Song of the Day 1/28: Neil Young, “Hey Hey My My (Into the Black)”

For John Kowalko

Neil Young refuses to fade away. He pulled his music off Spotify this week after he gave the service an ultimatum: Either you drop Joe Rogan over spreading Covid misinformation or I’m gone. He’s gone, and for an obvious reason: Rogan is the linchpin of Spotify’s highly profitable podcast division, while Young is a legacy artist who most appeals to a pre-Spotify generation.

Young opened and closed his “Rust Never Sleeps” LP with acoustic and electric versions of what’s essentially the same tune, both proclaiming a philosophy that became rock and roll’s battle cry: It’s better to burn out than to fade away. The line is not Young’s — it came from a song by singer/guitarist Jeff Blackburn, who around that time was playing with Young in a side project called the Ducks. (For that matter “rust never sleeps” was something Young picked up from Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh when he worked on Young’s film “Human Highway.”)

Young’s 1979 song and album were inspired by his feelings of impending irrelevance in the wake of three consecutive commercial and critical duds and the rise of punk music, whose practitioners mostly scorned Young’s generation as too old to rock (Young was 33 when “Rust Never Sleeps” was released.)

Long before Kurt Cobain used it as his suicide-note epitaph, the song’s celebrated line engendered an indirect exchange between Young and John Lennon, who told Playboy for an issue that appeared the month he died:

I hate it. It’s better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out. If he was talking about burning out like Sid Vicious, forget it. I don’t appreciate the worship of dead Sid Vicious or of dead James Dean or dead John Wayne. It’s the same thing. Making Sid Vicious a hero, Jim Morrison — it’s garbage to me. I worship the people who survive — Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo. They’re saying John Wayne conquered cancer — he whipped it like a man. You know, I’m sorry that he died and all that — I’m sorry for his family — but he didn’t whip cancer. It whipped him. I don’t want Sean worshiping John Wayne or Johnny Rotten or Sid Vicious. What do they teach you? Nothing. Death. Sid Vicious died for what? So that we might rock? I mean, it’s garbage you know. If Neil Young admires that sentiment so much, why doesn’t he do it? Because he sure as hell faded away and came back many times, like all of us. No, thank you. I’ll take the living and the healthy.

Asked to respond two years later, Young said:

The rock’n’roll spirit is not survival. Of course the people who play rock’n’roll should survive. But the essence of the rock’n’roll spirit to me, is that it’s better to burn out really bright than to sort of decay off into infinity. Even though if you look at it in a mature way, you’ll think, “well, yes … you should decay off into infinity, and keep going along”. Rock’n’roll doesn’t look that far ahead. Rock’n’roll is right now. What’s happening right this second. Is it bright? Or is it dim because it’s waiting for tomorrow – that’s what people want to know. And that’s why I say that.