Day After Day #21: Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black) (1979)

There have been many interesting artists over the decades, but few have been as interesting and unpredictable as Neil Young. Sixty-plus years in, he's still going: Making new music, releasing old music that's never been heard before, touring. He's made incredible music on his own and with Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. He's been a huge influence on bands in genres including folk, country, electronic and hard rock and everything in between. He's worked with artists as varied as Devo, Emmylou Harris and Pearl Jam.

Young has so many great songs in his catalog that it's difficult to pick just one. In the 1970s, he took many detours, most of them rewarding. One of my favorites was 1979's Rust Never Sleeps, which featured live versions (recorded the previous year) of solo acoustic songs on the first side and electric rockers with Crazy Horse won the second. An accompanying movie documented the tour, as did a double live released in November 1979 called Live Rust.

The Rust Never Sleeps album begins with the acoustic "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)" and ends with "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)." Side 2 of the album was already filled with heavy rockers, but the final song features a riff that is super-distorted and sludgy. The song actually came out of a collaboration with Devo for Young's movie Human Highway. Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh came up with the term "rust never sleeps," which Young used in the song. Inspired by punk rock, Young used "Hey Hey, My My" as a rallying cry against the stale arena rock that was in style in the late '70s.

"The king is gone, but he's not forgotten/This is the story of Johnny Rotten/It's better to burn out than it is to rust/The king is gone but he's not forgotten."

The song has been covered many times, including by Oasis, System of a Down, Dave Matthews Band and NoMeansNo, and the line "It's better to burn out than to fade away" was famously quoted by Kurt Cobain in his suicide note. Upon hearing that, Young said he wouldn't perform the song anymore, but the surviving members of Nirvana got him to change his mind. 

It's kinda perfect that Young followed up the release of Rust Never Sleeps with a decade full of truly weird projects, including an album filled with vocoders, synths and electronic beats (1982's Trans), a rockabilly album (1983's Everybody's Rockin'), a traditional country record (1985's Old Ways) and a horn-driven jump blues joint (1988's This Note's for You). He then closed out the decade with Freedom, which echoed Rust Never Sleeps and led to a resurgence in popularity for Young. He was embraced by younger acts, touring with Sonic Youth and Social Distortion and even making an album with Pearl Jam.

I was finally able to see Young in concert five years ago at the Wang Center in Boston, playing solo on a number of instruments and telling stories in between songs. It was pretty great. But I wish I could have seen that Rust Never Sleeps tour. Thankfully, we've got the concert film.