History is evidently much on Young's mind—the fact that it's the tenth anniversary of Woodstock matters a great deal to him. He first made his legend as an elegist for the Sixties, and one reason why his oeuvre during the long period of willful obscurantism that followed Harvest (1972) didn't loom as large as it should have was that he hadn't found another theme of commensurate scope. For Young, 1979 represents the end of another epoch, and this seems to have spurred him into action. What he's trying to do on Live Rust is to set himself up as a rock & roll Tiresias, sounding warnings for the future, and to somehow tie his songs of the last ten years into a vast and singular history of the times. Live Rust covers almost every aspect of Young's career, and it's all been arranged and presented as a sprawling epic of disillusion and loss. It's rock & roll as emotional superspectacle—wildly ambitious and wildly successful….

By following "Sugar Mountain" and "I Am a Child" with "After the Gold Rush," Young equates the real childhood in the first two numbers with the symbolic childhood of the Sixties. "Comes a Time," though it's out of chronological order, dovetails perfectly into this sequence, because it's the artist's answer song, eight years later, to "After the Gold Rush"—conciliatory where the other is absolute, stoically mature where the other alternates between youthful idyll and equally youthful bitterness. The message is obvious: innocence is a passing season, and tougher tests are ahead.

Throughout the LP, Young is playing off dualisms of young and old, time and change. He lashes together intimately personal compositions with broader social canvases, questioning his own past even while he tries to make it stand for ours. Over and over, early tunes are given new meaning by their juxtaposition with later ones, and by the arching, mythic context….

By mating Zuma's "Cortez the Killer" with Rust Never Sleeps' "Powderfinger," Neil Young undercuts his particular romantic feel for the American frontier with an acerbic awareness of just how that frontier got started in the first place….

On Rust Never Sleeps, "Hey Hey, My My (into the Black)" erupted out of nowhere, as stark as a telegram. Here, it's the logical culmination of everything that Live Rust has been leading up to. It's rock & roll treated the way a Southerner might view the Civil War—indeed, it seems to hearken back in spirit to the Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" far more than it does to Danny and the Juniors' "Rock & Roll Is Here to Stay." "Hey Hey, My My (into the Black)" is both a chilling tone poem to death and a grimly defiant ode to survival….

"Tonight's the Night" follows. It seems like a natural coda and takes on added resonance. Instead of being about Bruce Berry and Danny Whitten, "Tonight's the Night" sounds and feels like an elegy to all the dead that stretch back to the beginning of the album, and all the way back through the Seventies.

The evocation of that journey is Neil Young's final achievement…. [The] real message of Live Rust is that the rites of passage of the last ten years, going on even today—and tonight—are what's important. (p. 62)