Young And Younger Neil Young And Pearl Jam Combine Their Musical Styles To Create Fireworks In New Album

Talk about a summit conference of rock ‘n’ roll: Neil Young, the undaunted ‘60s hippie, and Pearl Jam, the Seattle grunge superstars. For rock fanatics spanning generations, it’s hard to envision a summit that could yield more excitement. Place these acts in the studio, then just sit back and watch the fireworks.

“I’m really happy. There’s a real spirit in this record,” Young says of “Mirror Ball.” It’s his new solo album (due out Tuesday), which has Pearl Jam backing him with a raw, ferocious power that should blow up many a home speaker system in the coming months.

Young sings of holding on to hippie dreams in the face of violence and cynicism (a familiar quest for him), while Pearl Jam provides street credibility with a tough, but exhilarating, hard-rock ride. Suffice to say it’s the rock event of the year so far.

Just please don’t think of this as a guru/disciple relationship, says Young, who scoffs at the fact that he’s nearly a quarter-century older than Pearl Jam members Eddie Vedder, Mike McCready and Stone Gossard. “I must be Methuselah, then!” Young says with a laugh, referring to the biblical patriarch who lived 969 years. “Really, I think they look at me as another guitar player. And if I’m putting out, they’re ready to go.”

Young, of course, is no more “another” guitar player than Pearl Jam is just another band. They both believe in rock as salvation, rather than a corporate enterprise. Thus, their teaming is both natural and perhaps inevitable. They’ve hovered around each other since Pearl Jam spiced its Lollapalooza shows three years ago with Young’s “Keep on Rocking in the Free World.”

“I’d heard of them from the Lollapalooza festivals,” Young says by phone from California. “They used to jam on my tunes. So that was a cool thing. I heard about that.”

Their paths then crossed again, in Europe. “I went to Europe with Booker T & the MG’s and Pearl Jam supported us on several shows. After that, we got to know each other better - and we did the MTV Video Music Awards a couple of years ago. We just liked jamming together. We had a good time.”

Then came the Rock Hall of Fame Awards this January in New York, where Young debuted a song, “Act of Love” (it’s on the new album), backed by Pearl Jam. They also played the tune at a subsequent abortion-rights benefit concert in Washington, D.C.

“We said, ‘That sounds awfully good. Maybe we ought to record it,”’ Young recalls. “And I said, ‘Yeah, let’s record it soon because you’ve got to get it while it’s hot.”’

So in late January, Young corraled Pearl Jam into two nights of recording at Seattle’s famed Bad Animals studio. Another two nights followed in February. That’s a grand total of four nights - a mere pittance by today’s studio standards - but Young was shooting for sheer, unfiltered effect.

“I was living dangerously, but I wanted to get the most out of the situation,” he says. “It’s sort of like picking apples. Get them when they’re ripe. And they were all ripe. They (Pearl Jam) had no problems. They were great to work with.”

Young simply showed up with a batch of songs and taught them to the band on the spot. They played them a few times together - and, voila, they had a finished take. “They learned very, very fast,” Young notes. “The songs, of course, are really easy. They’re written to not be hard to find your way through, but they were very good at learning them. But even more important than being fast learners, they had a really good feel for what was going on. And they’re very sympathetic to the way I play.”

Musically, Young has shifted genres his entire career, from acoustic to techno to rockabilly to country to heavy metal. The new “Mirror Ball” is 90 percent hard-rock guitar music (except for a couple of slow, organ-based tunes).

“The songs are all related to each other,” says Young. “They all came from the same period of time when I was surrounded by the guys in Pearl Jam and what was going on in their lives and how they were feeling about different things. I picked up on a lot of what they were thinking. There are pieces of all kinds of things in there. It really is like a mirror ball. That’s why I chose the title.”