Eddie Vedder gave a shoutout to former NESN cameraman John Martin, who currently is battling ALS, during Pearl Jam’s concert at Fenway Park on Tuesday night. Alternative Nation transcribed his comments.
“Thank you to my good friend Theo Epstein, that’s how I met all these cats. He sends his love I know, and I send it back. There’s another fella, part of the Red Sox family, he works on the video team, his name is John Martin. He’s got a great wife Adrian, and two daughters, and he was given some rough news fairly recently, I think last year, that part of his family’s future was to rise up and deal with something as heavy as ALS. So they have been dealing with it in a very dignified way, also they’ve been supported by their community big and large, large and small.”
He also said, “I wanted him to know that he has my support, our support. We’re very familiar because of our friend Steve Gleason. The energy of large groups of people, it has a lot of power. I got to tell you, when we go home we’re just guys in Seattle with kids, we do the laundry a little bit. We fix things around the house, take our kids on bike rides, get them to school, go to orientation things. We just feel like members of the community, proud members of the community. You don’t feel like somebody who would be able to stand in front of all of these people.”
He then appeared to call the crowd ‘family.’
“Saying it just makes it more incredible than you can even imagine, I just want to take this opportunity when talking about large groups of people, to thank everyone.”
Watch the video below, where Vedder gets choked up.
