Neil Young and Co. Build an Acoustic Bridge to Hope

“We thought we’d name this set . . . ‘The Songs You Knew You’d Never Hear Acoustic,’ ” Neil Young joked on Saturday at the start of his turn on stage during the 10th annual Bridge School benefit concert.

Young and Crazy Horse, the power-minded trio that frequently backs him on his most tenacious recordings, then launched into the vintage “Cinnamon Girl,” a song that the musicians played with all their electric fury on their recent U.S. tour.

Though it was acoustic on Saturday at the Shoreline Amphitheatre, the rendition--and those of such other power-ready tunes as “Cortez the Killer” and “Mr. Soul”--was so forceful that you’d swear there must have been a battery of electric guitarists backstage, secretly adding to the sonic assault.

The episode reflected the adventurous and unpredictable nature of the Bridge concerts, which were started in 1986 by Young and his wife Pegi to raise funds for educational programs for children with severe speech and physical impairments.

The Bridge weekend (a second show with the same lineup was scheduled for Sunday at the 21,000-seat venue) gives some of pop’s creative elite a chance to showcase new songs or reinterpret old ones in a warm, acoustic setting, free of normal commercial constraints.

Among the artists who have appeared at Bridge concerts: Bob Dylan and Beck, Bruce Springsteen and Ministry, Jerry Garcia and the Pretenders, Paul Simon and Elvis Costello. This is classic rock in the best sense--not simply the ‘60s and ‘70s bestsellers that define the lazy radio format of the same name, but simply quality artists of whatever age.

In Saturday’s six-hour concert in the punishing Bay Area cold, Young was joined by the announced bill of Pearl Jam, back for a third visit, and first-time guests David Bowie, Patti Smith, the Cowboy Junkies and singer-songwriter Hayden.

But the audience roared with delight shortly after the 6 p.m. start when a surprise guest, Pete Townshend, walked on stage. In the area Saturday to perform “Quadrophenia” with the Who at the San Jose Arena, he helped define the spirit of the evening by playing some of his early tales of adolescence. It was particularly moving when he sang “The Kids Are Alright” as the closed-circuit video camera showed the excited faces of the dozen or so Bridge School students who sat in wheelchairs at the rear of the stage.

After the Cowboy Junkies, Smith and her band came on stage, and she also seemed to have the children very much on her mind, both in her selection of songs, which emphasized tunes of optimism and survival, and in her presentation.

Bowie followed with some of his best-known tunes, including “Heroes,” “The Jean Genie” and even “Let’s Dance.” Though a violation of his dramatic pledge a few years ago to retire old material, the numbers were so spectacularly redesigned (and played with such shadowy vitality and flair by guitarist Reeves Gabrels and bassist Gail Ann Dorsey) that the move seemed only a partial retreat.

Eddie Vedder opened Pearl Jam’s set by teasingly telling the audience that he had a stomach ache--a reference to the illness that caused him to leave the stage during Pearl Jam’s appearance with Young at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park last year.

But he and the band, supplemented by a keyboardist, were in fine shape as they went through intimate, graceful treatments of a wide range of material, from “Black” and “Daughter” to “Better Man” and “Off He Goes.”

During the finale, the entire cast, minus Townshend, backed Young on a lengthy, liberating version of “Helpless,” a song whose title stood in glorious and defiant irony on a night when so many world-class musicians added their voices to the Bridge School tradition of comfort and community.

Normally, success seems to eventually tarnish everything in the pop world, but the Bridge concert, thanks to Young’s continuing integrity and vision, remains after 10 years the most consistently satisfying night in American pop.