Neil Young & Crazy Horse—Rust Never Sleeps

Neil Young & Crazy Horse—Rust Never Sleeps

Rust Never Sleeps—When Neil Young released the career-spanning Decade in 1977, it marked the end of an era. The 70s were not always kind to Young, who scored a hit with Harvest in 1972, but lost his friends, Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry. The grief he experienced was channeled into much of his music from the time, most notably Tonight's the Night (1975, but recorded variously from 1970-73). That album was released in place of Homegrown, which was meant to follow On the Beach (1974), but was shelved by Young, who called it "a very down album." Many of Young's albums from the subsequent period of time around the turn of the decade were unfinished or hodgepodge. When he scrapped Homegrown, he began slowly dispersing its songs through Zuma (1975), Long May You Run (1976), American Stars 'n Bars (1977), and Decade, at which point he had begun work on Chrome Dreams, which also would never be released. Some of its songs were holdovers from Homegrown and ended up taking up most of American Stars 'n Bars, while the rest have become miscellany and, more notably, the genesis of Rust Never Sleeps.

After the sidestep of Comes a Time (1978), which was his most straightforward country-rock record since Harvest had scored him a hit, and the production of his movie Human Highway, Young began a new tour where each show featured separate acoustic and electric sets. Rather than attempt to emulate the performances in-studio, Young decided instead to use concert recordings with overdubs, effectively making Rust Never Sleeps a live album aside from two songs on the acoustic side. The notes to the CD issue say that Rust is "a loose-knit concept album built around Young's conviction that an artist's reach must always exceed his grasp; that the alternative to creative growth was stagnation and irrelevancy." The record is bookended by differing versions of the same song; side one opens with "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)," co-written by Ducks bandmate Jeff Blackburn, which remarks that the recently-deceased Elvis Presley sadly "faded away." He then name-checks Sex Pistols singer Johnny Rotten, wondering if Rotten will meet a similar fate: fading into obscurity, drug-addled and overweight. What's exceptional about the song is that it says all this despite its sparse lyrics and arrangement.

Young reaches a new high on the autobiographical "Thrasher," commenting on his rocky tenure with the commercially-upheld Crosby, Stills & Nash, offering, "I searched out my companions/Who were lost in crystal canyons" before he left for the California countryside prior to the release of Harvest. "When the thrasher comes," he sings, referring to the onset of crass commercialism, "I'll be stuck in the sun like the dinosaurs in shrines/But I'll know the time has come to give what's mine," stating he will remain true to his principles. The song closes out with a moving harmonica solo. "Ride My Llama" is a bucolic number that recalls Zuma, except when Young sings, "I met a man from Mars/He picked up all my guitars/And played me traveling songs." "Pocahontas," named of course for the Native American icon, details the slaughter of those people by settlers, positing "We'll sit and talk of Hollywood/And the good things there for hire/And the Astrodome and the first tepee/Marlon Brando, Pocahontas, and me." It also includes the satire, "I would give a thousand pelts/To sleep with Pocahontas/In the morning on the fields of green," as Young cleverly rolls down to a melancholy lick as he does every time the song hits on a mournful observance. "Sail Away" is the simplest message, accompanied by Nicolette Larson, who was featured heavily in a backing role on Comes a Time (for which he probably considered the song).

"Powderfinger," basic enough that it could be about any number of things, details a premature death, with the powerful lyric, "Raised my rifle to my eye/Never stopped to wonder why/Then I saw black and my face splashed in the sky." Young originally offered it to Lynyrd Skynyrd and recorded it himself for Chrome Dreams as a shorter acoustic ballad. "Welfare Mothers" is the most puzzling song in the set: "Welfare mothers," who "make better lovers," wash "down at every laundromat in town now." It does rock, however, as does "Sedan Delivery," which may be something like the story of a parallel-universe Bruce Berry. "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" helps support this theory, being the darkened mirror image of the opening song, with the key lyrical difference being "You pay for this, but they give you that;" Young previously employed the tactic of closing Tonight's the Night with a more ragged version of the title song, and on Rust it not only ends ragged but positively mucked-up.

Having already made numerous masterpieces, it would have been easy to mark Neil Young for lean years as the 1980s approached. Instead, he delivered his most astounding work yet, without a single average-or-worse cut, and set a watermark for thoughtful, inventive rock and roll, which, as he puts it, is here to stay.