Music Arcades: Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Rust Never Sleeps

This is my 1983 vinyl copy of Rust (following the CD copy that featured here in February). The vinyl still sounds good. Can I really tell the difference between CD and vinyl? I wasn't sure, so I put My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue) on both the turntable and the CD player, cued up so that they were exactly in sync, and flicked back and forwards between the two of them, listening on headphones. The CD sounds much louder through the amplifier, so there was no way I could trick myself into not knowing which was which. I had a vague impression that the vinyl was more three-dimensional, and had more depth, as though you could hear the sound of the space in which it was recorded, whereas on the CD I could just hear the instrument and voice but they were somehow flatter. That's what I thought, anyway, though I wouldn't stake money on my ability to tell the difference reliably.

It was really good to concentrate on listening, as well. I heard things I haven't heard before in 25 years of listening: the repetitive almost avant-garde guitar line that Poncho repeats towards the end of Welfare Mothers, and some electronic beeping sound effects late on in Sedan Delivery. This was supposed to be an album that was recorded live with the audience noise removed afterwards, but I suspect a few things were added as well as taken away.

What lifts this album above all of Neil's others, and makes it close to perfect — recognising that it's the flaws in Neil's albums that often give them their charm — is the composition of the album as a whole. Whether by accident or design, the combination of folkie troubadour and distorted rocker, the timing of the album connected with its references to Johnny Rotten and Elvis, and the book-ending device of the two versions of Hey Hey, My My — all of these oppositions and symmetries make the album both a work of music, and a work about music (something it shares with the best album of all time).

Dennis Hopper made a little-seen and rarely-discussed film called Out of the Blue, which featured versions of a few songs from this album. I guess it was part of the trade that saw Hopper appear in Neil's Human Highway film. Jeremy and I saw it as part of a Hopper triple bill in the late '80s at a cinema in Acton (long-closed, but a great, great place — we also saw an Alan Rudolph triple bill there, which started at 11pm; by the third film, the cinema manager was providing waiter-service coffee directly to our seats).