Rust Never Sleeps (1979) Reviews

• A great piece of Rock History!

  stargazer_adonis2006-03-19

  This movie captures the electrifying spirit of Neil Young & Crazy Horse in the best era of their carer! Direction is great and the performances of all the songs are mind blowing! Cortez The Killer, Hey Hey - My My & Powderfinger are played in a way that the only thing you can do is wish you have been in Cow Palace too in 1978! The stage set-up is excellent and Neil wants to show with the gigantic speakers and mikes that the music is the star here and not the musicians! A must see for all rock fans and the DVD edition is a great chance to once again yell: Rock N' Roll will never die! If you like rock music we will love this, one of the greatest rock music movies ever put on screen

• Just another line in the field of time.

  dbdumonteil2005-07-12

  I certainly love Neil Young and I must say I was disappointed with his first self-made effort "Journey through the past" .As I do not go much for the CSN stuff the idea of a filmed concert with Crazy Horse was really exciting.Besides,Young was then at the height of his powers,after releasing one of his very best records "rust never sleeps".Sadly ,afterwards,then came a period of barren inspiration-but Young's career was buoyant again in the nineties-,but that's another story.Suffice to say that Neil Young's epiphanies were numerous and brilliant ,he is second only to Bob Dylan. The film features almost the same songs as the soundtrack album "live rust" although for instance the marvelous "thrasher" is not included in the record (and "tonight's the night" ,on the other hand,was not in the film ).Half acoustic,half electric ,Young plays like a person possessed and he revisits his catalog with gusto.Particularly impressive is his reggae version of "Cortez the Killer". The "star wars" stuff did not impress me.It's the singer and the songs which matter.The film begins with Hendrix's "star spangled banner" and the Beatles' "a day in the life" on the PA.

• Really exciting

  pmrocek2009-07-19

  At last I've been able to see this concert, which I've had on vinyl since I was young!!!! hahahaha. One of my favourite live rock albums ever, and on video its really exciting. Neil Young, some 30 years later, is still one of the best performers on stage. In fact, last year (2008) he played in Rock In Rio in Madrid and I saw the concert on TV: it was simply mind-blowing!!!! In this video, though, something has got on my nerves: the monks with torch lights plundering around the stage, and making so much noise as they go on changing the stage!!!! Was that meant to be like that??? Its really annoying. As it is the Stage announcements after My My Hey Hey (Out of the blue). The highlight, for me, is Like a Hurricane: rock'n'roll will never die indeed!!!

• My heart needs protection and so do i

  ChrisParlow2007-11-02

  wow, not only are the songs absolutely incredible but the imagery and loose end style is phenomenal. This movie is not just a rock film, its like an intense time warp journey through space. From the little sand people to the stage announcements, everything fits perfectly. This is the complete F***ing opposite of a washed up rock star. Neil delivers the smartest and most visually breathtaking performance of the decade. He makes every song interesting with Jamaican accents, giant amps, Rust-O-Vision goggles and characters that come seemingly from nowhere and depart into the recesses of the strange twenty foot tall amplifiers This film will blow your mind and leave you a changed person 100/100

• Crazy, Crazy, and Neil mounts The Horse

  pwoods12006-03-26

  I saw this concert film when it was first released in Australia and still have respect for the fact that it wasn't edited to present Neil as a 'star': like a lot of his albums, it's a "warts-and-all" presentation. Another commentator bemoaned the fact that "Tonight's The Night" wasn't included in the footage. I dunno. Perhaps it was, even as late as then, a too-sensitive subject for Neil and The Horse to explore on stage. Then again, there had to be differences between "Rust Never Sleeps" and "Live Rust". "Rust" as a 'show' was a concept: a piece of theatre that sometimes didn't work and at other times captured the sheer vitality and looseness which has been a trademark of Neil Young and Crazy Horse. The 'road-eyes', apart from being an atrocious pun (both linguistically and visually) can be seen as a comment, by Young, about the almost non-presence of roadies in the audiences' perceptions. The visual reversal of size: roadies small/equipment big is, as another pointed-out, an almost surreal juxtaposition. Acoustic Neil, crawling out of his sleeping bag, and later indicating that when he gets big he wants a real guitar, is his trademark self-deprecating humour. I have only one main criticism about "Rust Never Sleeps" - and that is purely that the cinematic/reproduction quality of the video was so abominably terrible. Still, that's production values for you. I'd probably have "bitched about" technicalities to do with a performance of a Shakespearean play, had I been there in Elizabethan times. Huh, yeah. I'd have been outside, sweeping-up horse-droppings to resell for fuel.