March 3 - Like A Hurricane

So it was 1991, and one of the releases that year was from a veteran rocker named Neil Young. He had taken his backing band Crazy Horse on tour, supported by Sonic Youth, and a live document from that tour was released in the form of Weld, a double live album. When it was first released, it also featured the album Arc, which was a mix of feedback and distortion (read: noise) that was mixed together greatly inspired by (and suggested by) Sonic Youth. I purchased the double cassette and listened to it very heavily on my Walkman. It may seem strange now to hear that I purchased a lot of my music on cassette, but it really was a cost-saving measure. I preferred CDs, as I had just purchased my first CD player in January 1991, and I still loved vinyl, but I didn't have a portable player for either of those media (and, come to think of it, an LP Walkman would have been quite unpractical), so I would have to tape the albums to listen to them on the go, and blank tapes was an added expense I couldn't afford. So some of my favorite albums I did purchase on the inferior cassette medium.

However, 1991 was a very transitional year for me. It was the year I graduated high school and started the first of my attempts at getting a university education. It was also the year I really started being very active on the national level in DNTU (Norwegian Teetotaling Youth Organization), accepting the elected position of rusgiftpolitisk leder, which meant that I was responsible for looking at drug and alcohol policy as a part of the elected board. This was a 2-year position, but the other big thing that happened at this year's national convention was that DNTU voted to start the merger process with NGU, another teetotaling youth organization, a merger that was scheduled to be finalized (or turned down) at a joint national convention in 1992.

As a member of the national board, I was invited to a ball at a Swedish castle, celebrating our Swedish sister organization UNF's anniversary - at least I think it was an anniversary, my memory is a little fuzzy, and internet was not yet prevalent (and I haven't found any records indicating what really was going on - I think I might have more information buried in my parents' basement, but it might also have been pitched). We stayed downtown Stockholm at a small hotel, and I remember playing Weld on my Walkman, for the first time really starting to see the magic of Neil Young, who really balances the "pretty" and the "ugly" in his music really well. A great example of that is Like A Hurricane, a beautiful song wrapped in very noisy guitars. Crazy Horse always play on the edge, sounding like they can fall apart any minute, which really adds to the frailty of Like A Hurricane, and Neil Young's voice has the high and shaky pitch that really moves me almost to tears every time I hear it. I hope you like it too.