Neil Young: Going To Extremes:

His new album is a feast of feedback-drenched guitar; next he promises the follow-up to 'Harvest'

by David Fricke

"Whatever it sells is fine with me," says Neil Young between mouthfuls of a takeout deli breakfast in the Manhattan offices of Warner Bros. Records. "I see it in the long scope of things, the kind of music I started making and how it developed.

Now here I am, forty-five years old," Young says, smiling, "and this is the essence of what's happened to my mind."

"This" is Arc, the special companion disc to Young's new live double album, Weld, and it may be the most extreme record he's ever released, even compared with such contentious Young classics as Re-ac-tor and Trans. Weld and Arc were both recorded earlier this year during Young's acclaimed U.S. tour with Crazy Horse. But whereas Weld is a two-hour serving of Young and Crazy Horse's trademark brand of earthquake garage rock, combining greatest Hits with recent songs from Freedom and Ragged Glory, Arc is a single half-hour piece made up of distortion-drenched edits from the songs' thundering intros, orgasmic outros and free-form instrumental breakdowns (all from performances other than those on Weld). The result: utter melodic holocaust, save for some snippets from of "Like a Hurricane" and "Love and Only Love".

"That, in some way, is the essence of the music, those things we do at the beginning and the end," Young insists. "As soon as we lose the beat, we break it down and we're gone. Nothing else matters. There are so many bands out there that are supposed to be rockin', and they're really playing to a click track. This is my reaction to all that shit."

The idea for Arc came, aptly enough, from guitarist Thurston Moore of the New York feedback terrorists Sonic Youth, Young's personal choice for opening act on the 1991 tour. Young gave Moore a copy of Muddy Track, an unreleased video documentary of a 1987 European tour with Crazy Horse. According to Young, the featured music in the video was "all beginnings and endings. Thurston came back and said, 'Wow, you guys ought to make a whole record of that stuff.' "

Young has no illusions about Arc or Weld - itself a blistering if more structured feast of six-string squealing - going down well with the After The Gold Rush crowd, and he couldn't care less. "I really made Arc for people who ride around in the Jeeps with the big speakers," he says. "If you pull up beside somebody on the street and you're playing that, that makes a fucking statement."

Weld is a statement in itself. The Persian Gulf War and the subsequent tidal wave of feel-good, yellow-ribbon patriotism may already seem like distant memories, but Young and Crazy Horse hit the road last January right in the thick of it. They were rehearsing at Prince's Paisley Park Studios, in Minneapolis, when the bombs started falling in Baghdad. On February 23rd, the day the ground assault began, they were actually onstage at West Point. By then, Young had overhauled his original set list, dropping some Ragged Glory numbers in favour of thematically appropriate songs like "Cortez The Killer" and "Powderfinger". He also added a stunning, Hendrixian torching of Bob Dylan's "Blowin' In The Wind", which alone is reason enough to buy Weld.

"We were there all the way through it," Young says of the war, "and to me, that's what Weld is about. It's very brutal, especially the songs with the big endings. I was trying to create the sound of violence and conflict, heavy machinery, outright destruction."

As for "Blowin' In The Wind," Young claims no other song better addressed the "corrosive mix of emotions" generated by the war." The song itself asks the same question everyone was asking then about how long it will be before people can be free. What do you have to do?

"We were watching CNN all the time, watching this shit happen, and then going out to play, singing these songs about conflict," Young says. "It was a hard thing. And I feel there was nothing else I could do. Whatever could bring people together was more important than me playing a new song. We couldn't go out there and just be entertainment."

The release of Weld and Arc (available separately and as limited-edition CD package entitled Arc Weld) is just the beginning of Young's fall season of activity. He has directed long-form video version of both Weld, a no-frills performance film a la Rust Never Sleeps, and Arc, which will "simply be a trip to watch," according to Young. He is also still at work on the long-awaited multidisc retrospective follow-up to Decade, which may or may not be released during his lifetime.

"I don't know," Young admits, laughing. "I really don't know. The more time that goes by, the bigger it gets because I do more things. I've already done two or three albums since I started working on it." In addition, Young has already shortlisted eighteen or twenty albums' worth of unreleased material for the box. Young devotees, take note: Two songs definitely set for inclusion are the Buffalo Springfield-era outtake "Sell Out" and the more recent "Ordinary People", a stormy, "Desolation Row"-style epic ballad that was a highlight of Young's 1988 shows with the Bluenotes.

"We can't put it all out," Young says apologetically. "But it will be like an archive. There will be a lot of detail, things you wouldn't usually find on a box set. I'm not so much concerned with how or when it comes out but that's in order. I want to do that myself. And I only have so much time to do these things."

In fact, just two days after this interview, Young commenced recording his next studio album, Harvest Moon. As the title suggests, it is the overdue folk-pop sequel to his 1972 platinum hit Harvest - twenty years overdue, if you ask some of his fans. The original Harvest studio crew, the Stray Gators featuring Tim Drummond and steel guitarist Ben Keith, is on hand at well. "I'll probably scare everyone at Warner Bros. if I actually said when I thought it was gonna be out," Young says. "But it's not going to be very long, I'll tell you that."

Still, Young says, "I see myself spending some time on making it really fine, just the opposite of what I just did - a very precise, exceptionally quiet record."