This article is about the album. For the company whose slogan originated the phrase, see Rust-Oleum. For the episode of the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, see Rust Never Sleeps (TMNT 1987 episode).
1979 studio albumwith live recordingsby Neil Young with Crazy Horse
Rust Never Sleeps is the tenth album by Canadian American singer-songwriter Neil Young and his third with American band Crazy Horse. It was released on June 22,1979,by Reprise Records and features both studio and live tracks.[6] Most of the album was recorded live,then overdubbed in the studio,while others originated in the studio. Young used the phrase "rust never sleeps" as a concept for his tour with Crazy Horse to avoid artistic complacency and try more progressive,theatrical approaches to performing live.[7]
The album peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard 200 album chart and spawned the hit single "Hey Hey,My My (Into the Black)" that peaked at No. 79 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart.[8] It also included one of Young's most popular and critically acclaimed songs,the enigmatic "Powderfinger".[9][10] The album,along with Young's 1990 release Ragged Glory,has widely been considered a precursor of grunge music with the bands Nirvana and Pearl Jam having cited Young's heavily distorted and abrasive guitar style on the B side to this album as an inspiration.[11]
Background
The album was recorded in May 1978 during solo acoustic performances at The Boarding House in San Francisco and in October 1978 during the "Rust Never Sleeps" tour,in which Young played a wealth of new material. The concert tour was divided into a solo acoustic set and an electric set with Crazy Horse. Two new songs,the acoustic "My My,Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)" and electric "Hey Hey,My My (Into the Black)" were the centerpiece of the new material. The overdubbed live tracks are complemented with two outtakes from Young's previous album,Comes a Time
The album sees Young reunited with Crazy Horse, his first credited to the band since 1975's Zuma. Four of the albums's eight songs date from the sessions from that previous album: "Pocahontas", "Ride My Llama", "Powderfinger" and "Sedan Delivery". Studio attempts at each of these songs from the summer of 1975 have since been released through Young's Archives series. Young explains in his memoir, Waging Heavy Peace: "The album Zuma is the first album we made with Crazy Horse after Poncho joined the band. We kept playing day after day and partying at night. We did the original "Powderfinger" and held it back. We did "Sedan Delivery" and held it back. "Ride My Llama" was completely finished and mixed and held back. Today I like listening to all of those tracks together in a compilation I call Dume that is in The Archives Volume 2."[12]
The album's title, Rust Never Sleeps takes its name from the song that bookends the album, titled "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)" and "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)". The line "It's better to burn out than it is to rust" was borrowed from a line in a song by Jeff Blackburn, Young's bandmate in The Ducks, with whom he toured in 1977.[13] Devo vocalist Mark Mothersbaugh added the lyrics "Rust never sleeps", a slogan he remembered from his graphic arts career promoting the automobile rust proofing product Rust-Oleum.[14] Young recalls in a 1981 Rockline interview:
"I think Mark had the idea in the first place. We were doing this version of "Out of the Blue" together and we were in the studio playing and Booji Boy was there and he was singing 'Hey Hey, My My' and he just had a lyric sheet and it said 'It's better to burn out than to rust' and he just said 'Well it's better to burn out 'cause rust never sleeps' and I thought, well all right, that makes a lot of sense to me."[15]
Young adopted Mothersbaugh's lyrics and created a new version of the song with Crazy Horse. He also adopted Mothersbaugh's lyrics for the title of his album as a metaphor about the hazards of complacency on his music career and the need to keep moving forward.[16] Young explained in a June 1988 interview for Spin Magazine how the lyrics resonated with him, and how he felt both the record industry should be shaken up at the time, and how he applies the sentiment of the song to his style of recording:
"I never met Johnny Rotten, but I like what he did to people. He pissed off a lot of people who I think needed waking up. Rock 'n' roll people, who in the Seventies were asleep and thinking they were just so fucking cool and they knew what had to happen. They were telling me why don’t you make a real record. People became aware that there was more to it than perfection and overdubs, and fucking equipment and limousines back and forth to Studio B, and the other group down the hall and getting high in the bathroom with the other group that's going in and singing on their record. That's not intense enough for me. I think art is a private thing. I'm not sharing my creative moment with whoever's in the hallway. Rust implies you're not using anything, that you're sitting there and letting the elements eat you. Burning up means you're cruising through the elements so fucking fast that you're actually burning, and your circuits, instead of corroding, are fucking disintegrating. You're going so fast you're actually fucking the elements, becoming one with the elements, turning to gas. That's why it's better to burn out."[17]
The lyrics, "It's better to burn out than fade away", were widely quoted by his peers and by critics.[18][19] In a 1980 interview with David Sheff from Playboy magazine, John Lennon was dismissive of the lyric and the song's reference to Johnny Rotten for what he interpreted as worship for the dead saying, "No, thank you. I’ll take the living and the healthy."[20][21] In 1994, Kurt Cobain quoted the lyric in his suicide note.[22] After Cobain's death, Young vowed never to perform the song again, but reversed his stance at the request of the surviving members of Nirvana.[23]
"Thrasher" was written while filming Human Highway in New Mexico with Dennis Hopper. Young remembers in a 2022 post to his website: "After leaving Taos with Carpio, a Native American friend I had met during the filming of Human Highway, sitting in the front seat of his car, I wrote this song, "Thrasher". Driving through the magnificent beauty of New Mexico, the words just kept coming to me. I saw the eagles circling, the deep canyons, the road ahead, reflecting on my journey through recent years, and thankful to be where I was."[24] The song's music bears similarity to Young's previous song "Evening Coconut," which he wrote about his boat. In the song's lyrics, he uncharitably describes his CSNY bandmates as "dead weight."[25] Young explains in a 1985 interview: "Well, at that point I felt like it was kind of dead weight for me. Not for them. For me. I could go somewhere and they couldn't go there. I wasn't going to pull them along, they were doing fine without me. It might have come off a little more harsh than I meant it, but once I write I can't say, 'Oh, I'm going to hurt someone's feelings.' Poetically and on feeling it made good sense to me and it came right out. I think I'd be doing a disservice to change it based on what I think a reaction would be. I try not to do that."[26] Young chose not to perform the song for several years after its initial release, due to his reaction to a particularly harsh review of the song. He would tell a 2014 audience "This song, you know, I did it, I haven't done it that much in my life because at a very vulnerable moment I read something about it. Just like the worst fucking review I've ever read. So for all your reviewers, if you feel like your words don't mean anything, you're probably right, but in that case, in that case they were damaging. So, anyway, I think I got this, I think this it's the one here. I hope so."[27]
"Ride My Llama" tells a tale of space travel and playing guitars with an alien. When introducing the song at The Boarding House, Young described it as "an extraterrestrial folk song" about "close encounters of the finest kind." He further shares that he wrote the song the same day as "Cortez the Killer".[28] Young and Crazy Horse would first record "Cortez the Killer", "Ride My Llama" and "Sedan Delivery" on the same day at the beginning of the Zuma sessions.
"Pocahontas" was written at the home of CSNY road manager and video producer Taylor Phelps "one night when I was just sitting around on one of my friend's farms out there. We were getting high sitting there in front of that old pot belly, thinking about what it could've been like. I turned over and said, 'Wow, I wish I had my 12 string with me right now'."[29] The song was written "just after Marlon Brando received his Academy Award and didn't accept it. And sent an Indian girl to receive the award and make a few comments."[30]
"Sail Away" was first performed live in 1977 with The Ducks. Its lyrics celebrate the feeling of freedom that comes with being able to change one's settings. Referring to the song, Young shares on his website in 2018 that "When i think about the road, I always see those long strips of blacktop cutting through immense valleys."
"Powderfinger" took several years to write; when Young first played the song live at The Boarding House, he claimed he still didn't know it well. Young explains its evolution in a 1993 interview: "It's a unique thing when you start a song at one point and finish it years later. Something happens. You get an original idea and get it going, and something stops you. It could be anything- some distraction that happens and takes your mind away from it. You could be trying too hard. These things happen, and you don't finish the song. "Powderfinger" took a long time; I wrote the first line in 1967 and didn't finish the song until 1975. It was funny to pick up where I left off. Something blocks me once in awhile, and I don't try to force anything to an unnatural end. I just put it away and maybe come back to it later."[31] Young would offer the song to Lynyrd Skynyrd for one of their albums, but members of the group perished before it could be recorded.[32]Cameron Crowe remembers in a post to his blog, The Uncool: "Neil Young gave a tape to Joel Bernstein to give to me which I gave to Ronnie [Van Zant], that had three songs on it - "Captain Kennedy," "Sedan Delivery," and "Powderfinger" - before they'd come out. And he wanted to give them to Lynyrd Skynyrd if they wanted to do one of his songs."
"Sedan Delivery" appears with a faster tempo and with one less verse than its studio performance from the Zuma sessions that surfaced on Chrome Dreams. In a 1995 interview with Nick Kent for Mojo magazine, Young denies any influence of U.K. punk rock on the album: "I wasn't really influenced by that scene. Most of the songs on that album had been written well before the Sex Pistols were ever heard of."[33] Instead, in a 2019 post on his website, he does credit Devo's influence: "This version was inspired by DEVO in attitude, moving a lot faster than the original earliest recording of "Sedan Delivery"."
Recording
The acoustic portions of the album including, "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)", "Thrasher" and "Ride My Llama" were recorded live in San Francisco at the Boarding House between May 24 and 28, 1978. Young played ten acoustic sets over five days. Young used the occasion to play several songs in concert for the first time. In addition to the three tracks on the album he also debuted "Powderfinger", "Shots" and "The Ways of Love" and played the rarities "Out of My Mind" and "I Believe in You" on piano. "Shots" would later appear on "Re·ac·tor" in 1981; "The Ways of Love" would first surface on Freedom in 1989. The concert takes were heavily overdubbed in the studio. For example, Young would later double the guitar part to "Ride My Llama" in the studio.
Two songs from the album were not recorded live: "Pocahontas" had been recorded solo in August 1976 during the Hitchhiker session, with later overdubs in September 1977 at Triiad studios for the album Oceanside/Countryside, an early version of Comes a Time. "Sail Away" was also recorded at Triiad as a solo track, and received full band overdubs during the Comes a Time recording sessions in November 1977.[34]
Following the May 27th performances at The Boarding House, Young joined Devo onstage at the punk club Mabuhay Gardens. The following day, they collaborated on the first electric performance of "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" at Different Fur Studios for the film Human Highway. Young would later push Crazy Horse to match Devo's intensity of performance when recording their version of the song for the album.[18]
The electric sets were recorded during the Neil Young/Crazy Horse tour in October 1978, with overdubs added later.[35] The same performance of "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" is used on both Rust Never Sleeps and Live Rust, with the former receiving significant overdubs. Audience noise is removed from the album as much as possible, although it is clearly audible at certain points, most noticeably on the opening and closing songs.
Young adopted a new look for the concerts, with much shorter hair and wearing a sport coat and bolo tie. The concerts incorporated several visual stunts: ridiculously oversized amplifiers, Star Wars Jawa-inspired "road-eye" characters roaming the stage and 3D "Rust-O-Vision" glasses were given out to the audience.[36] He would also appear onstage alongside three large wood-carved Indian statues from the set of Human Highway. One of the statues, "Woody", would accompany Young on future tours.[37]
The 1978 tour featured an abrasive style of guitar playing influenced by the punk rock zeitgeist of the late 1970s that Young saw as a wake up call for a rock music world which, in his opinion had become predictable and overdone.[38] The electric sets provided a reenergized response to the punk rock revolution and, were in stark contrast from Young's previous, folk-inspired album Comes a Time.[39][40]
Reviewing for The Village Voice in 1979, Robert Christgau called Rust Never Sleeps Young's best album yet and said although his melodies are unsurprisingly simple and original, his lyrics are surprisingly and offhandedly complex. "He's wiser but not wearier", Christgau wrote, "victor so far over the slow burnout his title warns of".[46]Paul Nelson, writing in Rolling Stone magazine, found its first side virtuosic because of how Young transcends the songs' acoustic settings with his commanding performance and was impressed by its themes of personal escape and exhaustion, the role of rock music, and American violence: "Rust Never Sleeps tells me more about my life, my country and rock & roll than any music I've heard in years."[47]
Rust Never Sleeps was voted the second best album of 1979 in The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop critics poll.[48] Christgau, the poll's creator, ranked it second on his own list for the poll, as did fellow critic Greil Marcus.[49] The album also won Rolling Stone magazine's 1979 critics poll for Album of the Year.[50] In a decade-end list for The Village Voice, Christgau named it the ninth best album of the 1970s.[51]
In 2000, Rust Never Sleeps was voted number 240 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums book.[52] In 2003, it was ranked number 350 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.[53]Rolling Stone re-ranked the album at 351 in the list's 2012 edition, and later at number 296 in the 2020 edition.[54][55] In a retrospective review, Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune said that the acoustic and electric sides were both astounding.[42]AllMusic's William Ruhlmann viewed that Young reinvigorated himself artistically by being imaginative and bold, and in the process created an exemplary album that "encapsulated his many styles on a single disc with great songs — in particular the remarkable 'Powderfinger' — unlike any he had written before."[41]Rob Sheffield, writing in The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), felt that "Powderfinger", "Pocahontas", "Thrasher", and "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" were among Young's greatest songs.[44]
Track listing
All tracks written by Neil Young except where noted.[56]
Neil Percival Young is a Canadian and American singer and songwriter. After embarking on a music career in Winnipeg in the 1960s, Young moved to Los Angeles, joining the folk-rock group Buffalo Springfield. Since the beginning of his solo career, often with backing by the band Crazy Horse, he has released critically acclaimed albums such as Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969), After the Gold Rush (1970), Harvest (1972), On the Beach (1974), and Rust Never Sleeps (1979). He was also a part-time member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, with whom he recorded the chart-topping 1970 album Déjà Vu.
Freedom is the 19th studio album by Canadian-American musician Neil Young, released on October 2, 1989. Freedom relaunched Young's career after a largely unsuccessful decade. After many arguments and a lawsuit, Young left Geffen Records in 1988 and returned to his original label, Reprise, with This Note's for You. Freedom brought about a new, critical and commercially successful album. It was released as an LP record, cassette tape, and CD.
Crazy Horse is an American rock band best known for their association with the musician Neil Young. Since 1969, 15 studio albums and several live albums have been billed as being by Neil Young and Crazy Horse. They have also released six studio albums of their own between 1971 and 2009.
American Stars 'n Bars is the eighth studio album by Canadian folk rock songwriter Neil Young, released on Reprise Records in 1977. Compiled from recording sessions scattered over a 29-month period, it includes "Like a Hurricane", one of Young's best-known songs. It peaked at #21 on the Billboard 200 and received a RIAA gold certification.
Comes a Time is the ninth studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young, released by Reprise Records in October 1978. The album is largely performed in a quiet folk and country style. It features backing harmonies sung by Nicolette Larson and additional accompaniment by musicians that had accompanied Young on his commercial pinnacle, Harvest. Like Harvest, the lyrics to many of its songs are inspired by relationships. In his memoir, Waging Heavy Peace, Young describes Comes a Time as one of his best albums ever.
Weld is a live album by Neil Young and Crazy Horse released in 1991, comprising performances recorded on the tour to promote the Ragged Glory album. It was initially released as a limited edition three-disc set entitled Arc-Weld, with the Arc portion being a single disc consisting in its entirety of a sound collage of guitar noise and feedback. Arc has since been released separately.
Sleeps with Angels is the 22nd studio album by Canadian musician Neil Young, released on August 16, 1994, on Reprise as a double LP and as a single CD. The album is Young's seventh with Crazy Horse. Co-produced by David Briggs, the album is Young's last with his long-time producer, who died the following year. The title track was written and recorded as a tribute to Kurt Cobain in wake of his suicide. Although the rest of the album was recorded before that event, the album takes on a somber, subdued tone throughout. Musician and author Ken Viola described the album as one of Young's "top five records. It examines the nature of dreams — both the light and dark side — and how they fuel reality in the nineties. Dreams are the only thing that we've got left to hang on to."
Live Rust is a live album by Neil Young and Crazy Horse, recorded during their fall 1978 Rust Never Sleeps tour.
"Hey Hey, My My " is a song written by Canadian-American musician Neil Young. Combined with its acoustic counterpart "My My, Hey Hey ", it bookends Young's 1979 album Rust Never Sleeps. The song was influenced by the punk rock zeitgeist of the late 1970s, in particular by Young's collaborations with the American art punk band Devo, and what he viewed as his own growing irrelevance.
Re·ac·tor is the twelfth studio album by Canadian folk rock musician Neil Young, and his fourth with American rock band Crazy Horse, released on November 2, 1981. It was his last album released through Reprise Records before he moved to Geffen for his next five albums.
Trans is the thirteenth studio album by Canadian musician and singer-songwriter Neil Young, released on January 10, 1983. Recorded and released during his Geffen era in the 1980s, its electronic sound baffled many fans upon its initial release—a Sennheiser vocoder VSM201 features prominently in six of the nine tracks.
Zuma, the seventh studio album by Canadian/American musician Neil Young, was released on Reprise Records in November 1975. Co-credited to Crazy Horse, it includes "Cortez the Killer", one of Young's best-known songs.
Ragged Glory is the 20th studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young, and his sixth album with the band Crazy Horse. It was released by Reprise Records on September 10, 1990. Ragged Glory was voted the 36th best grunge album of all time by Rolling Stone in 2019. A live recording of the album from November 2023 was released as Fuckin' Up in April 2024.
Life is the 17th studio album by Canadian musician Neil Young and his American backing band Crazy Horse, and it is Young's last release on the Geffen label. As with their 1979 album Rust Never Sleeps, most of the songs were recorded live with later studio overdubs. The album was released on July 6, 1987.
"Danger Bird" is a song written by Neil Young. It was first released on his 1975 album with Crazy Horse, Zuma. A live version was also released on the 1997 album Year of the Horse.
Chrome Dreams is the 46th studio album by Neil Young. It was first compiled as an acetate for consideration as an album for release in 1977. A copy of the acetate widely circulated as a bootleg in the decades prior to its release. The album was officially released on August 11, 2023 to universal acclaim from critics.
Frank "Poncho" Sampedro is an American retired guitarist and member of the rock band Crazy Horse, known mainly for his longtime collaboration with singer-songwriter Neil Young. Sampedro has played and recorded with Young in many other configurations aside from Crazy Horse and earned co-writing credits on several Young songs. Out of all Young's musical collaborators, Sampedro has perhaps proven the most adept at working with the mercurial artist.
"Powderfinger" is a song written by Neil Young, first released on his 1979 album Rust Never Sleeps. It subsequently appeared on several of Young's live recordings. A 2014 Rolling Stone special issue on Young ranked it as Young's best song ever.
Americana is the 33rd studio album by Canadian / American musician Neil Young, released on June 5, 2012. The album was Young's first collaboration with backing band Crazy Horse since their 2003 album, Greendale, and its associated tour.
Way Down in the Rust Bucket is a live album and concert film from Canadian-American rock musician Neil Young and his band Crazy Horse, released on February 26, 2021. It is Volume 11.5 in the Performance Series of Neil Young Archives.
References
↑ Young directly states that he considers this to be a studio album in the "Letter to the Editor" section on his website.
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