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Way Down In The Rust Bucket

✏️ Editing record

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Recorded in 1990 at a small Santa Cruz club, this joyous live document flips the energy of 1991's Weld on its head, swapping out incendiary arena rockers for oddball picks and warm, woolly vibes.Neil Young entered the 1990's acting as if his erratic 1980's never happened. He spent the bulk of the '80s sowing wild oats while in an unhappy union with Geffen Records. The label was so aggrieved by the mercurial singer-songwriter's behavior that they filed suit against Young, accusing him of purposefully delivering uncommercial albums. Perhaps they had a point: Once he returned to his old home at Reprise, he started making music like he had in the old days. Buoyed by the creative and commercial rebirth of 1989's Freedom, Young reconnected with Crazy Horse, the ambling backing band who had supported him through good times and bad since way back in 1969. Picking up a fuzzy strand left hanging from Rust Never Sleeps, the 1979 album that represented their last great triumph, Young and Crazy Horse knocked out Ragged Glory at his Broken Arrow Ranch in a few weeks. The quick sessions resulted in an album with a spontaneous feel; it was the liveliest and loudest Crazy Horse had ever sounded in the studio.As a full-bore rock'n'roll record, Ragged Glory was an ideal album to take out on the road, which is precisely what Neil Young and Crazy Horse did, spending the first four months of 1991 roaring through North America's arenas with supporting acts Sonic Youth and Social Distortion in tow. Young's decision to bring a pair of prominent alternative rockers on tour underscored the wild, untamed character of his work with Crazy Horse, with its swirls of distortion and primitive thump. The ensuing live 2xLP, Weld, and feedback-laden Arc EP tapped into the arena-sized aggression that fueled the band at its peak, all the way back to 1979's incendiary Live Rust. Way Down in the Rust Bucket, the 12th live album in Young's ongoing (and now absurdly active) Archives series, flips that energy on its head. Here, Crazy Horse aren't interested in assaulting their audience; instead, they're grooving along alongside them.Some of this change in tone is surely due to the change in venue. Way Down in the Rust Bucket captures a November 13, 1990 gig at the small Santa Cruz club the Catalyst, a hometown bar that became Young's regular stomping ground in 1977, when he spent the summer figuring out whether his ill-fated group the Ducks had a future. The Ducks didn't survive 1977, but Young's connection to the Catalyst endured; it became a place for him to limber up before heading back out on the road. That's precisely what happened in November 1990: With two months to go before a big arena tour, the time was ripe to kick off the cobwebs. Playing in their own backyard&mdash;for fans who were close enough to be friends, and friends who were more like family&mdash;shaped the concert from its setlist to its execution. Gone are expected crowd-pleasers like "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)," "Powderfinger," "Rockin' in the Free World" and "Tonight's the Night," all swapped out for oddball selections designed to scratch some itch of the band: American Stars 'n Bars' cornpone romp "Homegrown," a revved-up reading of the Re·ac·tor deep cut "Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze," plus the inane blues stomp "T-Bone."As silly as it sounds, "T-Bone" provides the key to unlocking many of Way Down in the Rust Bucket's charms. It's not much of a song&mdash;there are no other lyrics than "Got mashed potatoes/Ain't got no T-Bone"&mdash;yet hearing Crazy Horse lock into a primal rhythm then remain there for nearly seven minutes, as Young delivers each repetition of its lone line as if it's a new punchline, is as invigorating as his elongated solos. There's a direct line connecting this rave-up with "Farmer John," a frat-rock classic from Don & Dewey by way of the Premiers that wound up as a touchstone on Ragged Glory: They're party tunes played by a band intent on having a hell of a good time.Young spent 1990 absolutely giddy with the monstrous, transportive racket he could make with Crazy Horse, but those high spirits don't always come through on Weld. Blame some of that on the arena setting; blame some of it on timing. During those early months of 1991, Crazy Horse toured as Operation Desert Storm descended on Iraq, so Young sobered up, putting an earnest and angry version of Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" in a prominent position in the set list, then leaning into the group's harder edges. Way Down in the Rust Bucket, recorded just months earlier, has no socio-political undertones and no angst; here, "Fuckin' Up" doesn't play as self-immolation, it's merely a heavy shrug. Crazy Horse's immense volume camouflages a sweet hippie heart, an empathy that's apparent in both the selected songs and the warm, woolly performance. This is a joyous record, where even the melancholy epics "Like a Hurricane" and "Cortez the Killer" skirt sadness. Crazy Horse lumber toward bliss, goosed along by a leader who seems so enraptured by his own solos he doesn't want to break the spell. Context also gives these seemingly endless workouts a different vibe. They're surrounded by garage rockers and reconstituted anthems of the counterculture, songs designed to be played and heard in a communal setting. For a dirty, grungy rock'n'roll band, there's no better place to hold communion than the local pub, where the separation between artist and audience can be so thin, it may as well be nonexistent. Maybe that's why Way Down in the Rust Bucket feels transcendent: It captures the world's greatest bar band in their spiritual home.&mdash; Stephen Thomas Erlewine<hr/>History shows us there are plenty of bands where the whole is more than the sum of the parts, and Neil Young & Crazy Horse are a great example of how the right combination of musicians can create a tide that lifts all boats. Though Crazy Horse never do anything especially complicated, the loose but thoroughly deep groove they generate fits Young's musical ideas better than nearly any of his collaborators, and they give him the room to stretch out on guitar and make the most of his noisy explorations of melodic space; Young is rarely as inspired a soloist as he is with Crazy Horse, and they were in especially fine form on 1990's Ragged Glory, where their laid-back thunder brought out some especially inspired performances after a string of inconsistent projects from Young in the '80s. They were about to hit the road in support of the album when they played a pair of shows at The Catalyst, a 800-capacity club in Santa Cruz, California, to familiarize themselves with the material. Way Down in the Rust Bucket gives an authorized release to a previously bootlegged performance on November 13, 1990 when the group ambled through 19 songs in just under two-and-a-half hours. If it's possible to rock hard and seem relaxed at the same time, that's exactly the vibe that informs Way Down in the Rust Bucket. This doesn't match the fire of the arena shows that followed (you can hear what they sounded like on 1991's Weld), but Crazy Horse sound like they're having a great time making their way through most of Ragged Glory and throwing in some favorites from their back catalog along the way (even more surprising than hearing three tunes from 1975's Zuma is the appearance of two from 1981's noisy and idiosyncratic Re-ac-tor).Way Down in the Rust Bucket sometimes sounds like the musicians are playing for themselves as much as the audience, suggesting a public rehearsal tape, and that actually works in its favor; Young and his bandmates aren't pushing themselves especially hard, but they find the sweet spot in these songs and ride it for all its worth. Young was clearly having a great night on guitar, with Crazy Horse more than happy to help him out. Way Down in the Rust Bucket isn't one of the more revelatory items to emerge from Neil Young's archives since he began major excavation in the mid-2000s. However, for those who consider the joyous stomp of Neil Young & Crazy Horse rock & roll comfort food at its best, this is a feast to savor, a long and rollicking celebration of the pleasures of turning up the amps and inviting in the spirit.&mdash; Mark Deming

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