Rust Never Sleeps - Neil Young/Crazy Horse > Reviews > Rust Never Sleeps - And Neither Do My Neighbours

Author's product rating:   

Originality	Definitely a cut above the rest
Lyrics	Sublime
Quality and consistency of tracks	Flawless
How does it compare to the artist's other releases	Outstanding
Value for Money

Advantages:	The best album from his most successful decade
Disadvantages:	Everything else stops when this album goes on

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Considered by many to be one of the last, great dinosaurs of rock, and with a career spanning in excess of thirty years, Neil Young has had a thumb in more musical pies than a whistling Mr Kipling could bake in a hundred years.

Famous for his unpredictability (he once said it was the worst thing in the world to go out on stage and know exactly what you were going to do; and was once sued by his record company for making uncommercial records), and with an ability to confound his fans with his penchant for sonic experimentation (once releasing an album, “Arc”, billed as a thirty-eight minute, one-track, exploration of feedback), the newcomer to Young’s catalogue is advised to pick cautiously in their initial choices.

Cited as a long-time influence by many of today’s “young pretenders” (sorry!) – think of a band, somewhere, you can guarantee, they’ve name-checked him. He is as famous for stripped-down acoustic strumming techniques as his wild and excessive rockier outings (four solos to a song, anyone?). Both sides of Young are often captured within a single album; beautiful and theatrical acoustics sit (somehow comfortably) between ear-shattering scrapes with grunge, or even punk. However, I feel his complete repertoire has rarely been so successfully captured in one recording as on this album.

Released in the summer of 1979, “Rust Never Sleeps” is a live recording that has had its audience track removed, providing a scintillating and musically courageous exposure of Neil Young at his best (ie. live), while retaining the technical manifesto of a studio-smoothed recording. Several of these tracks had been toured extensively in the preceding months (on the “Live Rust” tour, the album of which was released five months after this one. Four of these tracks also make it to the successor album). The polish afforded by Young’s punishing schedule is captured on this blistering album. This album is also noteworthy for reuniting Young with his sometime backing band, Crazy Horse, for the first time since 1975’s acclaimed “Zuma”.

It is notable with this record that Young’s technique of juxtaposing simple acoustic strummers with festivals of feedback and distorted electric guitars has been revised slightly. The beautific and stripped down numbers are present in what can be described as the first half of the album (side one, we oldies still tend to consider it); while the second half of the album presents Young and Crazy Horse in all their rock-driven, yet immaculately tight, glory.

This does not make the album feel disjointed – far from it. In fact, the final track, “Hey Hey, My My”, is the feedback-drenched response to track one, “My My, Hey Hey”, rounding the album nicely, and asking as many questions of the audience as it answers.

**************

Track by Track:

1: My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue) (3.45)

A very simple but effecting riff, built on the top two bass strings of a single acoustic, with a gentle wash of chords to accompany it. It is a testament to rock and roll, and the lifestyle it spawns – and now lyrically infamous for providing Kurt Cobain with a quote for his suicide note –

“My My, hey hey/Rock and roll is here to stay/It’s better to burn out/Than to fade away/My my, hey hey”.

2: Thrasher (5.38)

A jangling guitar rhythm that REM’s Peter Buck would be proud of. This is Young the country-crooner’s tale of going it alone, heading out into the big wide world and cutting away from roots that bind you to the ground as oppose to nourish you –

“It was then I knew I’d had enough, burned my credit card for fuel/Headed out to where the pavement turns to sand/With a one-way ticket to the land of truth and my suitcase in my hand/How I lost my friends I still don’t understand”.

3: Ride My Llama (2.29)

Fabulously catchy, and sadly too short. Lyrically a little bizarre. Young meets a Martian who plays songs to him on Young’s own guitars, then takes him aboard his spaceship. You just have to hear it!

4: Pocahontas (3.22)

Young offers a leftfield history lesson in the plight of the Native American Indians fleeing the white man. A frightened and maligned race in search of “fields of green/and the homeland we’ve never seen”. Young catalogues the atrocities, this poignant tale of genocide told against a backdrop of a bouncing strumming pattern – which sardonically ends with Brando, Pocahontas and Young sitting around a campfire, swapping stories. An awesome, and haunting song, and probably my favourite track on the album.

5: Sail Away (3.46)

Again, this is Young the country balladeer, this time sharing vocal duties with Nicolette Larson. Lyrically tender – a slow and gentle love-letter for those “lying back on that blanket on the ground moments”.

6: Powderfinger (5.30)

The first full assault from Young backed with Crazy Horse, and one of the most lyrically powerful and popular songs of his career. A twenty-two year old boy guards a riverside outpost (I believe the reference is the American Civil War). Even when he is cut to pieces, “Raised my rifle to my eye/Never stopped to wonder why/ Then I saw black and my face splashed in the sky”, the boy sings an indictment of war, with Crazy Horse aurally swelling to sound like a band with three times as many instruments on stage. Possibly the Horse’s finest moment.

7: Welfare Mothers (3.48)

A curious but amusing number. The hard-rocking style kicks in here, with Young using humour - “Welfare mothers make better lovers” his backing band sing ad nauseum – to deliver a political attack on the politics of labelling and the failing system behind the necessity for welfare.

8: Sedan Delivery (4.40)

A pumping riff reciprocated with slower (but equally distorted) passages of calm. Young snaps out pithy lyrics with a lip-curled, nasal whine. Probably the one track that sounds most obviously like a live recording.

9: Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black) (5.18)

The heavy, thrashing response to the opening track. “Rock and roll is here to stay” Young blasts with a cutting, precise vocal, and this time he seems to be demanding it. Later to appear as the opening track on the double-live album “Weld”, regarded by many as the greatest live rock recording of all time. A band at the peak of their cranked-up, fuzz-soaked powers.

********************

Conclusion:

An album your CD player will cling onto, and possibly the most compelling start to Young a newcomer could make. A good companion set would be to pick up the later, and heavier, “Ragged Glory”, and the stripped down, acoustic-and-soaring-vocal at its finest “After The Goldrush”. I’ve always felt that Decade, the greatest hits package, while a great collection of songs, is a stilted way to discover the work of this chimerical yet always fascinating man.

************

Total run time: 38.29.

Tracks 1 through 5 performed by Neil Young, Nicolette Larson, Joe Osborne and Carl Himmel.
Tracks 6 through 9 performed by Neil Young and Crazy Horse.