With his growly, lacerated blues howl and heart-on-sleeve alt-rock anthems,
Eddie Vedder led grunge heroes Pearl Jam to worldwide success in the 1990s,
building a reputation as a principled, socially conscious songwriter with a
soul-wrenching, thunderbolt of a voice. Born Edward Severson III on December 23,
1964, in suburban Evanston, Illinois, he started playing guitar at the age of 12
and took up surfing when his family moved to San Diego, California in the
mid-1970s. When his parents divorced, he discovered that he had been living with
his stepfather and not his biological fat...