Album: Rust Never Sleeps
Recorded: August 1976, September 1977 and May + October 1978
Recorded: August 1976, September 1977 and May + October 1978
Released: June 1979
Songs / length: 9 / 38:16
Rust Never Sleeps is a good place to end this journey through Young's golden 60s & 70s musical era, not just because it's an album about the impermanence of rock & roll, but also because it's his last notable record for over a decade. The 80s were not particularly kind to Young, and while his various genre excursions into electropop (Trans), rockabilly (Everbody's Rockin') and country (Old Ways) are not without interest, the quality of his musical output was patchy from Hawks & Doves onwards.
Opening track My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue) sounds like a defence of rock & roll in the face of the emerging threat from punk music and Johnny Rotten. In his autobiography, Young remembers the Rust Never Sleeps tour fondly, saying the idea behind it was developed on his yacht (WN Ragland) while sailing round the Virgin Islands, focusing on the standpoint of a young boy dreaming. It was conceived like a work of performance art entitled "Rust Never Sleeps: A Concert Fantasy", inspired by the feeling of the hippie generation and the new punk generation being juxtaposed in some artists, like Devo, who directly gave him the inspiration for the album title, Rust Never Sleeps.
As well as its gorgeous guitar sound, the opening song is also memorable for the line, "it's better to burn out than to fade away", which was infamously quoted in Kurt Cobain's suicide note and was inspired by the death of Elvis ("the king is gone, but he's not forgotten"). It's one of three tracks recorded at The Boarding Horse in San Francisco in late May 1978, along with Thrasher and Ride My Llama, all of which form part of the album's acoustic first side. Thrasher is a lovely nostalgia-tinged song, while the lyrics to Ride My Llama are a bit naff, but both tracks blend nicely with the earlier 1976-77 recordings of Pocahontas and Sail Away (the latter featuring Nicolette Larson).
Side 2 is composed of four tracks taken from live performances in October 1978, including Powderfinger (recorded in Denver), Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black) recorded at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, and two songs from a live show at St Paul Civic Center, Minnesota – Welfare Mothers (by far the weakest song on the album) and Sedan Delivery. Live performances from this tour also formed the basis of Young's other 1979 release, Live Rust.
It was unfortunate timing that these Rust Never Sleeps live shows coincided with the release of Young's previous LP, Comes A Time, a completely different album recorded with a different band in Nashville. Young says in his autobiography that, "at that time, I was in the habit of performing all of my new live songs first, recording them that way, and then taking the audiences out of the mixes. Then I released them as studio albums. Crazy Horse was great live, and that was the most fun way to do it." Musicians can't be that bold any more because of YouTube and the way that any mistakes in live shows would be broadcast on social media. As a result, bands are arguably now more risk-averse, while this album is a prime example of the rewards of taking risks.
Highlights: Thrasher, Powderfinger and Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)
Album rating: A
Rust Never Sleeps is a good place to end this journey through Young's golden 60s & 70s musical era, not just because it's an album about the impermanence of rock & roll, but also because it's his last notable record for over a decade. The 80s were not particularly kind to Young, and while his various genre excursions into electropop (Trans), rockabilly (Everbody's Rockin') and country (Old Ways) are not without interest, the quality of his musical output was patchy from Hawks & Doves onwards.
Opening track My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue) sounds like a defence of rock & roll in the face of the emerging threat from punk music and Johnny Rotten. In his autobiography, Young remembers the Rust Never Sleeps tour fondly, saying the idea behind it was developed on his yacht (WN Ragland) while sailing round the Virgin Islands, focusing on the standpoint of a young boy dreaming. It was conceived like a work of performance art entitled "Rust Never Sleeps: A Concert Fantasy", inspired by the feeling of the hippie generation and the new punk generation being juxtaposed in some artists, like Devo, who directly gave him the inspiration for the album title, Rust Never Sleeps.
As well as its gorgeous guitar sound, the opening song is also memorable for the line, "it's better to burn out than to fade away", which was infamously quoted in Kurt Cobain's suicide note and was inspired by the death of Elvis ("the king is gone, but he's not forgotten"). It's one of three tracks recorded at The Boarding Horse in San Francisco in late May 1978, along with Thrasher and Ride My Llama, all of which form part of the album's acoustic first side. Thrasher is a lovely nostalgia-tinged song, while the lyrics to Ride My Llama are a bit naff, but both tracks blend nicely with the earlier 1976-77 recordings of Pocahontas and Sail Away (the latter featuring Nicolette Larson).
Side 2 is composed of four tracks taken from live performances in October 1978, including Powderfinger (recorded in Denver), Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black) recorded at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, and two songs from a live show at St Paul Civic Center, Minnesota – Welfare Mothers (by far the weakest song on the album) and Sedan Delivery. Live performances from this tour also formed the basis of Young's other 1979 release, Live Rust.
It was unfortunate timing that these Rust Never Sleeps live shows coincided with the release of Young's previous LP, Comes A Time, a completely different album recorded with a different band in Nashville. Young says in his autobiography that, "at that time, I was in the habit of performing all of my new live songs first, recording them that way, and then taking the audiences out of the mixes. Then I released them as studio albums. Crazy Horse was great live, and that was the most fun way to do it." Musicians can't be that bold any more because of YouTube and the way that any mistakes in live shows would be broadcast on social media. As a result, bands are arguably now more risk-averse, while this album is a prime example of the rewards of taking risks.
Highlights: Thrasher, Powderfinger and Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)
Album rating: A
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