Thurston Moore’s favourite Neil Young song: “I couldn’t believe it”
Nobody met punk’s meteoric arrival from the Woodstock generation as head-on as Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young. While many of his peers saw the 1970s turn to new wave with bemusement or crises of relevancy, Young sought inspiration from the movement’s insurrectionist iconoclasm, tapping into punk’s ephemeral urgency for his own creative rejuvenation.
Following his country-tinged Comes a Time, Young swapped gentle folk for distorted guitars and hung out with Devo during the production of his passion film project, Human Highway, so committed to the feature he poured $3,000,000 of his own money into it.
Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh also inspired the title of his tenth studio LP. Dropped in ’79 in a wholly different musical climate from the decade’s start, Rust Never Sleeps‘ down-tuned hard-rock existed alongside punk’s acerbic snarl with utmost authenticity. Taken from the album’s two bookend tracks, the acoustic ‘My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)’ and the famous ‘Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)’ garage rock incarnation, the “rust never sleeps” line was recalled by Mothersbaugh’s time as a graphic artist coming across Rust-Oleum’s slogan of the day.
Gifting Young with a little of that Devo subversion, the two cuts were afforded the perfect thematic foil for Young’s explorations of creative stagnation and the importance of pursuing artistic integrity no matter the cost.
Such impassioned thrash cut its intended mark on the new generation of kids keen to forge a new musical renaissance. Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore was no exception. Struck by ‘Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)’s raw power when exposed to the single blasted out of a radio speaker in New York’s Canal St, Moore expressed being stunned by the overamped guitar sound and Young’s revitalised swagger. “I couldn’t believe it,” Moore told Mojo last year, celebrating Young’s 79th birthday. “I’d boxed a lot of pre-’76 music away. It was eradicated. But hearing Neil play ‘Hey Hey, My My’ for the first time reawakened for me the wonders of pre-punk music. That song inspired me to radicalise the guitar within songwriting”.
Rust Never Sleeps and its sole single led to a wildly belligerent and oppositional subsequent decade in Young’s career, jumping into everything from vocoder-fronted synthpop, ’50s rock ‘n roller, and politically-charged firebrand, all guided by that same creative intuition that had fuelled him since his days in Buffalo Springfield, albeit with a healthy dose of sly contrarianism. He ended the ’80s much where he started: lambasting his contemporaries’ lapse into the corporate world with ‘This Note’s for You’, and closed the decade with an LP bookended by two different versions of ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’.
Just as he found kindred spirits in the punk generation, Young found himself at home among the grunge explosion, namechecked by Kurt Cobain and collaborating with Pearl Jam on ’95’s Mirror Ball. Moore too became an influence, touring with Sonic Youth for Ragged Glory and releasing the feedback-coated Arc at Moore’s encouragement.
Young’s ever-evolving appeal speaks to his fierce creative embrace of new ideas and his innate curiosity about music’s many new and innovative forms. From Woodstock to grunge via punk, Young’s reputation for organic relevancy is unrivalled among his musical generation.
