"Neil Young and Pearl
Jam have created the album of the year"
By Michael
Goldberg
Woodside, CA
1995
Pine trees and
redwoods are whipping by us as we tool down Skyline Blvd. in Woodside, a rural area of
Northern California just south of San Francisco. "Song X," a rousing rock and
roll sea chantey off Neil Young's brilliant collaboration with Pearl Jam, Mirror Ball, is
blasting so loud we can hardly think.
Think? Who needs to think when Young and his band of rock-and-roll outlaws are chanting
"Hey, ho away we go/ We're on the road to never/ Where life's a joy for girls and
boys and only will get better..."
Myself and ATN's ace business strategist (and major Neil Young fan) Steve McConnell are
two hours from zero hour: Our five p.m. appointment with Neil Young himself, for a rare
interview.
This is something of an event. Over the course of the 28 years since the Buffalo
Springfield's first hit, "For What It's Worth," charted, Young has granted few
interviews. This has certainly added to the iconoclastic rocker's mystique, though I
believe that Young's decision to limit press access has more to do with the fact that
there's too many other things he'd rather spend his time doing than mouthing off to the
media.
So why, then, at this juncture in a three-decade career, is Young suddenly talking? Is it
because he has recorded one of the best albums of his career? That's part of it. But as
Young admitted to ATN columnist Dave Marsh during a June 20 radio interview, there was a
period during the '80s when he'd really lost touch with his audience. Now he believes he's
reconnected, and the songs on Mirror Ball speak in a universal way to both 17-year-old
Pearl Jam and Soundgarden fans, and 45-year-old one-time hippies.
For those who haven't yet heard it, I would suggest you find someone with a copy of Mirror
Ball, or download some of the excerpts in ATN. This is an amazing album. Recorded during
four days in a Seattle studio, with Pearl Jam acting as his backing band, Young quickly,
spontaneously made rock & roll art. The collaboration of Young and Pearl Jam brought
the best out of both, spurring them to new heights of ensemble playing, and Young was
inspired to deliver a series of startling guitar solos.
The songs range from "Song X" and "Act of Love," which deal with
"choice" (as in whether to have a child or not after a woman has become
pregnant), to "Downtown" and "Peace and Love," which evoke idyllic
memories of the '60s and connect the truth sought by a generation then with the truth that
some of us at least are searching for now, in the '90s.
The music is loud, raw, Stones-meets-Stooges-meets-Pearl Jam-meets -Young rock & roll.
It's an album to crank up as loud as possible. An album to get lost in. A standout track
is "I'm the Ocean," and as one listens to this epic piece, walls shaking, it
truly feels like one is immersed in the ocean, completely enveloped by wave upon wave of
sound. As Young himself says, "To me, there's a sound in Mirror Ball that's never
appeared before...a unique musical shape."
