POP MUSIC : Across Rock’s Great Divide

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NEIL YOUNG

“Mirror Ball”

Reprise

“People my age, they don’t do the things I do,” Young sings at one point in an album that represents a dramatic bonding of rock generations. “They go somewhere, while I run away with you.”

Typical of Young’s most compelling work, the line can be interpreted in various ways. But in the context of an album that employs ‘90s rock sensations Pearl Jam as the backing band, it’s most useful to see the you as the questioning, independent spirit of rock ‘n’ roll itself.

This isn’t as much a theme for Young as it is a way of life, the result of a restless creative vision that has driven him with a fearless, sometimes stubborn resolve--even if it caused him at times to be out of commercial or critical favor.

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After a few years adrift in the ‘80s as he explored new musical textures, Young began a remarkable creative streak with the 1989 album “Freedom.”

Returning to familiar musical turf, he mixed the furious, guitar-driven exorcisms and the wistful, melancholy strains that have long given his music such rich resonance and range.

As he continued through the equally heralded albums “Ragged Glory,” “Harvest Moon” and “Sleeps With Angels,” Young, now 49, focused increasingly on a reassessment of the ideals and dreams of his youth--the ideas that were, in many ways, the philosophical foundation of ‘60s rock as defined by the likes of Bob Dylan and John Lennon.

It wasn’t a nostalgic hippie exercise.

Young didn’t celebrate peace and love in his music, but chronicled the way so many in his generation let indifference and greed strip them of their idealism. At the same time, he warned today’s young people against the compromises in their own lives.

Those concepts are especially timely today because rock generations have never been so divided. Parents who grew up with rock are as intolerant of such landmark ‘90s bands as Nirvana and Pearl Jam as their folks had been of Jimi Hendrix and the Doors.

By finding a common ground in “Mirror Ball,” Young and Pearl Jam, representatives of the ‘60s and ‘90s, offer music that is both timeless and liberating. The playing is remarkably seamless, with glorious guitar passages that cry out with urgency and grace.

“Mirror Ball” begins with a mocking, nursery rhyme-like expression of youthful optimism: “Hey, ho, away we go / We’re on the road to never / Where life’s a joy for girls and boys / And only will get better.”

But Young quickly begins concentrating on the acts of public and private corruption that strip society of its conscience and hope. By the time of “Truth Be Known,” a country-flavored lament that is as soulful as anything Young has ever recorded, the disillusionment is complete. Given all the faded dreams from the ‘60s, Young seems to be amused in “Downtown” by the innocence of young people embracing the hippie lifestyle and music. Yet he is ultimately drawn into the celebration.

In the remaining numbers, including one in which Eddie Vedder joins him vocally, Young tries to look at today’s age of schoolyard violence and general social hardening through the old peace-and-love ideals, and he recognizes that the failure of his generation to live up to its goals is no reason to discard them. The point isn’t so much a salute to the ‘60s as a siren call for the ‘90s.

“Can’t forget what happened yesterday,” he sings at a key point in the album, his voice as delicate as a prayer. “Though my friends say don’t look back / I can feel it coming through me / Like an echo, like a photograph.”

Summit meetings are dangerous in pop because they tend to end up with a conservative, compromised vision, but that’s not the case here.

Rather than a bastardized mix of “After the Gold Rush” and “Jeremy,” the vision in “Mirror Ball” is wholly Young’s, though Pearl Jam’s presence is felt at every turn, supplying a marvelous musical seasoning and, one senses, inspiration.

* New albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).