Rust Never Sleeps

The album was recorded in 1978 during the lengthy "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 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. 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,[11] and "Pocahontas" had been recorded solo in 1976[11] (original recording without overdubs was released in 2017 on archival release Hitchhiker).

The B side opens with "Powderfinger," whose enigmatic and evocative lyrics about a family's confrontation with authorities have never fully been explained by Young, and ends with the anthemic "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" with the defiant lyrics, "Rock and Roll can never die." After his final performance at the Boarding House on May 28, Young collaborated with the art punk band Devo on a cacophonous version of "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" at the Different Fur studio in San Francisco.[12] During the Different Fur studio session, 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.[13] 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.[14]

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. 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."[15]

[13] The lyrics, "It's better to burn out than fade away", were widely quoted by his peers and by critics.[12][16] 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."[17][18] In 1994, Kurt Cobain quoted the lyric in his suicide note.[19]

The electric sets were recorded during the Neil Young/Crazy Horse tour in late 1978, with overdubs added later.[20] 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 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.[21] 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.[22][23]

In a 1995 interview with Nick Kent for Mojo magazine, Young discusses the album and 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. The "Thrasher" was pretty much me writing about me experiences with Crosby, Stills & Nash in the mid-'70s. Do you know Lynyrd Skynyrd almost ended up recording "Powderfinger" before my version came out? We sent them an early demo of it because they wanted to do one of my songs."[24]

Retrospective professional reviews

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[25]
Chicago Tribune	[26]
Christgau's Record Guide	A+[27]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music	[28]
The Great Rock Discography	9/10[28]
Music Story	[28]
MusicHound Rock	4.5/5[28]
Q	[2]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	[29]
Spin Alternative Record Guide	10/10[28]
Consequence	A[30]

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".[31] 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."[32]

Rust Never Sleeps was voted the second best album of 1979 in The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop critics poll.[33] Christgau, the poll's creator, ranked it second on his own list for the poll, as did fellow critic Greil Marcus.[34] The album also won Rolling Stone magazine's 1979 critics poll for Album of the Year.[35] In a decade-end list for The Village Voice, Christgau named it the ninth best album of the 1970s.[36]

In 2000, Rust Never Sleeps was voted number 240 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums book.[37] In 2003, it was ranked number 350 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.[38] Rolling Stone re-ranked the album at 351 in the list's 2012 edition, and later at number 296 in the 2020 edition.[39][40] In a retrospective review, Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune said that the acoustic and electric sides were both astounding.[26] 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."[25] 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.[29]

All tracks written by Neil Young except where noted.[41]

• Neil Young – vocals, guitars, harmonica, organ, percussion

with (on "Sail Away")

• Nicolette Larson – vocals
• Joe Osborn – bass
• Karl T. Himmel – drums

Crazy Horse (on side two)

• Frank "Poncho" Sampedro – electric guitar, backing vocals
• Billy Talbot – bass, backing vocals
• Ralph Molina – drums, backing vocals

Singles

Year End Chart

A film of the same name was released on August 15, 1979, in the US, featuring the October 22, 1978, concert performance at the Cow Palace.

Track listing:

1. Sugar Mountain
2. I Am A Child
3. Comes A Time
4. After The Gold Rush
5. Thrasher
6. My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue)
7. When You Dance I Can Really Love
8. The Loner
9. Welfare Mothers
10. The Needle And The Damage Done
11. Lotta Love
12. Sedan Delivery
13. Powderfinger
14. Cortez The Killer
15. Cinnamon Girl
16. Like A Hurricane
17. Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)
18. Tonight's The Night [not present in the theatrical release, only in Video/DVD releases]

• McDonough, Jimmy (2002). Shakey: Neil Young's Biography. New York City, NY: Random House. ISBN 978-0-679-42772-8. OCLC 47844513.

• Rust Never Sleeps at Discogs (list of releases)
• Film: Rust Never Sleeps at IMDb