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Sleeps with Angels, Mirror Ball, and How the Punks Met the Godfather of Grunge
The suicide of Kurt Cobain on April 8, 1994, was an event that shook the music world in ways that the leader of Seattle grunge rock band Nirvana himself could never have possibly imagined. Although they had only released three albums up to that point—Bleach on the Seattle-based independent Sub Pop label, along with Nevermind, and In Utero on David Geffen’s new DGC imprint—Cobain’s music with Nirvana had resonated with the nineties alternative-rock generation in ways not seen since the Beatles—and their own fallen hero, John Lennon—had in the sixties.
It has been said many times over the years that in Cobain, the twenty-something generation of the nineties saw a mirror image of themselves. This was particularly true as heard in the finely tuned alienation expressed in the lyrics of so many of Cobain’s darker songs (mostly inspired by an isolated childhood spent as a social outcast growing up in the small, rough-and-tumble logging town of Aberdeen, Washington).
But lying just beneath Nirvana’s wall of noisy guitars, big drums, and sometimes depressing lyrics, there was little denying that Cobain also had a natural gift for good old-fashioned pop hooks. One listen to his best songs from Nevermind—“Come as You Are,” “In Bloom,” and especially the smash “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—confirms this. Like John Lennon’s best work with the Beatles, the lyrics may have been the message, but the music was ultimately the messenger making its delivery possible.
As for Cobain himself, by the time he chose to end his own life with a bullet one spring day in his Lake Washington home just outside Seattle, it was clear that the latest in a long line of rock heroes touted as the new “voice of a generation” wanted no part of it.
But as shocking as the news of the suicide was, there had already been signs that he was in deep physical and psychological trouble. His heroin addiction was hardly a secret within the Seattle alternative music community. The weeks leading up to his death had already seen one brush with death as the result of an overdose in Europe. Just days before taking his own life, Cobain had checked himself out of a rehab facility. Some reports of his final days on earth indicate there had even been clandestine visits to a dealer in a shady apartment building in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district with the intent to score.
Japanese promo poster for Neil Young’s Sleeps with Angels album. Released shortly after the suicide of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, this album has been called the sequel to Tonight’s the Night because of its lyrical focus on issues of death, life, and mortality.
Cobain’s death wasn’t exactly the first tragedy with a drug connection within the tightly knit Seattle alternative music community either. Heroin had already claimed the life of Andrew Wood—lead singer for Mother Love Bone, the early grunge pioneers who eventually morphed into Pearl Jam after Eddie Vedder took what had once been Wood’s spot. A few years later, Alice in Chains lead vocalist Layne Staley became the latest fatality amongst Seattle grunge-rock musicians intent on “chasing the dragon.”
Yet, even as the bodies continued to pile up, the sad fact was that heroin had become so entrenched as part of the alternative rock scene—especially in Seattle—that few were surprised by news of the latest rock casualty related to drugs. In Staley’s case particularly, many insiders had in fact long expected it.
Even so, the news of Cobain’s suicide hit particularly hard. But as much as his music with Nirvana had struck a chord with “Generation X” in the same way that albums like Sgt. Pepper had impacted their parents during the sixties, the common musical thread between the two wasn’t the Beatles at all.
It was Neil Young.
It’s Better to Burn Out Than to Fade Away
Perhaps nowhere is this unlikely musical, and even spiritual, connection illustrated more profoundly than in Cobain’s suicide note, where he famously quoted the lines “it’s better to burn out than to fade away,” from Neil Young’s “My, My, Hey, Hey.”
Although it had been rumored at the time that Young would stop playing the song altogether as a result of Cobain’s use of its key lines in that cryptic note, “My, My, Hey, Hey” was performed at the annual Bridge School benefit show later that year, appropriately coupled with “Sleeps with Angels”—a new song Young had written in direct response to the tragedy.
During subsequent performances of “My, My, Hey, Hey” in the months immediately following Cobain’s death, some fans have also reported that Young seemed to place more emphasis on the lines “once you’re gone, you can’t come back” than he had before.
“My, My, Hey, Hey” remains a fixture of Neil Young’s concerts to this day.
Are You Feeling All Right, My Friend?
Following his tours of Europe and America with Booker T. and the MGs in 1993, many expected Young to make his next record with the soul legends as well. Instead, he surprised nearly everyone by reconvening in Los Angeles with Crazy Horse and producer David Briggs to make the album that eventually became 1994’s Sleeps with Angels.
What couldn’t have been known at the time that sessions for this record began at L.A.’s Complex Studios was just how deeply the ghost of Kurt Cobain would haunt the final album.
By this time, Young’s spiritual kinship with the alternative rock community—particularly in Seattle—as well as his equally iconic status amongst them was already a matter of record.
Bands like Soundgarden and Blind Melon (whose own lead singer Shannon Hoon also died as the direct result of a drug overdose in 1995) toured with him, while songs like “Rockin’ in the Free World” were covered by everyone from Pearl Jam to the Melvins. Young devotees like Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Mascis paid their own unique style of homage by fashioning their entire sound around the heavy riffing associated with the beautiful noise Young made on Old Black with Crazy Horse.
You Wait Around and Get the Word
Meanwhile, the still-untitled album Neil Young had begun making with Crazy Horse was already shaping up to be far more downbeat than any of his previous efforts recorded with Briggs and the so-called second greatest garage band in the world.
The few new songs Young initially brought to the sessions included “Change Your Mind,” a lengthy guitar showcase he had already been playing on tour in Europe with Booker T. and the MGs. Here, he channeled the psychedelic improvisations last heard on 1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Other songs were written right there in the recording studio, marking a return to the on-the-fly style of writing and recording that had characterized the original 1973 sessions for Tonight’s the Night.
It’s no mistake that comparisons between the two albums—and the way that death permeates both—are made often, or that Sleeps with Angels is sometimes called the sequel to Tonight’s the Night.
But where much of that landmark album often has the atmosphere of a boozy wake, Sleeps with Angels has more of a somber, elegiac feel to it. With a few notable exceptions (the violent bursts of feedback characterizing the Cobain-influenced title track and the dreamlike jamming heard on the fifteen-minute “Change Your Mind”), the songs on Sleeps with Angels are much quieter and more overtly bleak. It is easily Young’s darkest-sounding music since On the Beach, making the fact that this album rose all the way to #9 on the Billboard albums chart all the more astonishing. There was no tour to support the album.
“Sleeps with Angels” was in fact one of the last songs recorded for the album, with Young deciding it would also become the title track at the last minute (the decision to recreate Tonight’s the Night’s original black label for the CD—a great touch—was also reportedly made right as copies were about to be pressed).
The song itself came to Young on the golf course as he was participating in an Eddie Van Halen celebrity tournament for charity. The song lyrics “he sleeps with angels … too soon” pay tribute to Cobain in a sparse arrangement, interrupted only by sharp bursts of feedback. One only hopes that the more unhinged, twenty–minute version rumored to exist will eventually see the light of day as part of the ongoing Archives project.
Although it was written sometime before Cobain’s suicide, the epic “Change Your Mind” could have just as easily been about that very same subject, and it makes a great companion piece to “Sleeps with Angels” on the final album. The way that Young and Poncho Sampedro’s guitars interweave with each other on the lengthy instrumental breaks also recalls the amazing, original chemistry between Young and Danny Whitten on songs like “Down by the River.” The song represents some of the best dual guitar work heard on a Neil Young album since Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.
Taken together, these two tracks make up the lyrical and musical centerpiece of the album.
“Blue Eden,” which immediately follows “Change Your Mind,” continues to rattle off a laundry list of those things “embracing, distorting, supporting, controlling, destroying you” before concluding “I know someday we’ll meet again.” Elsewhere, songs like “Prime of Life,” “Driveby,” and “Trans Am” fit right in with the overall lyrical theme of death and mortality heard on Sleeps with Angels (intentional or otherwise). The haunting, dirgelike “Safeway Cart” also remains one of the single eeriest-sounding pieces of music ever to come from the pen of Neil Young.
Only “Piece of Crap” sticks out like a sore thumb here, coming off as an amusing but ultimately out-of-place, goofy-sounding rocker more in line with something like Ragged Glory’s “Fuckin’ Up.”
Going, Going, Gone and the Picture Cries
Two promotional films were made for Sleeps with Angels. The first of these is a thirty-minute documentary capturing Neil Young and Crazy Horse recording the actual album at Complex. This video was shot by longtime Young videographer Larry “L.A.” Johnson.
Like many of Young’s film projects associated with Johnson, the film is said to be quite ragged in terms of actual quality, but also an accurately raw and immediate snapshot of the odd relationship and recording process between Young, Briggs, and Crazy Horse. The film remains mostly unseen, at least outside of those within Neil Young’s inner circle.
The second, more professionally filmed document from the Sleeps with Angels period is the Complex Sessions video shot by acclaimed director Jonathan Demme and released on VHS. Though long out of print, this film captures Neil Young and Crazy Horse performing four songs from Sleeps with Angels—”My Heart,” “Prime of Life,” “Piece of Crap,” and an epic version of “Change Your Mind” that rivals the one on the Sleeps with Angels album—live in the Complex Studios, one day after that year’s Bridge School benefit.
Although the Complex Sessions film has its critics—Shakey biographer Jimmy McDonough being chief among them—if you can find it today (check eBay), it is well worth owning for the stunning, twenty-minute “Change Your Mind” alone.
In the version I found (again, on eBay), the goofy video bits criticized by McDonough in Shakey also seem to have been largely edited out.
The Act of Love Was Slowly Pounding, Slowly Pounding, Slowly Pounding
On January 12, 1995, in a glitzy ceremony held at New York City’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, Neil Young was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist. A few years later, he was inducted once again into the Hall as a member of the Buffalo Springfield—an event he famously no-showed. His apparent snub of his former Springfield bandmates prompted one of the funniest lines ever spoken during a Rock Hall ceremony, when Stephen Stills turned to Richie Furay and said, “He quit again.”
Young’s own 1995 Rock Hall induction (honoring his work as a solo artist) was marked by speeches from both Atlantic Records chairman Ahmet Ertegun and Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder. Once the speeches were over, the inevitable all-star jam fest followed.
This proved to be a particularly sloppy affair that involved various members of Crazy Horse and Pearl Jam backing up Neil on songs ranging from “Fuckin’ Up” to the newer “Act of Love,” before devolving into an ill-conceived pairing with Led Zeppelin for an odd take on that group’s “When the Levee Breaks,” incorporating a few verses of Stills’s “For What It’s Worth.”
A true WTF moment before such a thing even existed.
In his own acceptance remarks, Young thanked everyone from Rassy, Mo, and Elliot to Pegi, Crazy Horse, and Kurt Cobain. To the relief of nearly all present that night, he also refrained from going off on a rant dissing those individuals far less deserving of praise.
More significantly, and as sloppy as things often got in the jam that night, the seeds had been sown for Neil Young’s next project—an album he would record over a couple of wild days two weeks later in Seattle with Pearl Jam.
“Seattle’s basically over now,” Young told Shakey biographer Jimmy McDonough of his decision to make a record with the grunge rockers on their own turf. “So it’s time for me to go. Cleanup man …”
Where’s the Feel of Body Heat?
Although the names of Neil Young and Kurt Cobain will be forever linked by virtue of the latter’s suicide note, Young’s closest musical allies in the alternative rock scene at the time were in fact the members of Pearl Jam.
Their musical paths had already crossed numerous times—most often when one would show up at the other’s gigs. In one of the most memorable pairings from the period, Young and Pearl Jam tore the roof off the building at the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards with a blistering version of “Rockin’ in the Free World.”
Young was particularly energized by the way Pearl Jam had taken to his new songs like “Act of Love” during their performance together at a Washington, D.C., pro-choice benefit concert, and in the informal jams that took place in the days leading up to Young’s induction into the Rock Hall. Spurred on by the endorsement of manager Elliot Roberts—who loved the idea of his elder rock statesman client collaborating with the hottest new kids on the block—the no-brainer decision to make an album together in Seattle was made official shortly after Eddie Vedder’s Rock Hall speech inducting Young in New York.
Merkin Ball—Pearl Jam’s companion E.P. to their album with Neil Young, Mirror Ball.
Mirror Ball is an album that, even by Neil Young standards, came very quickly. Recorded over a span of just four days with Pearl Jam producer Brendan O’Brien at Seattle’s Bad Animals—the studio owned by the Wilson sisters of Heart fame—the album is also notable because it represented one of those rare instances of Young making music in a strange new environment, and on terms other than his own.
This was, after all, Pearl Jam’s producer recording Pearl Jam at a studio in Pearl Jam’s hometown. Young’s usual comfort zone of being surrounded by familiar faces like David Briggs and Crazy Horse (who had once again been left behind as Young pursued the latest of his many artistic whims) at a locale like the Broken Arrow ranch were far, far away during the whirlwind sessions in Seattle.
Even so, as anyone familiar with the stories behind the recording of such classic albums as Tonight’s the Night and On the Beach already knows, this style of “capturing the moment” by writing and recording songs in the studio and on the fly suited Young just fine. Although he initially showed up at the sessions with just two songs—including one that Pearl Jam already knew (“Act of Love”)—there was enough of a high-energy vibe between the two musical behemoths in the room that several other new songs quickly followed.
I Got Id
As it turned out, the sessions proved to be more prolific than anyone could have ever imagined. In just four days, they had not only a completed Neil Young album but enough leftover material for a companion E.P. from Pearl Jam.
The Merkin Ball E.P., as it turned out, proved to be a necessary evil.
The original plan for what became Neil Young’s Mirror Ball, was to release the sessions as a full-on Neil Young and Pearl Jam collaborative effort, with both parties receiving equal billing on the album sleeve. Executives at Pearl Jam’s label Sony, however, resisted this idea, and refused to allow their band to be credited on what they saw as a Neil Young album. The two-song Merkin Ball E.P. was eventually released by Sony as a Pearl Jam recording, while Reprise put out Mirror Ball as Neil Young’s new record.
Of the two songs on PJ’s Merkin Ball, “I Got Id” is by far the most explosive, and comes closest to capturing the frenetic energy that dominates the full-length companion album credited to Young. Eddie Vedder’s passionate vocal screams on this song also serve as a perfect complement to some of the most blazing hard-rock guitar heard from Neil Young in years.
Downtown, Hear the Band Playin’
Upon a first listen, Mirror Ball hits you like a freight train and doesn’t let up at all from there. The musical chemistry between Young and Pearl Jam is undeniable, and the result is a blast of pure hard-rock adrenaline that in some ways pulls off the trick of beating Crazy Horse albums like Ragged Glory at their own game. Where the Horse’s specialty on those albums lies in their ability to lay down a loose and funky groove behind Young’s wall of guitar, Pearl Jam more or less just let it rip here.
In that respect, Mirror Ball is arguably the best pure hard-rock record of Young’s entire career—a sonic blast of musical Dexedrine combining the punk-rock energy of the Ramones, with the tight musical chops you’d more likely associate with a group of seasoned pros like Booker T. and the MGs.
Once you get past its amped-up, high-energy vibe, there are also some great songs on this album.
Given Pearl Jam’s involvement—and the general cynicism and mistrust among alternative rockers toward their parents’ generation—the way many of these songs invoke sixties nostalgia and hippie values is a bit strange. As if there were any doubt of this, one of the best songs on Mirror Ball sports the title “Peace and Love,” and the lyrics even make direct reference to John Lennon. Elsewhere, the song “Downtown” celebrates a “psychedelic dream” where “all the hippies go” and Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin trade licks on the stage.
Promotional poster for Mirror Ball, Neil Young’s mid-nineties album with Seattle grunge rock band Pearl Jam.
Other songs given the high-octane Pearl Jam treatment here include “Throw Your Hatred Down,” one of Young’s strongest antiwar songs in years (with sentiments largely shared by Pearl Jam’s generation), and “I’m the Ocean,” where some of Neil’s most autobiographical lyrics ever become hidden deep within the glorious racket being made by the band. Mirror Ball also continues Neil Young’s long-standing tradition of Indian-themed songs on “Big Green Country,” which includes lyrics describing a great chief watching his painted braves closing in for an easy kill.
Released in June 1995, Mirror Ball became Young’s highest-charting album in years—peaking in Billboard’s top five.
Who Will You Love in a World of Constant Strangers?
The mutual admiration society between Neil Young and Pearl Jam continued with a short tour of Europe, along with a handful of shows back in the U.S. Their close relationship continues on through the present day, with PJ being a fixture at the annual Bridge School benefit concerts.
Mirror Ball is remembered today by some fans as the last of Young’s amazing “comeback run” of consistently great albums made during the early to mid nineties.
Although there was still some great music to come after the new millennium, Young seemed content to ride out the remainder of the nineties more preoccupied with his newfound status as owner of the Lionel Train company. In a deal engineered by Elliot Roberts, Young fulfilled a childhood dream by purchasing the company in partnership with Martin Davis and Greg Feldman as 1995 drew to a close.
There were new Neil Young records in the nineties, of course, including reunions with both Crazy Horse and a long-awaited one with Crosby, Stills, and Nash. But Mirror Ball would prove to be his last real blaze of glory for several years to come.