Neil Young & Crazy Horse released Live Rust on November 14, 1979, through Reprise. The double live album drew from their fall 1978 tour, moving between Young performing alone and the full band. Across 16 tracks, it placed material from Rust Never Sleeps alongside songs that had been in his repertoire for years.
The two albums made different use of live recordings. Much of Rust Never Sleeps, released earlier in 1979, had been recorded in concert and then worked on in the studio, with overdubs added and audience noise largely removed. Live Rust presented a wider selection from the stage show. “Powderfinger” and “Sedan Delivery” appeared alongside older songs such as “The Loner” and “Cinnamon Girl,” making the newer writing part of a larger concert sequence.
Young takes the entire first side himself. “Sugar Mountain” opens the record, and the arrangements leave room for his guitar, harmonica and voice before he moves to piano for “After the Gold Rush.” The side ends with “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue).” Crazy Horse’s absence gives those opening performances their own space; the band doesn’t enter the album until “When You Dance I Can Really Love” begins side two.
Guitarist and keyboard player Frank Sampedro, bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina make up the Crazy Horse lineup on the record. Their arrival changes the scale of the performance, but Young doesn’t keep the rest of the set electric. After “The Loner,” he returns to an unaccompanied “The Needle and the Damage Done,” before the band joins him again for “Lotta Love.” An announcement heard before “The Needle and the Damage Done,” asking people to get down from a tower, was taken from Woodstock in 1969.
The tour also gave the music a theatrical setting. As Rhino’s retrospective recounts, oversized amplifiers dominated the stage, and crew members appeared in hooded costumes with glowing eyes inspired by the Jawas in Star Wars. Those figures were known as “Road-eyes.” The production made the machinery around the musicians part of the spectacle, a side of the tour preserved in the concert film Rust Never Sleeps.
Young directed that film under the name Bernard Shakey, using footage from the October 22, 1978, performance at the Cow Palace in Daly City, California. He also shared production credit on Live Rust with David Briggs and Tim Mulligan. The album’s “Sugar Mountain” and “Powderfinger” both came from the filmed concert, but other selections came from elsewhere on the tour. The film preserves one evening; the album assembles its concert sequence from several.
The second LP stays with Crazy Horse, with “Cortez the Killer” and “Like a Hurricane” among the performances leading toward “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black).” That electric counterpart to the first side’s closing song doesn’t finish the album. “Tonight’s the Night” gets the final word, extending the set beyond the paired acoustic and electric statements that framed Rust Never Sleeps.
The double album went on to reach No. 15 on Billboard’s album chart in early 1980.
