Rust Never Sleeps (1979)

Rust Never Sleeps is the tenth album by Canadian American singer-songwriter Neil Young and his third with American band Crazy Horse. It was released on June 22, 1979, by Reprise Records and features both studio and live tracks. Most of the album was recorded live, then overdubbed in the studio, while other songs originated 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 album peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard 200 album chart and spawned the hit single "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" that peaked at No. 79 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart. It also included one of Young's most popular and critically acclaimed songs, the enigmatic "Powderfinger". The album, along with Young's 1990 release Ragged Glory, has widely been considered a precursor of grunge music with the bands Nirvana and Pearl Jam having cited Young's heavily distorted and abrasive guitar style on the B side of the album as an inspiration.

Background

The album was recorded in May 1978 during solo acoustic performances at The Boarding House in San Francisco and in October 1978 during the "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 overdubbed live tracks are complemented with two outtakes from Young's previous album, Comes a Time.

Writing

The album sees Young reunited with Crazy Horse, his first credited to the band since 1975's Zuma. Four of the album's eight songs date from the sessions from that previous album: "Pocahontas", "Ride My Llama", "Powderfinger" and "Sedan Delivery". Studio attempts at each of these songs from the summer of 1975 have since been released through Young's Archives series. Young explains in his memoir, Waging Heavy Peace: "The album Zuma is the first album we made with Crazy Horse after Poncho joined the band. We kept playing day after day and partying at night. We did the original "Powderfinger" and held it back. We did "Sedan Delivery" and held it back. "Ride My Llama" was completely finished and mixed and held back. Today I like listening to all of those tracks together in a compilation I call Dume that is in The Archives Volume 2."

The album's title, Rust Never Sleeps, takes its name from the song that bookends the album, titled "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)" and "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)". The line "It's better to burn out than it is to rust" was borrowed from a line in a song by Jeff Blackburn, Young's bandmate in The Ducks, with whom he toured in 1977. 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. 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.

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: