The 1990s band that was everything Neil Young needed: “Great music”
Neil Young didn’t like to have limitations on virtually anything that he made.
He was content to work with anything and everything as long as it had a good idea behind it, and even though Crosby, Stills and Nash had the perfect lineup in many respects, it didn’t take long before Young eventually got bored and started moving on to better things. He wanted the chance to be free and work with ideas that he wasn’t sure of, but he knew that he couldn’t go wrong when he had musicians that he could trust behind him.
But the idea of him spending all of his life with Crazy Horse was bound to be a bit tricky. He liked the idea of making music that had a bit more of a punch to it, but when you look at some of the more subdued records that he made, a lot of them get their appeal from the idea of you listening to just one person. Not every song needed to blow out your eardrums, but there were a few times where Young did become a bit lost along the way.
Being able to call your own shots is the kind of creative freedom most people dream of, but when you look at the music Young was putting out in the 1980s, that could also be a problem as well. There was never anyone less equipped to handle the era of MTV than Young, and even though he tried his hand at making music that fit in with the zeitgeist like Landing on Water, it’s not really up there with his classics by any stretch.
If anything, he could have benefited from just being himself every single time he played. Freedom was the most authentic version of himself that he had shown the world in a while, and since the rest of the world was about change once grunge came in, Young was no longer a relic of the past. He was the wise sage that predicted what the Seattle scene was going to sound like, and Pearl Jam were practically his musical sons based on the way that they operated.
Eddie Vedder wanted to stay as true to himself as possible, and he wasn’t afraid to put his career on the line the same way that Young did. He figured that it was better for him to peel back from the limelight every now and again, and when the band ended up working with Young on Mirror Ball, Young got to see first hand the kind of chops that these kids had every single time they played one of his songs.
Young was still going to march to the beat of his own drum, but he would have been just fine if all he had to work with was Pearl Jam for the rest of his life, saying, “I’ll tell you what: If all I had was Pearl Jam, and I didn’t have another band in the world, I would not be worried. Because in there is the essence of making great music. You don’t have to use it all at once, but it’s there.” And it’s not like the guys in Pearl Jam would have been against that idea, either.
The last few years of playing in Pearl Jam had done a number on them, and working with Young without Vedder gave them a bit more confidence to work with each other a lot better. That record helped remind everyone that they were still a band and just as important as Vedder, and being able to jam with one of the greatest rock and roll stars of all time wasn’t lost on them when they plugged in.
So while the version ‘Rockin’ In the Free World’ Young played with them at the MTV Awards was a piece of musical history, it was only the beginning of that musical love affair. Everyone in the were beyond thrilled to work together, and there wasn’t anything that could replace someone like Young actually approving of what they were doing.
