Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps: Burning Out, Not Fading Away | Music Videos Deconstructed

Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps & Human Highway

 

Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps captures a moment in history where rock’s old guard was bumping up against the aftermath of punk. 

Greil Marcus' wrote in his 1993 book "Ranters & Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music" on selecting "Rust Never Sleeps" as the most important album of 1979:

"Divided equally between graceful acoustic reveries and viciously hard rock, this was a sneak attack on entropy, its explicit subject. Up against the most reliable and unpredictable rock 'n' roller of the decade, entropy never had a chance --- at least while this album was playing."

From Music Videos Deconstructed :

And so it is that in 1978 we get a short-haired Neil Young singing about how “it’s better to burn out than to fade away/rust”, a line which alongside Pete Townsend’s “Hope I die before I get old” captures the rock n’ roll ethos (not to mention punks ‘anarchic’ nihilism) pretty perfectly. In two versions, one acoustic, the other bludgeoningly electric, of one song ‘Hey Hey, My My’ (Out Of The Blue/In To The Black) Young filters the current zeitgeist, preceding the line above with “The King is gone but he’s not forgotten, this is the story of a Johnny Rotten” referencing the death of Elvis, the arrival of the Sex Pistols and all that seemed to represent in one killer line.

And whilst the ambient resonance of punk is most obviously referenced in ‘Hey Hey, My My’ it is every bit as evident in the trashy blast of ‘Welfare Mothers’ and the pummeling drive of ‘Sedan Delivery’, the latter’s verses delivered at positively breakneck speed by Crazy Horse standards. The entire electric part of this performance is loose limbed and slightly ragged. The music ebbs and flows, with Young acting as the conductor taking his band up and down at will. Together they make what might be labelled in England as a glorious racket.

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Burning Out, Not Fading Away: Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps 

March 12, 2016 by Paul Brown 

We take a look at a classic concert movie which captures a moment in history where rock’s old guard was bumping up against the aftermath of punk…

The late 1970’s were a strange time for the generation of rock royalty that had emerged so brightly from the previous decade. No longer the vanguard, the likes of Dylan, the Stones, The Who et al found themselves increasingly out of step especially when the twin explosions of punk and disco shook the cultural landscape to its core.

Neil Young weathered that particular storm better than most. In part this was because Young had never really been in step with his own generation anyway. Although he may have began his career in the 60’s with Buffalo Springfield it was in the 70’s that Young really flowered, releasing a string of albums that have become his core works. To this end Young surfed that high wave over and through the shifting sands beneath.

The other factor was that with Crazy Horse he had for some years been playing music which had the same un-technical, shambolic air that many an untutored punk band was currently pedalling. Crazy Horse were absolutely not musos, and in another life would have been lucky to have gotten a job with anyone else of even half Neil Young’s stature. Indeed, Young had cause to defend his backing group’s abilities to his peers on more than one occasion. When he told CSNY colleague Stephen Still that he played with them because they had soul, Stills replied “My dog’s got soul Neil, I don’t want him in my band”.

Young was right though, what Crazy Horse lacked in chops they made up for with feeling, and it’s that which Young prizes above all else and was what most delighted him about punk, which he was quick to embrace and support. In an interview at the time he said “I like that music because the people making it are alive. And they don’t give a shit. They don’t care about being number one. They don’t care about a great sounding, polished product. What they want is guts, and a good beat”.

And so it is that in 1978 we get a short-haired Neil Young singing about how “it’s better to burn out than to fade away/rust”, a line which alongside Pete Townsend’s “Hope I die before I get old” captures the rock n’ roll ethos (not to mention punks ‘anarchic’ nihilism) pretty perfectly. In two versions, one acoustic, the other bludgeoningly electric, of one song ‘Hey Hey, My My’ (Out Of The Blue/In To The Black) Young filters the current zeitgeist, preceding the line above with “The King is gone but he’s not forgotten, this is the story of a Johnny Rotten” referencing the death of Elvis, the arrival of the Sex Pistols and all that seemed to represent in one killer line.

And whilst the ambient resonance of punk is most obviously referenced in ‘Hey Hey, My My’ it is every bit as evident in the trashy blast of ‘Welfare Mothers’ and the pummeling drive of ‘Sedan Delivery’, the latter’s verses delivered at positively breackneck speed by Crazy Horse standards. The entire electric part of this performance is loose limbed and slightly ragged. The music ebbs and flows, with Young acting as the conductor taking his band up and down at will. Together they make what might be labelled in England as a glorious racket.

It’s with an acoustic performance we begin though, and slowly too. The first minutes of the performance see the ‘roadeyes’ setting the stage to the slightly disjointed strains of Hendrix’s ‘Star Spangled Banner’ and the Beatles’ ‘A Day In The Life’ for Young to emerge childlike from a box to sing ‘Sugar Mountain’ followed by ‘I Am A Child’, songs as sweet as any he has ever written. As he carries on through this section there seems to be something almost incongruous about these songs in light of what you know is to come. This is the spoonful of sugar, sweetening things for the heavy medicine Crazy Horse are about to bring.

It’s only when he launches in to the acoustic ‘Hey Hey, My My’ that the atmosphere starts to bristle a little, and only when the band launch in to searing versions of ‘When You Dance You Can Really Love’ and ‘The Loner’ that we get down to business, the latter rocking much harder than the version on his eponymous debut, and all the better for it. Indeed, fuelled by punk’s noise Young was rocking harder than he ever had. Long time Young associate Joel Bernstein would later recall of the Rust Never Sleeps tour “It was incredibly loud, unbelievably loud” and adding how in one L.A. show the entire guest section including Ahmet Ertegun and David Geffen left during the second electric song, such was the pummeling effect of the volume.

Contrarily enough the highlights come when all concerned slow the pace a little and relax in to songs that have become staples of the NY&CH ouvre. ‘Powderfinger’ and ‘Cortez The Killer’ give them a chance to stretch out a bit, with Young’s incendiary solos taking center stage, but it’s ‘Like A Hurricane’ that really soars, howls in fact, and is also the point in the concert where Young sails closest to the kind of mega-stadium ROCK that punk was trying to get away from.

And it’s his inbuilt sense of the contrary which shines through strongest on Rust Never Sleeps; acoustic troubador and hard-nosed rocker, at once both sharply in tune with the times and yet always resolutely marching to his own beat. He would lose his way a bit in the 80’s but only by steadfastly refusing to compromise his artistic drive. It’s an ethos which colours his entire career, and is how he’s managed to remain wholly contemporary without ever being even slightly fashionable. And it’s how in 1978 he was able to flourish where others floundered as a new era dawned.

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Sheryl Crow In The Studio with Neil Young

Neil Young & Sheryl Crow - 11 March 2016
(Click photo to enlarge)
Reports from Sheryl Crow News indicates that Sheryl Crow was working with Neil Young in the studio, earlier this month.

No other details are available other than Steve Jordan is possibly both Producer and Drummer on the project.

From Vanity Fair magazine (November 2005):

"My hometown of Kennett, Missouri, sits right on the Arkansas and Tennessee borders. The Mississippi River makes the air hang heavy with moisture. About 10 miles away, there's a town called Senath, famous for its legend of a mysterious, otherwordly light. As kids, we would drive out to an empty field and sit for hours waiting for its light to appear. Neil Young's "Harvest" was the soundtrack of my last summer in Kennett, and although I told many boys, I'd seen "the light," I never really did."

"Long May You Run"
Stephen Stills and Sheryl Crow
Neil Young Honored As MusiCares Person Of The Year

Sheryl Crow at MusiCares Honors Neil Young As Person Of The Year - 2010:

"He seemed to marry folk music and country music and for me, where I was from in Missouri, it really sort of set me on course as far as a songwriter goes, and he also managed to interject really socially, politically, moving lyrics into rock songs and he still is for me the template that I hold up and hope to eventually accomplish the things that he's done."

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F*Words: My Life of Film, Food, Feminism, Fun, Family, Friends, Flaws, Fabric, And The Far Out Future by Jeanne Field

Ben Keith, Tim Drummond, Neil, Tim Mulligan - ~1972
(Click photo to enlarge)
Some people lead charmed lives. There is extra grace involved when the person who lives that life is as charming and irresistible as Jeanne Field in her book F*Words: My Life of Film, Food, Feminism, Fun, Family, Friends, Flaws, Fabric, And The Far Out Future .

Author and traveler Jeanne Field crossed paths with Neil Young and many others back in the late 1960's and into the 1970's. Field's autobiography includes going on the road making a film with CSNY in 1970 after working on “Woodstock”. The footage they shot became the backbone of “Journey Through The Past”. She also worked on David Lynch’s “Eraserhead” and “The Last Waltz”. Then, along with L.A. Johnson, she worked on “Human Highway”, “Rust Never Sleeps” and “Solo Trans".

Her book, “F*Words” has a lot of remembrances of living on the ranch, touring with Neil Young and making films.An excerpt regarding Neil Young and L.A. Johnson during the Harvest recording sessions from F*Words: My Life of Film, Food, Feminism, Fun, Family, Friends, Flaws, Fabric, And The Far Out Future :

Larry [L.A. Johnson] reported that Neil was completely enthralled with the filmmaking process. He was hard at work on a new album which would become “Harvest”, but he was devoting a lot of time to getting southern footage (for "Southern Man") and Nashville footage (a great scene with a barge being launched into the Cumberland River). Larry took him to his mother, Margaret’s, hometown, Americus, Georgia where Larry reunited with the old black couple who had taken care of him as a baby. After that trip, we spent time on the ranch filming Neil and the musicians (Kenny Buttrey, drums, Tim Drummond, bass, Jack Nietzsche, piano, Ben Keith, slide guitar) that producer Elliot Mazer had introduced Neil to in Nashville.

Setting up in an old barn on the ranch, they put in a stage and left the hay bales. You had to sit on something. The hillside facing the barn had a herd of buffalo which would run toward the barn every afternoon around 5pm. Maybe they wanted to harmonize or were just enjoying the music. I felt very privileged to be there, listening to those wonderful songs that have become Neil classics, "Are you Ready for the Country", "Alabama", and "Words - Between the Lines of Age" (which we always sang as "Between the ears of Tas", honoring our little dog). It was a great part of my production assistant job.

F*Words: My Life of Film, Food, Feminism, Fun, Family, Friends, Flaws, Fabric, And The Far Out Future

by Jeanne Field
(LA Johnson took the cover photo in 1971)

Jeanne Field -- to a degree -- is another voice of her generation, beginning in the 1940's and continuing until the present. She lived in magical times and has met and befriended some remarkable people in her book where she encounters Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Gregory Peck, Harold Lloyd, Buckminster Fuller, Bill Murray and many more fascinating people who are the generation's archetypes.

Jeanne Field didn't make these connections out of ambition. She was adventurous but practical enough to have made it through the turbulence. Usually, she was just looking for a job, and ended up with amazing people with great work ethics and our reading is rewarded with sharing her time behind the scenes with people of substance, even genius. Practicality can lead you to magic, she might say.

She tells us that "each person has an amazing story, whether told through a novel like Carol Shields' "The Stone Diaries" or described in terrifying detail in "Anne Frank's Diary" ".

Teenagers back in the 1960's may recognize themselves in many of Field's journeys. But will "millennials" of today? Will today's young seeker see that our journeys don't have to be planned, that one can stay open, resilient, letting nothing bring you down while realizing that simple choices can lead to magic? Hopefully not after finishing reading F*Words: My Life of Film, Food, Feminism, Fun, Family, Friends, Flaws, Fabric, And The Far Out Future by Jeanne Field

During her years in the entertainment industry, Jeanne Field has worked as a distributor, camera assistant, editor, producer (in film and theater), agent and manager. Her production work includes documentaries such as Michael Wadleigh’s Academy Award winning “Woodstock,” Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Waltz” and another Academy Award winner, Sarah Kernochen’s “Marjoe.” She also worked on four feature-length films and videos with Neil Young, two one-hour videos with Joni Mitchell, “The TVTV Show” (for NBC), feature films “Eraserhead” (directed by David Lynch) and “Uforia” (directed by John Binder), and many other films and television shows. 

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HOW TO WIN BOOK COPY OF F*Words: My Life of Film, Food, Feminism, Fun, Family, Friends, Flaws, Fabric, And The Far Out Future by Jeanne Field

A lucky Thrasher's Wheat supporters will be eligible to win a copy of the book F*Words: My Life of Film, Food, Feminism, Fun, Family, Friends, Flaws, Fabric, And The Far Out Future by Jeanne Field ". We truly appreciate being able to do what we do here at TW, and we love being able to give something back in return.

To enter the contest, follow these steps:

#1) Subscribe (or be already subscribed) to one of our blogfeed channels either via Facebook Page (LIKE us), Twitter (FOLLOW us), YouTube Channel (SUBSCRIBE), Google + (PLUS us) and/or subscribe to our email list.

2) Then just email us (thrasher@thrasherswheat.org) Also, include which blogfeed channel you signed up for (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or email list options noted above in Step #1). *Be sure to include your complete Facebook ID or Twitter handle or YouTube ID or email address.*

Include your name, postal mailing address, including *COUNTRY*.

Entries must be emailed to thrasher@thrasherswheat.org with SUBJECT line: CONTEST - F*Words by Jeanne Field

Deadline: Thursday, March 31, 5PM EST

We'll then randomly select Thrasher's Wheat readers as winners.

Don't Be Denied!

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