#1
Allman Brothers
The Fillmore Concerts
#2
Little Feat
Waiting for Columbus
#3
The Band
Rock of Ages
#4
CSN&Y
Four Way Street
#5
Bob Dylan and the Band
Before the Flood
#6
Neil Young
Live Rust
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The Ten Best Live Rock Recordings, Part 6-10
By C. Michael Bailey
Neil Young - Live Rust (Reprise 2-2296)
Look out, Mama, there's a white boat comin' up the river
Around the beginning/end of each of the last four decades, Neil Young has gotten mad and produced a masterpiece or two. Witness: After The Gold Rush (Reprise 1970), Rust Never Sleeps and Live Rust (Reprise 1979), Freedom (Reprise 1989), Ragged Glory (Reprise 1990), Arc-Weld (Reprise 1991), and Road Rock, Volume 1 (Reprise 2000, yet to be hailed a "masterpiece", but how can one go wrong with any live Neil Young). An added plus is that three and one half of these releases are live albums. The groundbreaking Rust Never Sleeps is the half live offering, containing all previously unreleased music. Side one of the LP is all acoustic music, typically introspective, beginning with a laid back "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)" and proceeding through the now classic "Thrasher" and "Pocahontas". Side two
side two is another story altogether. Opening with the remarkable "Powderfinger", Young establishes his vision of the 1980s, one that is on the bleak side. This release ends with an electric "Hey, Hey, My, My (into the Black)" that pounds English Punk rock into a handful of dust.
with a big red beacon and a flag and a man on the rail
Right on the heels of Rust Never Sleeps is Live Rust, an all-live recording containing many of Young' earlier songs. It is this added completeness and the period of the recording that gives Live Rust the edge over Rust Never Sleeps in this list of the top ten best live rock albums. Live Rust, was originally released as a double-LP live album, on the streets just four months after Rust Never Sleeps. It was the soundtrack to the concert film recounting Young's Rust Never Sleeps tour and was recorded Oct. 22, 1978, at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Live Rust reprises four songs from Rust Never Sleeps in different performances. In spite of this apparent redundancy, Live Rust is an excellent Neil Young live album and retrospective, illuminating Young's career from the early "Sugar Mountain" and arriving at then-new songs like the scathing "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)" and "Sedan Delivery".
you better call John, 'cause it don't look like they're here to deliver the mail
The concert documentation begins with an acoustic Neil Young, playing guitar and harmonica. He spins his way through some of his more introspective songs: "Sugar Mountain", "I Am a Child", and "Comes a Time." He then switches to piano to deliver one of his first masterpieces, a nervous "After the Gold Rush." He then reprises "My, My, Hey, Hey" from Rust Never Sleeps. Then Young turns it up. "When You Dance, I Can Really Love" and "The Loner" are separated from the remaining electricity by a sound clip from Woodstock and a desolate "The Needle and the Damage Done" and an unplugged "Lotta Love". Finally Young gets serious with a reprised "Sedan Delivery" followed by a sextet of songs that can only be described as corrosive ferocity. "Powderfinger", Young's ode to hopelessness very well may be the greatest country song ever written. While quite traditional harmonically, Young makes the genre radioactive musically and lyrically. This song is simply astonishing and its development is equally astonishing as one listens to the three commercially available versions.
and it's less than a mile away, I hope they didn't come to stay
On Rust Never Sleeps, we are first introduced to the song and Young sings it with a pensive resignation. The story of a young man faced with overwhelming adversity alone takes the only horrible way out he sees. On Live Rust, Young turns it up a notch and the listener can detect real fear emanate from Young's anguished story. By the time that ten years elapse between Live Rust and Arc-Weld, Young has honed the song to a crystalline clarity, the fear now palpable as a tumor, the terror as clear as traumatic pain. "Cortez the Killer", Zuma's molten tour de force, bubbles and flows effortlessly from Young's black, modified Les Paul, hailing the great and ruthless explorer. The early "Cinnamon Girl" is loud and proud, updated since its infancy. Young's guitar centerpiece, "Like a Hurricane" is next, a Dorian elegey to love, delivered in Young's apocalyptically devastating way. "Hurricane" is an anticlimax that plateau's with the electric hammer of "Hey, Hey, My, My" closing the coffin lid on the Punk era. The show closes the "The Needle"'s other bookend, "Tonight's the Night", a song transmogrified every time young has played it.
its got numbers on the side and a gun that's making me quake.
A singular talent, Neil Young has out lived and out produced the majority of his contemporaries without losing a bit of his grit and drive. Lyrically, Young is second only to Dylan in theme and design. His acoustic personality has the perfect temperament for internal detection and exposition while his electric music is the best vehicle for his rage and frustration. Young has been widely recorded live, both commercially and by bootleg. The Road Rock series is not old enough to hail a masterpiece yet nor has it yielded a new performance of "Powderfinger" or "Hurricane". Let's hope the series does yield these. But for the time being, Live Rust rules.
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