(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Tue 28 October 2025 21:30, UK
Neil Young has always been extremely fickle when it comes to the things he liked.
If he loved it, it didn’t take him long to want to sing its praises, but if he so much as had an inkling that things were moving in the wrong direction with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, it didn’t take him long to jump ship and move on to something entirely different. While that might be annoying for anyone that tries to get a read on the guy, that’s only because he’s constantly in search of artists in it for the right reasons.
Because the minute that any rockstar becomes famous, there’s only a few years where they can make the kind of impact that they want to. A handful of them might use that as their golden opportunity to work their magic on their audience, but there’s also bound to be a few people that only see the dollar signs in front of their faces and start working on making the bastard son of whatever tune that had turned them into the biggest band to begin with.
That kind of career move certainly has its place, but it wasn’t necessarily where Young saw himself going. He subscribed to the punk rock attitude of being yourself years before punk even had a name, and even when he was being considered as yesterday’s news by some, you can tell that he couldn’t give a shit either way. He was still a great songwriter, and that usually meant doing whatever the muse told him to do.
And while the 1980s weren’t kind to his rustic brand of songwriting and even more scathing regarding his experimental period, it was a breath of fresh air seeing what the new school of grunge bands were doing. Nirvana felt like they kicked down the door for a new musical revolution, but when it came to pure rock and roll, Young knew that nothing could get any better than what he saw out of Pearl Jam.
Even though he had his favourite rock and roll acts from decades past, Young figured that nothing else compared to listening to Pearl Jam stripping rock down to its best features, 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.”
As much as Kurt Cobain respectfully disagreed and thought that Pearl Jam were the most corporate thing he had ever heard, it’s not like they weren’t in it for the right reasons. They were definitely not in the same kind of underground class of rock bands that Sonic Youth or Flipper were a few years before, but their brand of rock was at least respectful to the past in many regards.
The whole point of grunge was always about stomping out the biggest names in hair metal, but what Pearl Jam were doing were far more indebted to the 1970s era of rock and roll. There were some pieces of Young’s music in there, but there was also everything from Led Zeppelin to Cheap Trick to The Who in their delivery.
Yeah, it wasn’t the most dissonant thing that anyone had ever heard, but if there was one thing Pearl Jam stood for, it was bringing back the values of what a rock band was supposed to be. Everyone had seemed to forget what that was after a while, and sometimes it takes a band like them to remind everyone where all of this music comes from.
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