Neil Young - Weld
On October 22, 1991, "Weld", the double live album by Neil Young and the band "Crazy Horse", was released.
After a restless decade of the 1980s, in which Neil Young moved wildly between electronic experimentation, rockabilly, country and blues, while also battling bitter legal battles with the Geffen record label, the years 1989 to 1991 caught the Canadian artist at one of the most prolific and dramatic creative peaks of his life. The glorious comeback began with the masterpiece album "Freedom" from 1989 and continued in September 1990 with "Ragged Glory", a raw, noisy and liberated studio album recorded at Young's ranch in Northern California with his longtime partners in the band "Crazy Horse", guitarist Frank Sampedro, bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina.
In January 1991, Neil Young and Crazy Horse embarked on a massive American tour called the Smell the Horse Tour, a decision that would prove to be a seminal event in the history of alternative rock. In a bold move that stunned the conservative music industry, Young chose to open with New York indie and noise rock pioneers Sonic Youth alongside Californian punk band Social Distortion. The intergenerational connection between the forty-five-year-old Young and the generation of the alternative revolution of the early 1990s, precisely in the months when bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam were about to change the face of world music, ignited a wild creative fire on stage and reinforced Young's reputation as the godfather of grunge.
But the tour took a much darker and more charged turn on its first day. When the band opened the tour in Minneapolis on January 22, 1991, Operation Desert Storm was already under way in the Gulf War, with broadcasts of the bombing of Baghdad playing nonstop on television screens backstage. The sense of fear, rage and chaos of war seeped directly into the band's amplifiers. Young immediately changed the setlist, cranked up the decibels to unprecedented levels and turned each show into a cathartic ritual of electricity, sweat and bloody feedback, with giant, wall-high simulated amplifiers on stage alongside his blazing Fender Deluxes.
The double album "Weld," produced by Young and David Briggs with Billy Talbot, with John Hanlon contributing to the mixing, captures this storm in its full force in a presentation that emphasizes the performances’ rough power. The album opens with "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)", the prophetic grunge anthem from "Rust Never Sleeps," which here gets a much heavier, slower, and more menacing treatment, with the legendary Old Black guitar sounding like it's tearing the speakers apart. It's followed by "Crime in the City", which rolls from a taut groove into searing solos, and leads to one of the album's most chilling moments, an electric, apocalyptic cover of Bob Dylan's classic "Blowin' in the Wind." Against a backdrop of air raid sirens and gunfire, Young dismantles the acoustic protest song from the 1960s and rebuilds it as a slow, electric mourning march over a burning battlefield.
The telepathic dialogue of "Crazy Horse" culminates in the long tracks from "Ragged Glory" scattered throughout both discs, led by "Love to Burn" and "Love and Only Love", which develop into hypnotic guitar journeys lasting nearly ten minutes in which the monotonous and heavy rhythm of Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina serves as an anchor for the storms of Young's improvisation. Alongside the new material, the band gives new and violent life to early classics such as "Cinnamon Girl", "Welfare Mothers" and the crashing "F*!#in' Up", which would later become one of the most permanent and beloved show songs of the band "Pearl Jam" led by Eddie Vedder.
The album's beating heart lies in the breathtaking sequence of epic past hits, which opens with a masterful nine-and-a-half-minute rendition of "Cortez the Killer" from the album "Zuma," in which Young's every note oozes melancholy, pain, and majesty, followed by the timeless "Powderfinger." In the last part of the album, the political and emotional outburst reaches its peak with a tremendous performance of "Rockin' in the Free World", which in those years became the undisputed anthem of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, followed by the fourteen-minute sonic whirlwind of "Like a Hurricane", in which Young abuses his guitar strings until the entire melody is swallowed up in a white hurricane of pure noise, before the journey concludes with the somber intoxication of "Tonight's the Night" and the wild country-rock anthem "Roll Another Number".
But the story of "Weld" is not complete without its twin, wilder and even more radical, the album "Arc", which was also released as part of a limited and mythological three-disc set called "Arc-Weld". The idea for "Arc" took shape during the 1991 tour at the encouragement of Thurston Moore of the band "Sonic Youth", who suggested that Young record an entire album consisting solely of the endings of his chaotic songs. During the grueling editing work on the tour's tapes, in which Young listened to every version of every song every night, he decided to isolate the final minutes of the shows, those moments when the musical structure completely fell apart and gave way to feedback, shrieks from amplifiers, sound effects and broken sentences.
The result of this daring experiment was "Arc," a thirty-five-minute, continuous avant-garde sound collage of white noise, distortion, electrical noises, and colliding sonic waves, welded together in the studio like a giant metal sculpture. While many critics immediately compared it to Lou Reed's controversial 1975 "Metal Machine Music," for Young it was not an alienating provocation but the most organic and emotional distillation of the spirit of rock and roll, an attempt to capture the pure energy that remains in the air after the song itself has died down. The name "Arc-Weld" perfectly expressed the artistry with which Young welded the songs of "Weld" into the electric sparks of "Arc."
The physical and mental toll that the "Arc-Weld" project took on Neil Young was unbearable. Months of exposure to extreme sound levels on stage and in the mixing room caused him severe hearing damage and chronic, painful tinnitus in his ears, and he preferred to avoid loud sounds for a time. To soothe his damaged ears, he pulled out his acoustic guitar, harmonica, and piano again, and out of this forced silence, a year later, the quiet and successful masterpiece "Harvest Moon" was born. "Weld" and "Arc" stand the test of time as a double, uncompromising historical monument, the moment when a rock legend from the 1960s and 1970s proved that he remained as dangerous, hungry and relevant as the younger musicians he had inspired.
In 2023, "Weld" and "Arc" returned in "Official Release Series Volume 5", alongside "Freedom" and an expanded "Ragged Glory".
For Listening: Neil Young Archives, Apple Music
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