Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Rust Never Sleeps Remastered 1979-2005

As far as pure songcraft goes, it's hard to beat this 1979 offering from Young and Crazy Horse. By the end of the '90s, Young, Talbot, Molina and Sampredo had refined their crushing sonic assault to the extent that they could bludgeon the listener with Wagnerian riffs and rhythms (the entropy hymn "Hey Hey, My My") or provide just enough grit to keep Young's far-out lyrics from ascending into the stratosphere ("Ride My Llama.") Songwise, RUST is a schizophrenic album. Young moves from the brilliant surrealist imagery of "Pocahontas," with its evocation of "Marlon Brando, Pocahontas and me," to the sharp narrative perspective of the equally transcendent "Powderfinger" and the good-humored social commentary of "Welfare Mothers."

Rust Never Sleeps, its aphoristic title drawn from an intended advertising slogan, was an album of new songs, some of them recorded on Neil Young's 1978 concert tour. His strongest collection since Tonight's the Night, its obvious antecedent was Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home, and, as Dylan did, Young divided his record into acoustic and electric sides while filling his songs with wildly imaginative imagery. The leadoff track, "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)" (repeated in an electric version at album's end as "Hey Hey, My My [Into the Black]" with slightly altered lyrics), is the most concise and knowing description of the entertainment industry ever written; it was followed by "Thrasher," which describes Young's parallel artistic quest in an extended metaphor that also reflected the album's overall theme -- the inevitability of deterioration and the challenge of overcoming it. Young then spent the rest of the album demonstrating that his chief weapons against rusting were his imagination and his daring, creating an archetypal album that encapsulated his many styles on a single disc with great songs -- in particular the remarkable "Powderfinger" -- unlike any he had written before.

Neil Young - vocals, acoustic & electric guitars
Frank Sampedro - guitar
Billy Talbot - bass
Ralph Molina - drums

Additional personnel
Nicolette Larson - vocals
Joe Osborne
Carl Himmel


Tracks 1-5: With Nicolette Larson, Joe Osborne & Carl Himmel
Tracks 6-9: With Crazy Horse

1. My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue)
2. Thrasher
3. Ride My Llama
4. Pocahontas
5. Sail Away
6. Powderfinger
7. Welfare Mothers
8. Sedan Delivery
9. Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)