Neil Young unleashes a live one

by Tom Carson

Because Neil Young is so ambitious, his career has sometimes seemed frustratingly incomplete. He's as much a master politician as David Bowie - always deftly changing masks, from sensitive folkie to screeching rock & roller, from child of the Sixties to dour Seventies revisionist, from reckless romantic to sardonic critic of his own culture. And his success at it is all the more remarkable because he works in a folkie-hippie, romantic-sentimental idiom in which any kind of role playing risks crossing the line into a fatal loss of emotional credibility. But there hasn't been any one record, or one role, that's been able to fuse all the dialectical opposites of his character into a single statement that would define not only the artist but his audience as well- though Young's heroic sense of himself won't settle for anything less.

The last two years have seen Young's best work. In late 1978, Comes a Time so purified and refined his folk roots that the album became a perfect, stylized miniature, beyond persona. Then, in mid-1979, came Rust Never Sleeps, an LP that was all persona: jangled, chaotic, intense and filled with a desperate urgency that Young hadn't shown in quite some time. For him to release Live Rust so hard on the heels of Rust Never Sleeps is a way of further stepping up the pressure. Though Neil Young is aiming at a larger target now, he's gone to a live recording here for the same reason he did on 1975's Tonight's the Night. He wants its jarring, journalistic impact to jolt his audience with the immediacy of the historic moment.

History is evidently much on Young's mind - the fact that it's the tenth anniversary of Woodstock matters a great deal to him. He first made his legend as an elegist for the Sixties, and one reason why his oeuvre during the long period of willful obscurantism that followed Harvest (1972) didn't loom as large as it should have was that he hadn't found another theme of commensurate scope. For Young, 1979 represents the end of another epoch, and this seems to have spurred him into action. What he's trying to do on Live Rust is to set himself up as a rock & roll Tiresias, sounding warnings for the future, and to somehow tie his songs of the last ten years into a vast and singular history of the times. Live Rust covers almost every aspect of Young's career, and it's all been arranged and presented as a sprawling epic of disillusion and loss. It's rock & roll as emotional superspectacle - wildly ambitious and wildly successful.

Though Live Rust, like Rust Never Sleeps, begins with an acoustic side and then explodes into rock & roll, what was counterpoint on the earlier album is a progression here. By following "Sugar Mountain" and "I Am a Child" with "After the Gold Rush," Young equates the real childhood in the first two numbers with the symbolic childhood of the Sixties. "Comes a Time," though it's out of chronological order, dovetails perfectly into this sequence, because it's the artist's answer song, eight years later, to "After the Gold Rush" - conciliatory where the other is absolute, stoically mature where the other alternates between youthful idyll and equally youthful bitterness. The message is obvious: innocence is a passing season, and tougher tests are ahead.

Throughout the LP, Young is playing off dualisms of young and old, time and change. He lashes together intimately personal compositions with broader social canvases, questioning his own past even while he tries to make it stand for ours. Over and over, early tunes are given new meaning, by their juxtaposition with later ones, and by the arching, mythic context. Sometimes an old song is used as an artifact: on its own, for instance, "The Needle and the Damage Done" is a slight, rather self-righteous condemnation. But here, sandwiched between the belligerent, overheated romanticism of "The Loner" and the wistful "Lotta Love," and introduced by a fatuous snippet of Woodstock tape, it's simply another journalistic snapshot and all the more powerful because of it.

By mating Zuma's "Cortez the Killer" with Rust Never Sleeps' "Powderfinger," Neil Young undercuts his particular romantic feel for the American frontier with an acerbic awareness of just how that frontier got started in the first place. Within "Cortez the Killer," Young manages an amazingly daring transformation by singing the line, "He came dancing across the water," in reggae patois - thus not only connecting a story of colonialist exploitation with present day Third World politics, but also aligning himself with the single most politically radical music being made today. Other times, a composition's meaning is changed by a new emphasis in the performance: by making the phrase, "Hard to find a job," the focal point of "Sedan Delivery," hitting it again and again over a galvanizing guitar riff, the singer converts the song from a gnomic fantasy to a recession anthem.

Young made his breakthrough with rock & roll as pure sound on 1975's Zuma after learning how to use raw noise on Tonight's the Night, but even so, you aren't prepared for the reach and depth of the playing on this record. It's sweeping and majestic, filled with ragged strength. Instead of speeding up the tempo on the long rave-ups, Young and Crazy Horse slow it down to an almost funereal pace, leaving plenty of space between the drawn-out, corrosive guitar notes and muffled, thudding drums. Then they startle you with a sudden burst of dirty noise. The entire last two sides of Live Rust coalesce into one dark, enormous dirge. It's so massively stately that you get the feeling of huge mountains on the move. And yet, in"Cortez the Killer" and the shimmering "Like a Hurricane," the guitars almost seem to float, only to rush down like a river of molten lava for "Hey Hey, My My (into the Black)."

On Rust Never Sleeps, "Hey Hey, My My (into the Black)" erupted out of nowhere, as stark as a telegram. Here, it's the logical culmination of everything that Live Rust has been leading up to. It's rock & roll treated the way a Southerner might view the Civil War - indeed, it seems to hearken back in spirit to the Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" far more than it does to Danny and the Juniors' "Rock & Roll Is Here to Stay." "Hey Hey, My My (into the Black)" is both a chilling tone poem to death, with Young's vocals valiantly striving to reach you across long stretches of empty space, and a grimly defiant ode to survival. When Neil Young sings, "The King is gone but he's not forgotten / Is this the story of Johnny Rotten?," it's clearly Rotten he's mourning, not Elvis Presley: Rotten embodied the extreme that Elvis had retreated from long before, the extreme that Young himself is now trying to sustain.

"Tonight's the Night" follows. It seems like a natural coda and takes on added resonance. Instead of being about Bruce Berry and Danny Whitten, "Tonight's the Night" sounds and feels like an elegy to all the dead that stretch back to the beginning of the album, and all the way back through the Seventies.

The evocation of that journey is Neil Young's final achievement. The current catch phrase among music-industry flacks is "a preview of the Eighties." It'll probably be applied to this record as well, perhaps with some justice. But the real message of Live Rust is that the rites of passage of the last ten years, going on even today - and tonight - are what's important.