‘Rust Never Sleeps’- Neil Young becomes the Godfather of Grunge

It can be hard to fathom, but the crunchy guitar revolution behind grunge originates in a seminal and often reserved record by Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young.

After reuniting with the iconic backing band of Crazy Horse for 1975’s “Zuma,” Young opted to rush into the complete opposing direction, and his lyricism grew more introspective as his songs grew softer. From these sessions came the unfinished “Chrome Dreams” record, which most cuts ended up on the decidedly more rocking “American Stars ‘n’ Bars”, a fine if often undercooked record.

With the follow up, the soft country-folk of “Comes a Time” in his rear-view mirror, Young returned to several outtakes from the “Chrome Dreams” sessions, polishing up the acoustic demo of “Pocahontas” and rerecording or even overhauling other material. As part of this experiment in resurrecting his past, he started to incorporate live recordings with heavy overdubbing, culminating in what would become “Rust Never Sleeps.”

The first side of “Rust” arguably functions to lull the listener into a sense of false security, with only the last track “Sail Away” bringing in a more diverse instrumental palette than Young’s guitar and harmonica.

On this acoustic side’s strongest cuts, with opener “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)” and the aforementioned “Pocahontas,” the folk singer’s vocals have rarely been as perfectly fragile, with the latter commenting on the American genocide of the Indigenous peoples through the ironic perspective of the country’s subsequent technological and cultural achievements.

Side two is a completely different beast, singlehandedly providing the case for Young’s title as the “Godfather of Grunge.” He opens this four song stretch with “Powderfinger,” a watershed moment for his abilities as a guitarist and as a songwriter, weaving a tale of a young man who dies protecting his family from an encroaching gunboat. The magic of this tune is in Young’s brilliant juxtaposition, each lead guitar line soaring higher as his lines grow more somber.

Elsewhere, the raucous new wave/punk fusions of “Welfare Mothers” and “Sedan Delivery” most clearly reveal the influence of Devo on Young’s music at the time with even the title for the album coming from Devo lead singer Mark Mothersbaugh. All three of these wonderfully noisy cuts, however, are merely a warm-up for the completely blown-out closer “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black).”

“Into the Black” reincorporates most of the opener while crucially changing the line “It’s better to burn out than to fade,” quoted in Kurt Cobain’s final note, to the title-dropping “It’s better to burn out cause rust never sleeps.” This change epitomizes the cold, angsty nature of the second side, further enforced by the earth-shatteringly fuzzy tone rupturing through the wall of sound.

One can imagine a young Cobain experiencing a spiritual realization when he first heard Young scream “rock and roll can never die” over Crazy Horse’s fittingly crazed antics. While the songwriting and some of the compositional sensibilities remain wholly foreign to the grunge sound in any capacity, it is hard to deny how important this record was and still is to the evolution of rock music.