Neil Young & Crazy Horse: Rust Never Sleeps

Fans of Neil Young will undoubtedly cite earlier albums (Harvest, Tonight's the Night, or others, while the compilation Decade is stunning and will be featured here in the future) as the best of his remarkable body of work, but, for this listener, hearing this music for the first time as a young teen, Rust Never Sleeps has the most significance.

While this young listener was more drawn to the primal closer "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" and the other harder-rocking tunes on the record, the blogger decades later can now see the tie to Bob Dylan's 1965 classic Bringing It All Back Home, in that the first side (of the LP, of course) is acoustic and the second electric.  "Thrasher" is a remarkable tune with some of Young's most impressionistic and yet pointed lyrics about the artistic quest, while "Pocahontas" is another rumination on the terrible treatment of indigenous Americans by whites and "Sail Away" is a great song apparently about escaping from modern pressures.

"Powderfinger" is an exceptional song, as heavy as Crazy Horse, which hadn't recorded with Young for a few years, often was, and the lyrics are simultaneously direct and vague, with respect to the fact that they tell a story of an attack by a boat on a river, but don't indicate where, when or why—then again, Young often wrote with that kind of tension of laser-sharp specifics and broad ambiguities.

"Sedan Delivery" tells another story with some striking details of pool halls, a bizarre dental appointment and erotica among the stars, though the lines "I'm makin' another delivery / Of chemicals and sacred roots," seems clear enough.  As for the closer, it definitely brings back memories of hearing the song on the radio way back when—and when I probably assumed "Johnny Rotten" was a character from the songwriter's imagination. 

Rust Never Sleeps, which was recorded in concert with most of the audience noise scrubbed, was, says the liners, "a loose-knit concept album" with the broad idea "that an artist's reach must always exceed [their] grasp," otherwise they would face "stagnation and irrelevancy."  Reportedly, inspired, at least partly, by the revolutionary effect of punk rock, Young's reference to Johnny Rotten in the bookend tracks was an acknowledgment of what he saw as the fact that rock artists "needed waking up."

Lastly, there seems to be a clear lineage between the album and the grunge movement that, after the pop/electronic sheen that permeated much of the music of the Eighties, including Young's, brought about the likes of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Mudhoney, Soundgarden and many others.  Whether or not Rust Never Sleeps is the best of his many albums over a long career, it is one that had a strong impression way back when.