as far as I'm concerned. That was the only reason I was really open to it. After Temple of the Dog I felt that I wanted to always keep an open mind in my career about different collaborations because I felt like that was an exciting experience and it taught me that it was totally possible and pretty painless to do it."

- Finally, check out the official video for Ed's new single, Hard Sun:

YouTube Video Of The Week

This week, we check out one of the better fan-made videos for PJ, for the No Code fan favourite, In My Tree.

Leave a comment and let us know what you think...