Yes, that was a very self-absorbed-looking Eddie Vedder—does he look any other way?—hiding beneath a fedora on March 12 during the encores of Neil Finn's Coach House show. Vedder has been one of Finn's good buds for a while—going back at least as long as Pearl Jam have been covering “I Got You” in concert. Finn made that tune famous in his pre-Crowded House band Split Enz. Vedder, who contributes a cameo on Finn's new live disc, 7 Worlds Collide, was among several celeb performers/guests spotted on- and offstage at the Coach House. Others included guitarist Wendy Melvoin, long ago of Prince's band the Revolution; fiddler Lisa Germano; Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg; comedian Margaret Cho; and, more locally, Shon Sullivan (a.k.a. Goldenboy), late of Moonwash but lately in both Finn's and Elliot Smith's bands. Vedder joined Finn for takes on the old Hunters N Collectors nugget “Throw Your Arms Around Me” and “History Never Repeats,” one of the bigger Split Enz smashes. During one break, Eddie took the mic and started spouting kind words for the Coach House. “I've been to this place many times,” said Vedder, who used to drive up the 5 when he lived in San Diego during his pre-fame days; he was a big follower of an Oingo Boingo spinoff group called Food for Feet. “I'm glad to see it still thriving.” (Rich Kane)
EDDIE LOVES GARY, TOO
During his shout-out of Coach House love, Vedder also mumbled something about club owner Gary Folgner having just three months to live. Wha . . .? So the next day, we put in a call to Folgner, who was running around as undying-like as ever at the Finn show. Folgner told us that he was recently diagnosed with diverticulitis, a nasty intestinal inflammation that, according to our American Heritage College Dictionary, causes “fecal stagnation and pain.” Ouch! The part about doctors giving Folgner a final countdown was indeed true, he says. “I was bleeding, and they said I had just a 30 percent chance of living, so I had surgery about a month ago.” Folgner says he didn't know if he would survive. “They cut out about 15 feet of my large intestine. I got nine units of blood and was on life support for two days. But it all ended up working out perfectly.” Folgner says his health improves a little bit each day. “I'm doing really well—I've made it,” he says. “The past two weeks have been good. I can't do any heavy lifting, but hopefully, I'll live to be an old sucker.” (RK)
Free Speech Seigal
THE WEEKLY LOVES BUDDY
Fond of reading the free-speech-loving Buddy Seigal in the music pages of your Weekly? Well, you don't know how good you've got it, bub! Other less-interesting rags get somewhat squeamish over Seigal's colorful prose. According to the San Diego Reader, that city's major daily, the Union-Tribune, was forced to stop its press run two weeks ago after editors discovered that the word “shit” had somehow appeared in Seigal's column (under the name of his alter ego, Buddy Blue) in the U-T's entertainment section—but it wasn't even his fault! “It was a copy editor's error, which I seem to be getting blamed for in sideways fashion,” Seigal tells us. According to the Reader, some 25,000 copies of the U-T were printed up and distributed before the problematic four-letter word was found. More hilarious was a memo to U-T employees, sent out from a copy editor: “You have probably heard of our little problem with the word 'shit' finding its way into . . . today's run. When we proofread the Buddy Blue column, Blue Notes . . . we marked a few expressions that were of questionable taste, among them 'old fart,' 'crapola' and 'pooh-butts.' We decided that 'old fart' is not a term suitable for our newspaper in almost any context. But, in an effort to preserve Blue's 'edgy' style as much as possible, I allowed the use of 'crapola' in the body text but asked that it not be echoed in a caption. I also let pass a reference to 'pooh-butt' at the end of the column.” The memo further explained that during the proofreading process, the word “pooh-butt” had been marked as “stet,” a proofreading term that indicates a word or phrase should be left alone. But a computer person read the word as “shit” and replaced it as such. “We should not allow the crude terminology such as 'crapola,' 'old fart' and 'pooh-butts' to make it past even the first level of the editing process,” the memo continued. Meanwhile, come experience the musical side of Seigal's talents as his old band, the Beat Farmers, fire off another reunion gig at the Coach House on March 29. (RK)
