Friday Night Jukebox, Vol. DXXIII--Neil Young: Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)

Yikes--almost two weeks late.  To steal a phrase, it's alright, Ma, it's life and life only....

My introduction to this week's tune was my turntable in my bedroom at my parents home in Kokomo, Indiana.  I had a big assist from noted rock critic Robert Christgau and a stellar review he wrote in The Village Voice for this week's album--which prompted me to rush right out and buy a copy.  Christgau nailed it--it was a great record and with the passage of time became quite the influential album....

I wrote about Neil Young in Jukebox Vol. LXXX, and if I do say so myself, it was a nice bio paragraph, and other than his marriage to actress Daryl Hannah, releasing nine (!) more albums (Young was nothing if not prolific) and adding one more Grammy nomination it was a pretty bland nine years for Young (note:  tongue planted firmly in cheek).  I also wrote about Young for his brilliant protest song, "Ohio" in Vol. CCLII, which was ever so nobly performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. That's six links in three sentences--you'd think this was Wikipedia....

"Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" was the closing song on Young's seminal 1979 album, the rather oxidizingly entitled Rust Never Sleeps.  The single would peak at #79 (with a bullet!) on the Billboard Pop Singles chart, while the album hit #8 on (just to show you how old the album is) on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart.

Fun Fact:  Rust Never Sleeps opens with an acoustic version of this week's song, entitled "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)."  Pretty damn sure that's a Friday Night Jukebox first (and one hell of a song in its own right).

Give "Hey Hey, My My" one listen and you can instantly tell why Young is considered the Godfather of Grunge.  From the thrashing slashing guitars to the ripped raw lyrics, Young takes on his relevance, his music's relevance, and what exactly should become of rock and roll (one of pop music's great ironies is that punk music did burn out rather than fadeaway).  It was a singular achievement for Young and sparked a musical movement for the rest of us.  Did I happen to mention that it's also simply a great song?  The vocals, the guitars, the band, the lyrics--just an ultimate piece of work that ranks with any of rock's greatest songs.

Lyric Sheet:  "Hey hey my my/Rock and roll can never die/There's more to the picture than meets the eye/Hey hey my my..."

Enjoy:

Bonus acoustic version:

Fuck Donald Trump

Peace,

emaycee

It took a Village (Voice)

It's alright, Ma, I'm only crying

I noted a couple of posts back in Friday Night Jukebox that I spent my formative years (ages 14-21) in the small (but completely uninteresting) town of Kokomo, IN.  Our newspaper there, The Kokomo Tribune, reflected the town itself and what many of its residents would consider an ideal America--Mom, baseball, apple pie, and hot dogs (not a caricature).  Somehow when I started college at the regional Indiana University campus there in Kokomo, I came across the New York City weekly The Village Voice.  

The big city newspaper in Kokomo was The Indianapolis Star, a conservative beacon in Indiana.  Television consisted of five channels--the big three (only ABC, NBC, and CBS existed back then), one local channel that showed nothing but reruns, and if the weather was just right (no clouds) you could sort of get the PBS station on the TV.  Radio was top forty out of the big city there in Chicago, and again, if the weather was just right, you could get one of them rock and roll FM stations out of Indianapolis.  There was no internet.

You can imagine what it was like, then, when I started subscribing to The Village Voice, an alternative weekly before there were alternative weeklies.  It introduced me to the punk movement and Neil Young (after a hella review of his Rust Never Sleeps LP) and the work of music critic Robert Christgau (whom I continue to have a love/hate relationship with to this day).  It taught me that not all people who were gay were in the closet.  That there were Americans who were a lot more liberal than that commie Jimmy Carter.  That there were a lot of people angry just like me at the state of America.  And that there was a lot more to America (both good and bad) than I had been taught in my high school history classes.

So it was with some sadness that I read this past week that The Village Voice is ceasing publication, though I'd quit subscribing sometime after my daughter was born (not a justifiable expense for a young family) roughly thirty-five years ago.  Not surprised--printed newspapers have pretty much become a quaint nod to our past, which I suppose is what this whole post is.

Give 'em credit, though--in a world that is still screaming for the coolness quotient, they scored a perfect ten on their final cover (Dylan saluting, as seen at the top of this post).

If you gotta go, as the saying goes, at least leave a beautiful corpse.

Fuck Donald Trump,
emaycee