Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Rust Never Sleep (1979)

Rust Never Sleeps is an album by Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young and American band Crazy Horse. It was released on July 2, 1979, by Reprise Records. Most of the album was recorded live, then overdubbed 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.

The bulk of the album was recorded live at San Francisco’s Boarding House and during the Neil Young/Crazy Horse tour in late 1978, with overdubs added later. Audience noise is removed as much as possible, although it is clearly audible at certain points, most noticeably on the opening and closing songs. The album is half acoustic and half electric, opening and closing with different versions of the same song: “Hey Hey, My My”.

“My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)”, “Thrasher” and “Ride My Llama” were recorded live at the Boarding House in early 1978 and all of side two was recorded during the late 1978 tour. Two songs from the album were not recorded live: “Sail Away” was recorded without Crazy Horse during or after the Comes a Time recording sessions, and “Pocahontas” had been recorded solo around 1975.

Young also released a film version of the album under the same title. Later on in 1979, Young and Crazy Horse released the album Live Rust, a compilation of older classics interweaving within the Rust Never Sleeps track list. The title is borrowed from the slogan for Rust-Oleum paint, and was suggested by Mark Mothersbaugh of the new wave band Devo. It is also an aphorism describing Young’s musical self-renewal to avert the threat of irrelevance.

In a contemporary review for The Village Voice, 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”.

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.”

Rust Never Sleeps was voted the second best album of 1979 in The Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop critics poll. Christgau, the poll’s creator, ranked it second on his own list for the poll, as did fellow critic Greil Marcus. The album also won Rolling Stone magazine’s 1979 critics poll for Album of the Year. In a decade-end list for The Village Voice, Christgau named it the ninth best album of the 1970s.

In 2003, Rust Never Sleeps was ranked number 350 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In a retrospective review, Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune said that the acoustic and electric sides were both astounding.

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.”[8] 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.

Personnel:
Ralph Molina (drums, background vocals)
Frank “Poncho” Sampedro (guitar, background vocals)
Billy Talbot (bass, background vocals)
Neil Young (vocals, guitar, harmonica, organ, percussion)
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Karl T. Himmel (drums on 05.)
Nicolette Larson (vocals on 05.)
Joe Osborn (bass on 05.)

Tracklist:

01. My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue) (Young/Blackburn) 3.45
02. Thrasher (Young) 5.38
03. Ride My Llama (Young) 2.29
04. Pocahontas (Young) 3.22
05. Sail Away (Young) 3.46
06. Powderfinger (Young) 5.30
07. Welfare Mothers (Young) 3.48
08. Sedan Delivery (Young) 4.40
09. Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black) (Young/Blackburn) 5.18

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Neil Young – Harvest (1972)

Neil Young’s most popular album, Harvest benefited from the delay in its release (it took 18 months to complete due to Young’s back injury), which whetted his audience’s appetite, the disintegration of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (Young’s three erstwhile partners sang on the album, along with Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor), and most of all, a hit single. “Heart of Gold,” released a month before Harvest, was already in the Top 40 when the LP hit the stores, and it soon topped the charts. It’s fair to say, too, that Young simply was all-pervasive by this time: “Heart of Gold” was succeeded at number one by “A Horse with No Name” by America, which was a Young soundalike record. But successful as Harvest was (and it was the best-selling album of 1972), it has suffered critically from reviewers who see it as an uneven album on which Young repeats himself. Certainly, Harvest employs a number of jarringly different styles. Much of it is country-tinged, with Young backed by a new group dubbed the Stray Gators who prominently feature steel guitarist Ben Keith, though there is also an acoustic track, a couple of electric guitar-drenched rock performances, and two songs on which Young is accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra. But the album does have an overall mood and an overall lyric content, and they conflict with each other: The mood is melancholic, but the songs mostly describe the longing for and fulfillment of new love. Young is perhaps most explicit about this on the controversial “A Man Needs a Maid,” which is often condemned as sexist by people judging it on the basis of its title. In fact, the song contrasts the fears of committing to a relationship with simply living alone and hiring help, and it contains some of Young’s most autobiographical writing. Unfortunately, like “There’s a World,” the song is engulfed in a portentous orchestration.

Over and over, Young sings of the need for love in such songs as “Out on the Weekend,” “Heart of Gold,” and “Old Man” (a Top 40 hit), and the songs are unusually melodic and accessible. The rock numbers, “Are You Ready for the Country” and “Alabama,” are in Young’s familiar style and unremarkable, and “There’s a World” and “Words (Between the Lines of Age)” are the most ponderous and overdone Young songs since “The Last Trip to Tulsa.” But the love songs and the harrowing portrait of a friend’s descent into heroin addiction, “The Needle and the Damage Done,” remain among Young’s most affecting and memorable songs. (by William Ruhlmann)

In other words: a classic album !

Personnel:
Kenny Buttrey (drums)
Tim Drummond (bass)
Ben Keith (pedal steel guitar)
Neil Young (guitar, piano, harmonica, vocals)
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David Crosby (background vocals on 05. + 08.)
John Harris (piano on 02.)
Teddy Irwin (guitar on 04.)
James McMahon (piano on 06.)
Graham Nash (background vocals on 05. + 10.)
Jack Nitzsche (piano, slide guitar on 03. + 08.)
Linda Ronstadt (backiground vocals on 04. + 06.)
Stephen Stills (backiground vocals on 08. + 10.)
James Taylor (banjo, guitar, background vocals on 04. + 06.)
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London Symphony Orchestra  (on 03. + 07.)

Tracklist:
01. Out On The Weekend 4.35
02. Harvest 3.03
03. A Man Needs A Maid 4.00
04. Heart Of Gold 3.05
05. Are You Ready For The Country? 3.21
06. Old Man 3.22
07. There’s A World 3.00
08. Alabama 4.02
09. The Needle And The Damage Done 2.00
10. Words (Between the Lines Of Age) 6.42

All songs written by Neil Young

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