One of the anomalies about Pearl Jam and Neil Young's collaborative album Mirror Ball is that Eddie Vedder hardly features on it. Bar a cameo on the epic rocker Peace And Love, Vedder is absent from the record that saw the grunge giants team up with their hero. His lack of presence during the sessions was down to his reluctance to leave his home at the time owing to what he described as a “pretty intense stalker problem.”
But when Vedder did show towards the end of the sessions, he immediately got on board with the creative momentum his bandmates and Young had fostered. Straight away, he helped Young finish the lyrics to Peace And Love, writing the words to the track’s cascading middle-eight, and his elder encouraged him to go one better.
“We listened back to Peace And Love and he liked the lyrics I’d written,” Vedder recounted in Pearl Jam Twenty, the 2011 tome released to celebrate the band’s 20th anniversary. When Young counted how many songs they’d got through and saw it was nine, he implored Vedder to come up with one and take it up to a nicely rounded 10.
“At that point, I hadn’t written a song in three or four months,” Vedder said. “So I went upstairs and wrote I Got Id in about 20 minutes. All it takes is someone like Neil to point at you, and it’s on. It wasn’t until probably three years later that I realised the chorus is kind of the same as Cinnamon Girl but I had no idea at the time.”
In the end, that song never saw the light of day on Mirror Ball, which was released in June 1995, with Young nodding to the existence of two Vedder-fronted cuts that were leftover in an interview with Guitar World at the time. “I sang on a couple of his songs which aren’t on the record,” he said. “They’ve got ‘em in the can somewhere.”
That the two tracks – I Got Id (sometimes called I Got Shit by fans and the band themselves) and Long Road – were siphoned off from Mirror Ball is perhaps down to legal issues, with Young and Pearl Jam’s respective labels Reprise and Epic agreeing ahead of the sessions that Pearl Jam’s name wouldn’t feature on the cover of the record. It’s been suggested that, at the time, neither label believed Vedder would be involved. They saw the light of day the following December, put out under the Pearl Jam handle and released on the two-track Merkin Ball EP. That made its connection to Mirror Ball clear, at the same time as being the first time many of the band’s teenage fans (this writer included) discovered what a merkin was.
The EP turns 30 next week and remains one of the band’s most notable one-off releases. These are songs that capture Pearl Jam turning from one band into another, I Got Id picking up where the raw, frayed-round-the-edges rock of Vitalogy left off and Long Road the sort of a hypnotic hymnal that signposts the experimentalism they would introduce on their next album No Code.
It's a reconfigured line-up across both songs, a sign perhaps that the two efforts were done on the hop as the Mirror Ball sessions were winding down. I Got Id features Vedder on guitar and vocals, PJ drummer Jack Irons behind the kit, long-standing producer Brendan O’Brien on bass (standing in for Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament, struck down with flu) and Young handling guitar, pump organ and backing vocals – he adds a trademark thunderous solo to the song, sometimes wrongly attributed to Pearl Jam’s equally virtuosic guitarist Mike McCready.
Ament returned to lay down bass on the more subdued Long Road, written by Vedder as a tribute to his old San Diego drama teacher, who he’d just heard had died and who began solemnly strumming his guitar in response, his bandmates delicately joining in. “We must have played that D chord for about four minutes,” said Vedder. “When we finally hit the C chord, it was earthshaking. I went up to the mike and the words just happened.”
It was a feeling of spontaneity and capturing a moment that summed up what Pearl Jam learned from Young over the course of the Mirror/Merkin Ball sessions. “With people like Neil Young, you learn from just witnessing,” Vedder opined. “All you have to do is watch and learn. It’s not like lessons: ‘Step two of this theory or that theory.’ It’s not even from conversations.”
Pearl Jam had always regretted not having their name on Mirror Ball, which Vedder said was not reflective of the fact it was a “coming together” of both camps. Merkin Ball went some way to making up for it. From that point on, Eddie Vedder & co. carried a little bit of whatever they’d gained from the collaboration in everything they did.
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