Way Down in the Rust Bucket is a live album and concert film from Canadian-American rock musician Neil Young and his band Crazy Horse, released on February 26, 2021. It is Volume 11.5 in the Performance Series of Neil Young Archives.
Recording and release
The album was recorded on November 13, 1990 at The Catalyst in Santa Cruz, California, where the band was warming up for their upcoming Ragged Glory tour. The show consisted of three sets and an encore, featuring most of the recently released Ragged Glory as well as older fan favorites and deeper cuts.[2] Guitarist Poncho Sampedro remembers the show fondly in a March 2021 interview for Rolling Stone:
"Let me go on record as saying that I think this Way Down in the Rust Bucket is the best Crazy Horse record we ever recorded. I love it! I love this record. Neil plays great, unbelievably great. He's just electrified. "Country Home" sounds like a country tune I never heard in my life. He just takes it to all kinds of different levels. He nails "Cortez." He nails "Danger Bird" and "Over and Over." He's just playing so good and the band played really good. We'd go onstage and we played "T-Bone". We'd played that song at a birthday party for one of Pegi's friends and then we played it there. We never played it too many other places. It was just fun. We played "Homegrown," and at the end, people were throwing weed on the stage since it's a big weed-growing community. We were having fun. It was all about the beginning of a new era. We were becoming alive. I just don't see it as a warm-up. It doesn't hit me like that. We played "Cortez" and it sounds so beautiful. When I hear Neil play it with other people, it just doesn't sound the same to me, ever."[3]
Due to a temporary power loss, the multitrack recording of "Cowgirl in the Sand" was damaged; it was decided to remove the song from the CD and LP running order (which also allowed the release format to be limited to two CDs/four LPs). "Cowgirl in the Sand" appears only on the DVD version, with dropout sections augmented by lower-fidelity FOH mix. [4]
Young announced the release on his site on January 1, 2020 with the intention to release it that year along with Greendale Live, which was later retitled Return to Greendale, a 2003 rock opera that also features Crazy Horse.[5] This album was initially scheduled to come out on October 16, 2020 before being postponed to January 15, 2021[6] and later February 26. Young has previously shown all the concert video footage of this show as part of the Movietone section of his Archives website.
Way Down in the Rust Bucket was met with acclaim from critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, this release received an average score of 85 based on 7 reviews.[7]
