There is no clearer sign that Neil Young is a man who likes to get things done than the fact that there was little over a week between him deciding he wanted to make a record with Pearl Jam and the moment he rocked up in Seattle with nothing but a guitar and an amp. It was early 1995 and Young was already long-established as rock royalty but for the purposes of the album that would become Mirror Ball, he left his status at the city limits. Young wanted the collaborative record with the grunge rockers to tap into the sound that had made Eddie Vedder’s crew one of the biggest bands of the 90s. He didn’t even bring a roadie.
“I decided rather than adding the complexity of using my own producer, I’d use theirs,” Young explained in the career-spanning opus Pearl Jam Twenty. “We got rid of everything individual on my side and all of my trappings, so it was just me going in there by myself… The whole idea was to do it as fast and fresh as possible. I didn’t want it to drag on.”
Well, clearly. The year had only just begun and making a record with Neil Young had probably not been on Pearl Jam’s list of resolutions. The two artists had already crossed paths on a few occasions, with Young seemingly very keen to act as mentor and help guide them through to the other side of meteoric success. Pearl Jam weren’t just big fans who’d already incorporated Young’s classic Rockin’ In The Free World into their live set, they were inexperienced newbies trying to work out how to transition from band selling shitloads of records in the here and now to band who would still be going decades later. Young, who’d been there, done it, and done it again, was the man they looked to.
Mirror Ball had its roots at a Voters For Choice benefit gig in Washington, DC, in mid-January, 1995. Pearl Jam were also on the bill and having played a version of new song Act Of Love with his band Crazy Horse and been displeased with the results, Young asked Pearl Jam to step in and see if they could elevate it. The result was so good that Young became convinced they should record it together. “We really smoked it,” he said at the time. “We got two days in the studio and did it about a week or so later.”
It's 30 years ago this week since the band and Young got down to work at Seattle’s Bad Animals Studios, the recording facility owned by Heart sisters Nancy and Ann Wilson and what began as an idea to record two tracks – Act Of Love and the swaying, sea shanty-ish Song X, quickly blossomed into something bigger. “Neil had his boat up in Seattle – he went back to his boat every night for four or five nights and wrote two songs,” recalled Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament.
The collective put down seven songs over two days, with Vedder, dealing with a stalking problem at the time, missing from the sessions. “Neil is the only one that would be a big fan of the band and then get rid of Eddie,” guitarist Stone Gossard said.
The album was finished with another batch of recording in mid-Feb, with Vedder making an appearance and co-writing the expansive rock cut Peace And Love, as well as leading the charge on two songs that would later feature on the Pearl Jam sister EP Merkin Ball.
For Ament, it was a coming together that taught the Ten stars to lighten up a little. Everything had got a bit heavy. “He showed us you could write good and different songs in a really short period of time,” he remembered. “It couldn’t have come at a better time for us. We were feeling the pressure of being a big rock band at the time and, in some ways, we probably put that pressure on ourselves. He made us realise it wasn’t that important. It’s not life-or-death stuff – it’s just music.”
It was a heartening, instructive record for Pearl Jam, one that came at a crucial point in their career and probably cast a big shadow over the decision to switch things up on 1996’s experimental No Code, but they did come out of Mirror Ball with one regret. To save drawn-out back-and-forths between their respective record labels, the two camps had agreed beforehand that Pearl Jam’s name would be absent. Vedder later wished they hadn’t.
“We just wanted to avoid having a bunch of label negotiations and it turns out that not having Pearl Jam mentioned was a decision we kind of regret,” he lamented, “because it really was the coming together of both bands.”
Well, here’s an idea: why don’t they make a follow-up and correct the error? In the meantime, here’s the song that kicked it all off:
