1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 432. Neil Young With Crazy Horse – Rust Never Sleeps (1979)

 

Seems like a long time since we’ve had anybody from the CSNY family tree, and my suspicion is that Neil Young is going to be the only one with any connections to Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds etc. that we will get any more from going forwards, but we shall see. 

There are two sides to Neil Young – Acoustic Folky Neil, and Acid Grungy Neil, and this album breaks the two sides of Neil into the two sides of the album. 

Side One is acoustic, a return to the kind of country-folk style tracks that we haven’t heard for a long time. It’s hard not to hear Thrasher without thinking of Fred Neill/Harry Nilsson’s Everybody’s Talkin’, but then we get something a bit trippy with Ride My Llama, about riding a llama into outer space. Pocahontas sees the narrator hanging out with Pocahontas and Marlon Brando. This isn’t such a random pairing as it may seem, as Brando was a campaigner for the rights of Indigenous people. The track starts with a massacre of a Native American village, and is typical Young merging of acerbic political content with personal reverie. 

This carries across to Side Two’s Powderfinger, wherein a young man is killed defending his village from the “gunboats on the water”. The images from the track Pocahontas had me thinking of early American history, and I wondered if the narrator was a Native American, or if it was perhaps a Civil War story, but thinking about gunboats it could equally be a Vietnam era tale. Or, in fact, anywhere and anywhen where violent conflict destroys families and communities. 

Powderfinger introduces us to the heavier, grungier sound of Side Two. This is where Crazy Horse join in, Side One being mostly acoustic guitar and vocals with no percussion section or amplified instruments. Here, Young returns to the style of earlier tracks like Cinnamon Girl or Cowgirl In The Sand, but it feels like he gradually notches up the grunginess of his guitar as the album progresses. 

By the time we get to the final track, Hey Hey My My (Into The Black), everything is deeply muddy and distorted, a glorious sludgy noise-fest that I can only assume a young Kurt Cobain must have heard and gone “This is where I want to go”. Sadly, Cobain also took to heart the lyric “It’s better to burn out than to fade away”. 

The two bookend versions of Hey Hey My My – the light acoustic (Out Of The Blue) at the beginning and the dark grungy (Into The Black) at the end – serve as a synecdoche of the Seventies as a whole – we started out with the country rock of Eagles and the wistful acoustic folk of James Taylor, and we’ve come to the nihilistic grime of The Fall and Joy Division, same as the (Western) world started out the Seventies with some of the optimism of the late Sixties, and that perhaps the hope that a new decade would change things, and ends the decade with financial crises, political scandals, and a world in more fractured turmoil than ever.  

I was prepared to think of this one as being here only because of Dimery’s seeming obsession for all things CSNY, but actually it’s a great document of musical evolution, and a pretty good album to boot.