The 1995 song that made Neil Young love Pearl Jam: “It sounds good”
It was going to take more than just a fad in rock and roll to impress Neil Young.
Half of his greatest songs are usually about someone stripping things down and telling a story that couldn’t be told by a team of songwriters, so if he was going to give lip service to a band, they needed to be wearing their heart on their sleeve to some degree. But even after soldiering through the 1980s, the era of grunge felt like the moment that he got his second wind all over again when jamming with Pearl Jam.
Because when you think about it, Young didn’t need to change a whole lot of his sound to make music that grunge kids could get behind. He was already playing by his own rules since the days when he first started making After the Gold Rush, and since people like Kurt Cobain were bringing rock and roll back to its roots, all Young had to do was stay true to himself and play the music that he’d been playing all his life.
The 1980s already weren’t kind to him on albums like Landing on Water, but Eddie Vedder could have practically been his adopted son in many respects. Neither of them cared about the corporate side of rock and roll by any means, and even when they did play on MTV, they were going to do it on their terms instead of trying to mug for the camera. But, really, Young’s choice to work with Pearl Jam had more to do with the band than Vedder; half the time they performed.
Vedder had already been working the band hard and pushing them in some strange art-rock directions, and Mirror Ball was everyone’s opportunity to reorient themselves. Young had already gone through his own reinvention on Freedom, and if the band could play ‘Rockin’ In the Free World’ with him and hold their own perfectly, he was shellshocked when he threw a new song like ‘Act of Love’ at them during their first rehearsals.
He only had a certain amount of time to record the tunes, but ‘Act of Love’ was the first time that he felt the band could handle the material he was throwing at them, saying, “Eddie had just inducted me into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in New York, where I played ‘Act of Love’ with the guys from Crazy Horse. The Pearl Jam guys recorded the performance on a cassette player they had on their table, and they knew it by the next night. I said, ‘Why don’t we try it?’ So we did it in Washington, and it was great. I said, ‘Maybe we ought to record it. It sounds good.’ They were thinking the same thing.”
And while Young has the reputation of being the crazy uncle of rock and roll, he was the one looking out for the band half the time. Everyone was clearly uncomfortable with their own concept of fame by that point, but by having them work outside of their comfort zone, Young made them realise how important they were when they played together whenever they made a new song.
Vedder might have already had a father figure in Pete Townshend, but working with Young and the band again on ‘I Got Id’ is one of the closest things that they’ve ever made to heartland rock. They weren’t going to be the next Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers or anything like that, but they at least learned a valuable lesson about what every member of the group brings to the table.
They might not agree on everything, and there are more than a few times where their friends could drive them up the wall, but at the end of the day, Mirror Ball is the record that made them feel like a musical family. Being one of the biggest rock stars in the world isn’t the easiest thing to do by any stretch, but if it meant getting to go to Young for advice, they weren’t going to take a second of it for granted.
