FILM: Rust Never Sleeps (1979)
Released just two months after the album Rust Never Sleeps, this film documents the October 22, 1978 performance at Cow Palace, San Francisco during Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s fall 1978 tour. It’s probably one of the best representations of the Horse’s dynamic. I saw them described once as “America’s biggest garage band,” and that really shows through here. They look like they just rolled out of bed. They are rough, the playing is all over the place. They make mistakes. And it’s glorious.
I’m going to cover the live album Live Rust after this and they largely have the same playlist, so I’m going to focus on the stage show and production of this film instead of the music. The first thing to talk about is that Neil had an entire concept and plan for this tour that is unlike anything I’ve seen before (and I’ve seen Iron Maiden). There’s a good discourse that this show is essentially a metaphor for Neil moving past his folkie/hippie roots and into the nascent punk zeitgeist. Which isn’t to say he really changes into a punk, but that he adopts the attitudes of that new genre because he sees it as the new iteration of counter culture, just like folk singers and hippies. To do this, he frames the show as a coming of age story set against the events of Woodstock. Neil famously hated Woodstock and wouldn’t let himself be filmed during this CSNY performance, seeing it as not representing the hippie dream, but instead being commercialized and centered around rockstardom.
Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” comes over the PA on a dark stage. Figures emerge to setup the stage, dressed like Jawas from Star Wars. They are adult sized, which works because the stage is filled with oversized elements: Speaker cases, mics, tuning forks. As a speaker case lifts off one of the large fake speakers, a sleeping figure is revealed (I always wonder how long Neil had to stay under that case) and seemingly wakes up from a dream in wonder. Neil launches into what I have come to think of as his theme song, “Sugar Mountain,” a song about growing too old to experience the joys of childhood. As he walks around the stage, playing sad folk songs, his expression grows more weary, until he ultimately puts himself to sleep in a sleeping bag while reciting the refrain from “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)”: “rock n roll can never die…” As the Jawas (or as they are called here, Road-Eyes) pull him off stage in the sleeping bag, the lights go down and stage announcements from Woodstock about brown acid come over the PA.
When the lights come back up, the oversized speakers are revealed, and the show shifts into the blistering electric portion with Crazy Horse. We see David Briggs in a lab coat fiddling with the tube amps in front of the drum set and various crew in other costumes at outlandish set pieces. The sound board is in a chariot. It’s a surreal bit of stagecraft that marks the shift into this new electric age. The band goes for it and seems to be having fun throughout. “Like a Hurricane” is accompanied by escalating wind machines. “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)” is as crunchy and distorted as any punk show, making Neil’s case for moving on and staying relevant. Of course he never abandons the acoustic folk side, but the 80s go very weird places for awhile as he constantly explores music for himself. As becomes somewhat custom, they end the show with a harrowing performance of “Tonight’s The Night,” making sure everyone remembers the people they lost in the preceding decade.