On June 24, 1995, Pearl Jam was playing a show at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. But they only got about seven songs in before frontman Eddie Vedder excused himself from the remaining set. He’d been in the hospital with severe food poisoning earlier, but left to make an attempt to play for 50,000 fans. He later admitted that he didn’t like that he’d left the show, even though he was seriously ill.
He explained his exit by saying that Neil Young was there to make a guest appearance with Pearl Jam. Young took over vocal duties for Vedder and finished the show to placate disappointed fans. But for Vedder, Young’s appearance felt like both a blessing and a curse.
A blessing, because he was able to recover from his illness in the hospital sooner. But a curse because he felt he should have worked through the sickness anyway.
“Looking back, I should have got through that show somehow, and I think the fact that Neil [Young] was there made me feel like I could get off the hook in some way, and I did go out for a few songs,” Vedder said in 2001.
“I just didn’t feel good about the whole thing, I felt swallowed up by the whole deal,” he continued. “It was just a situation where you couldn’t go to work. But I think now I’d probably get through that show.”
Eddie Vedder Writes “Red Mosquito” After Severe Food Poisoning Experience
Following the experience, Eddie Vedder wrote “Red Mosquito”, which appeared on Pearl Jam’s 1996 album No Code. It wasn’t released as a single, but became an unexpected hit with fans.
“That whole [Golden Gate Park] thing was a blur based on some bad food,” Vedder said in 2001. “It was really, really bad. Looking back at it, it doesn’t seem as intense as it was, but it was horrible. I just felt not human.”
That moment was a turning point for Pearl Jam, actually. They canceled the rest of the dates on their short summer tour, making the decision after the others saw Vedder trying to push himself to perform through sickness in San Francisco.
“That day you could see he was totally sick but still trying to push himself,” guitarist Stone Gossard told the Los Angeles Times in 1996. “When we saw what was happening, the band finally said, ‘This is insane. We’ve got to stop.’ We couldn’t let him feel like he’s got to tour because we’re expecting it from him.”
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How “Red Mosquito” relates to the situation comes from the feeling of containment, of being trapped. Vedder’s lyrics speak to confinement in a room with a mosquito hovering over him. “Watched from the window with a red mosquito / I was not allowed to leave the room” are the first lines to open the song, setting a claustrophobic scene.
Reading later interviews with Pearl Jam discussing that time in their career puts that song into perspective. While No Code didn’t do nearly as well as the band’s early albums, “Red Mosquito” still broke the Top 40 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Chart. But for a few years after 1994, Pearl Jam struggled. Kurt Cobain’s death didn’t help. Neither did their rejection of Ticketmaster, which frustrated fans who felt they were never able to catch the band live.
“We all got together after that and talked things over,” said Gossard of the San Francisco show. “Why are we in a band? Do we really like each other? Do we really want to play music together?” He added that after those discussions, “It was a new beginning.”
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