Neil Young: No Album Left Behind: Way Down in the Rust Bucket (2021) Is an Essential Look at Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s Fearless Peak

From pastemagazine.com

This long-lost document may be the band’s most important live offering of all

The hard truth is, no matter how many albums we review each year, there are always countless releases that end up overlooked. That’s why, this month, we’re bringing back our No Album Left Behind series, in which the Paste Music team has the chance to circle back to their favorite underrated records of 2021 and sing their praises.

Being a fan of Neil Young requires a considerably thick skin. Sure, the man blazed a trail of unfuckwithable classics after he shed the hippie deadweight of his partners in CSNY. But guessing where his muse was leading him time and time again made his more than 50 years as a solo act one of the most interesting careers in the history of pop music. Even a hard veer through the guardrails for ol’ Shaky can be more fruitful than one of his contemporary’s creative detours. But while records that contain Young’s name alone can indulge in his freaky side—look no further than his ’80s output for further evidence—his material with his longtime backing band and blunt rotation Crazy Horse tends to deliver a vibe that is unique to them alone.

Looking at the vast body of work Young put out with the guys in the Horse, it’s easy to pinpoint certain changes within the group. Instead of aging like a fine wine, the band only rusts like undisturbed auto parts in a junkyard. You can really look at the group’s evolution in sound with two monumental albums: their first, 1969’s Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, and 1990’s Ragged Glory. With eternal plug-in-and-play jams like “Cinnamon Girl,” the title track, and sprawling jams like “Down By The River” and “Cowgirl in the Sand,” the album drew a line in the concrete with spilt beer between how Neil’s records would sound with this band and the softer, more mass-appeal records he would later make on his own, like Harvest. The band’s releases became more ferocious in their attack up until the end of the ’70s with Rust Never Sleeps. But after a decade of hard-to-pin-down Young solo records mostly made without the core group of Crazy Horse, due to a well-documented feud with label czar David Geffen, Ragged Glory is the true awakening of the band we’ve known for the past 30 years.

Like how the official live release of Live Rust found Young and his bowling team (I’m just going to keep assuming they do things like that together) during their Rust Never Sleeps era, the 1991 live album Weld catches these mischievous elder statesman taking a glorious victory lap at the dawning of the grunge era they helped inspire. In fact, on that tour, they had enlisted a pretty great group of Crazy Horse disciples to help remind the younger generation of their forefather status, with Sonic Youth and Social Distortion taking opening slots in arenas on their trek across the States. While Weld is a thrilling and energetic listen, the loose Way Down In The Rust Bucket may be the definitive representation of Crazy Horse during this period.

Recorded at a warm-up gig for the Ragged Glory tour at the 800-capacity venue The Catalyst in Santa Cruz, California, this set pulled from the endlessly rewarding Neil Young Archives finds Young and the boys in a more playful mood, eager to fuck around without the pressure of delivering for the live documentation of their tour-tight future selves at the end of this run of shows. Much like the vibe on Ragged Glory, they didn’t seem to be out for blood at this show like some of the material on Weld, but rather aiming to deliver a relaxed marathon set of classics with a stoned-out, shit-eating smirk.

The set begins with a nine-minute-plus version of the Glory opener “Country Home,” and you can hear the culmination of years Young spent perfecting his one-of-a-kind guitar tone. Nearly all of the cuts from that album are represented in the 19-song set, and many of them receive a similar mid-tempo treatment—sometimes stretching out to around the 10-minute mark, like on the transcendent run through “Love to Burn”—allowing notes to ring out until they decay into blissful banshee squeals coming through Young’s vintage fleet of tube amps. This is the golden era of the “Neil Tone.” The scummy fuzz was behind the riffs and tremolo solos back in the ’70s, but the early ’90s is when it was no longer bound to a reality mere mortals could comprehend. Young creates guttural chugs and notes that feed back with both dissonance and musicality, like a spirit in limbo leaving and returning to a corpse between the jolts of defibrillator paddles.

The set is chock-full of classics, but it’s the rare nuggets like the American Stars ’N Bars tune “Bite The Bullet” that add a certain amount of goofy charm to the set. Sure, the white-hot fury of the blistering renditions of Freedom’s “Crime in The City” or “Rockin’ in the Free World” on Rust Bucket, but hearing the band practically laughing through blissfully shit-faced takes on jokey songs like Re-Actor’s “T-Bone” (“Got mashed potatoes / Ain’t got no T-Bone”) and the pro-legalization stomp of “Homegrown” is arguably more fun and representative of Young and Crazy Horse at their core.

Perhaps the most charming of all is their take on the Zuma kiss-off “Don’t Cry No Tears.” When the band concludes the song, Young doesn’t seem quite satisfied with moving on, so he slowly launches back into the second verse and the band gradually joins him for another partial go-around. “I just wanted to sing a little more,” he mumbles in between lyrics. Once the final chords ring out, he says, “That’s kind of a little Las Vegas ending we put on that for you.” Bassist Billy Talbot jokingly responds, “We might have to go to Vegas soon, it’s hard to find a job!” The two giggle like old friends playing covers in a garage riddled with empty Molsons, rather than millionaire rock stars who have influenced the changing tides of rock and roll.

The true treasure of Way Down In The Rust Bucket is the set’s final three extended jams: “Like a Hurricane,” “Love and Only Love” and an appropriately transfixing run through “Cortez The Killer.” Before launching into the towering and emotional version of the chaotic epic “Hurricane,” Young says, “We’d like to dig way down in the rust bucket for this one,” giving the release its appropriate title. On “Love and Only Love,” the band anoint the newer song with the classic status it would later achieve as a highlight at Crazy Horse gigs. The song packs one of Young’s best choruses and enough guitar gunpowder to “shelter from the powder and the finger.”

By the time they reach “Cortez,” Young, Talbot, guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro and drummer Ralph Molina had laid to waste the previous decade of relative inactivity. Rather than speed through it with any sort of aggression to prove their worth to the newly initiated in the audience, they take their time, letting Young’s spectral tone pierce the sludge. As he sings the song in a hushed quiver, the band provides delicate harmonies to aid him throughout the retelling of the story.

With just three songs in the set’s last 37 minutes, Neil Young and Crazy Horse reach the final steps of the altar they had erected at their previous peak. It’s as if they reached down into the Rust Bucket to find a new sense of purpose while entering the final years of the 20th century. Now that “Pancho” has retired from the group due to a serious hand injury, with Nils Lofgren stepping in as a replacement, we may never hear this group blasting it out in full IDGAF fashion like this ever again. It’s why this long-lost document may be the most important live offering there is of Neil Young and Crazy Horse—or at least the most important Young has shared with us. Long may they rust.

Neil Young & Crazy Horse Way Down in the Rust Bucket (2021)

From rollingstone.com

Between vintage concert albums and recent ones excavated from archival tapes, it’s become easier than ever to track the onstage history of Neil Young and Crazy Horse. We can now hear Young and the band in its early, funky, Danny Whitten days (Live at the Fillmore East), breaking in Whitten replacement Frank “Poncho” Sampedro (the often breathtaking Japanese 1976 show included on last year’s Archives Volume II), thundering in arenas not long after that (Live Rust), flexing their newly revitalized muscles in the early Nineties (Weld), and showing the flannel-shirt crowd a thing or two about endurance and longevity in the mid Nineties (Year of the Horse).

Next to those projects, Way Down in the Rust Bucket isn’t especially revelatory, nor does it shed new rays of gleaming light on an under-documented part of the saga. To warm up for the 1991 arena tour heard on Weld and its noise-mayhem sibling  Arc, the band played two club shows in Northern California, and this long-bootlegged tape, from the 800-seat Catalyst in the fall of 1990, documents one of them. (Young must have a fondness for that venue, since he had also played there, somewhat incognito with the Ducks, over a decade before.)

As on Weld, Way Down in the Rust Bucket showcases a reconvened band that sounds newly motivated after increasingly sluggish and creaky shows in the Eighties. They’re not yet the smooth-galloping machine they would become on the full-blown tour, though. What we’re hearing is the musicians feeling their way — for only the second time onstage — through the new material from the just-out Ragged Glory. The must-plays, like “Cinnamon Girl,” get by through sheer musical memory. But a certain tentativeness is evident on Glory songs like “Fuckin’ Up” and “Mansion on the Hill,” which would tighten up on the road; “Farmer John” sounds especially, shall we say, liquored up.

One would be hard-pressed to call any Crazy Horse show carefree, but the inclusion of goofy throwaways like “Homegrown” and “Roll Another Number for the Road” adds to the somewhat lighter vibe here. In the accompanying DVD, Billy Talbot seems especially stoked to be back on any type of stage, and as the band sets up for “Like a Hurricane,” Young takes a swig of water and drolly mentions the “big production number” coming up. At that point, the Gulf War that would hover over the “Smell the Horse” tour hadn’t begun, so don’t expect to hear the cover of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” complete with siren and gunfire sounds, that entered the set of the arena shows.

Unlike, say, Bob Dylan, Young rarely if ever dramatically rearranged his material when he played with the Horse, so major surprises here are rare. Apart from being a more sonically intimate recording than Weld, what distinguishes Rust Bucket is the set list. As if they knew they’d be playing to rabid Neil-Heads and not people who wandered into arenas expecting “Heart of Gold” and “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” Young and the Horse get to roam around a bit more in his catalog.

In particular, we get to hear three deep cuts that never made it to the subsequent tour. Without the combined vocal firepower of Linda Ronstadt and Nicolette Larson, “Bite the Bullet” isn’t quite the hurricane it was on American Stars ‘N Bars, but it’s a kick to hear the Horse play it. For this show only, they also resurrected Re-ac-tor’s “T-Bone” and “Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze.” The former, a proud caveman’s ode to slabbed meat , has not aged especially well; actually, it wasn’t even that good on Re-ac-tor. But the fact that Young would resurrect “Surfer Joe” is amusing: The song isn’t about his bosses at Warner Brothers (where he’d returned after a stint with Geffen), but the fact that the two characters in that song were named after them remains pretty funny.

And finally, there’s Zuma‘s “Danger Bird,” which made its way-belated stage debut that night at the Catalyst (and was never played during the “Smell the Horse” shows). You wonder why it took so long for them to work it up, but it’s worth the wait. From Talbot’s spare opening notes to Young’s inevitable guitar spasms, complete with bended torso and flying hair, it’s deep-cut heaven, and reason enough for this album to exist. It’s also an indication of the serious business to come just a few months down the road.

Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Way Down in the Rust Bucket (2021)

From post-trash.com

The release of Way Down in the Rust Bucket, the latest in Neil Young’s absolute barrage of archival albums and box sets, raises a recurring question: who really needs to hear all these recordings? This 2 ½ hour set covers a November 1990 warm-up gig for Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s 1991 North America tour. The tour itself, which saw the band reach new heights of volume and precision, was chronicled twice before: on the Sonic Youth-inspired, “you-gotta-hear-it” sound collage album Arc, and on the roaring, all-time classic live album Weld. The detail-oriented listener will note that Way Down in the Rust Bucket has a lot in common with Weld. No fewer than nine of its songs reappear here. In some ways, these versions aren’t quite as commanding than the ones that were released at the time. But, as is often the case on a journey through Young’s past, a little context doesn’t hurt.

1990 was a comeback year for Crazy Horse. Neil Young was riding a popular resurgence that began with 1989’s anthemic Freedom, and he looked to his on-again, off-again backing band to carry him further. When they’d last joined forces, Young had saddled them with unfamiliar keyboards and MIDI instruments. This time around, they played to their strengths: Young and Frank “Poncho” Sampedro on guitars, Billy Talbot on bass, Ralph Molina on drums, and all on vocals. They banged out the album Ragged Glory, a loud and loose collection featuring garage rock nugget “Farmer John” and a strong, introspective set of Young originals. The band was reinvigorated, and subsequent tour document Weld shows that they quickly tightened up and settled into a huge, monolithic sound.

Way Down in the Rust Bucket is what came in between. For all its connections to Weld, the loose charm of Ragged Glory is still in full force. The set was recorded on November 13, 1990 during a short run at The Catalyst in Santa Cruz, CA. They lean into the new material, and with good reason: they sound like they’re having an incredible amount of fun. Album opener “Country Home,” an only-slightly-melancholy ode to the benefits of having “Somewhere I can walk alone / to leave myself behind,” showcases a band that couldn’t wait to play, hitting the nail on the head with heavenly vocal harmonies and a series of gleeful guitar solos. “Roll Another Number (For the Road),” a laid-back country number and live staple of various Young bands since 1973, fits like a glove. The lyrics almost seem to catch the narrator of “Country Home” at an earlier point in life, stoned, dozing off in his car, dreaming of the life he’d eventually find.

Gritty oddities “Bite the Bullet” and “Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze,” both dating back to earlier, stranger Crazy Horse eras, are delivered with fire fully intact. Even “T-Bone,” hard to sit through in its original incarnation on 1981’s Reactor, somehow hits its mark here. Not quite all the older songs fare as well. “Danger Bird” drags, held back by some seriously clunky backing vocals. “Sedan Delivery” is a rough ride as well; the band falls flat when trying to keep up with all the song’s rhythmic jumps. But in almost all cases, Crazy Horse’s looseness translates into charm. “That was our Vegas ending,” Young laughingly explains after an extended rendition of “Don’t Cry No Tears.” The Ragged Glory tracks all seem to reach as high as “Country Home,” between the concise self-judgements of “F!#in’ Up” and “Mansion on the Hill” and the lengthy, radiant jams on “Over and Over” and “Love and Only Love.”

Back to the question: does this entry in the Neil Young Archives Performance Series (it’s “Volume 11.5”) serve a purpose? What does Way Down in the Rust Bucket have going for it that Weld doesn’t? The answer is: the sound of a great band waking up. They love this music. They love each other. Love bleeds all over this recording. They’re remembering what worked in the past, looking to the future, and by the end of the show, “Like a Hurricane” and “Cortez the Killer” soar as high as they ever have. It’s a concert worth remembering.

Neil Young & Crazy Horse, released their live album, Way Down in the Rust Bucket, via Reprise Records on February 26th

From overblown.co.uk

Neil Young & Crazy Horse released a new live album and concert film, Way Down in the Rust Bucket, this last week via Reprise Records. The release is part of Neil Young’s famed Archives, a long going project to release and catalogue Neil Young’s 50 plus years of music.

Way Down in the Rust Bucket was recorded in 1990, at The Catalyst in Santa Cruz, CA, in preparation for the 1991, Ragged Glory tour. It is considered Volume 11.5 of the Performance Series within the Neil Young Archives.

Neil Young is a cultural (and now American!) treasure whose music not only defined the county-folk-rock scene, but drug it out of the 60s and 70s, and to its new home in 2021. With that said, I think Neil Young with Crazy Horse is an acquired taste. I will always choose Neil Young’s work without Crazy Horse, preferring his more traditional folk-country roots to the jam-band vibe that comes with the collaboration; however, I know many Baby Boomers (my mama) who love Crazy Horse.

As a rule, I do not like live albums. I prefer clean recordings with great mixing. I want to believe this is the band’s intended perfect sound. Which makes it all the more great when you see a band live whose craft lives up to their album. However, I would say the generation that loves Neil running with the Horses also has a predilection for live albums. My assumption stems from the idea that live albums were the next best thing for many fans who could never dream of seeing their heroes live (again, my mother, living in small town, Wyoming). As a result, listening to a live album was an event in itself, of which I’m envious. I wish that more people still listened to albums in full and connected with the album’s story (I suppose people still do. If you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’re one of these people and that you also know the type of people whose music listening practices we all bemoan). With that said though, a live album is the equivalent of slapping your dick down on the table and asking other bands to measure up. You cannot depend on mixing. You cannot depend on the studio bassist that was hired to compensate for your Sid Vicious. You can only rely on your band, its tightness and your artistic statement to speak for itself. (And of course the amazing recording and sound engineers who make the album and clarity possible.) In a scene where more and more bands can’t hold their own and do more air-guitar and lip syncing than playing, it may be time for live albums to make a comeback.

If you have 2 1/2 hours to spare in your hectic lives, dim the lights, roll a joint, and attend the recording at The Catalyst. I’m certain my mama has already bought the film.

Way Down in the Rust Bucket track overview:

1. ‘Country Home’ – Ragged Glory, 1990
2. ‘Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze’ – Re-act-or, 1981
3. ‘Love to Burn’ – Ragged Glory, 1990
4. ‘Days that Used to Be’ – Ragged Glory, 1990
5. ‘Bite the Bullet’ – American Stars ‘N Bars, 1977.
6. ‘Cinnamon Girl’ – Everybody Know this is Nowhere, 1969; first album Neil Young recorded with Crazy Horse
7. ‘Farmer Joe’ – Ragged Glory, 1990
8. ‘Over and Over’ – Ragged Glory, 1990
9. ‘Damage Bird’ – Zuma, 1975
10. ‘Don’t Cry No Tears’ – Zuma, 1975
11. ‘Sedan Darling’ – Rest Never Sleeps, 1979
12. ‘Roll Another Number (For the Road)’ – Tonight’s the Night, 1979
13. ‘Fuckin’ Up’ – Ragged Glory, 1990
14. ‘T-Bone’ – Re-act-or, 1981
15. ‘Homegrown’ – First released on American Stars ‘N Bars, 1977; recently released on Homegrown, another Archives album (and one of my favorites!)
16. ‘Mansion on the Hill’ – Ragged Glory, 1990
17. ‘Like a Hurricane’ – American Stars ‘N Bars, 1977
18. ‘Love and Only Love’ – Ragged Glory, 1990
19. ‘Cortez the Killer’ – Zuma, 1975

Neil Young – Way Down In The Rust Bucket (2021)

From clashmusic.com

When I was at school Select Magazine ran a feature of the Best 100 Albums released in the 90s. For the rest of that year, I made it my mission to hear, and own, all of them. This was a time before the internet so hearing all 100 was a long and laborious task. Bargain bins in record shops were scoured and family members were asked if they had any of the missing albums.

One of the harder ones to track down was Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s 1990 album ‘Ragged Glory’. Ironically, my parents were happy for me to have Method Man, Snoop Doggy Dogg, The Prodigy, Portishead, and Green Day, but an album with a song called ‘Fuckin’ Up’ was a bridge too far. Eventually I found someone at school whose Dad had it. I swapped the first Reel 2 Real album, and I had a copy for a week.

After I heard ‘Ragged Glory’ I was blown away by how stark the recordings were, but also how fun it was. Grunge was over and Britpop was starting get in full swing, so hearing a 45-year-old just rocking out felt strangely rebellious. 

This brief jaunt down memory lane comes to mind as soon as I start listening to Neil Young’s latest live album ‘Way Down In The Rust Bucket’. The album was recorded in November 1990 at The Catalyst in Santa Cruz, two months after ‘Ragged Glory’ was released. The show was a three-hour epic. Three different sets and an encore for the audience in attendance. Every track on ‘Ragged Glory’ is played, expect ‘White Line’ and ‘Mother Earth’. This on its own would have been worth the admittance, but the rest is the kind of greatest hits sent you could only dream of. ‘Cinnamon Girl’, ‘Cowgirl in the Sand’, Sedan Delivery’, Like A Hurricane’. ‘Cortez the Killer’ and ‘Dangerbird’ getting its first live airing, 15 years after it was released in 1973’s ‘Zuma’.

This isn’t just a Greatest Hits set, oh no, throughout Young and Crazy Horse throw out hidden gems and deep cuts. It’s great to hear ‘Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze’ belted out here. It’s criminally underrated and has always been one of my favourites of Young’s songs. It just sounds massive and crunching here.

‘Bite the Bullet’ sounds better than on 1977’s ‘Stars N Bars’. ‘Homegrown’ – one of Young’s great lost songs – gets a deserved live performance. It sounds far more laidback than on the 2020 album, but this performance cemented its legend with the Young community. “It exists!” you could imagine members of the audience saying to one another.

‘T-Bone’ also gets a rare outing. This could be the standout moment on the album. Lyrically it’s just Young saying ‘Got mashed potatoes, Got mashed potatoes, Got mashed potatoes, Ain’t got no T-Bone’. It’s pretty throwaway, but at its heart ‘T-Bone’ is a barroom stomper. This is the kind of song that in anyone else’s hands it might come off as lazy rock, but Young and Crazy Horse manage to distil everything that makes them such mercurial outfit.

It has been rumoured on forums and message boards that ‘Way Down in the Rust Bucket’ is the best Young and Crazy Horse every played together. The release of 1991’s double live album ‘Weld’ often put these conversations to bed. However, after hearing ‘Way Down In The Rust Bucket’ it makes a strong argument. The set list is far more interesting, due to the deep cuts, than ‘Weld’ but the real excitement comes from when Young and Crazy Horse just get in each other’s pockets and play.

What’s even more remarkable is that three years prior Young said he wouldn’t play with Crazy Horse again due to his frustrations with about bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina. However, like a magnet, Young was drawn to his backing band. Maybe this friction gave the performance some added bite. The only downside to the album is ‘Cowgirl in the Sand’ was also performed on the night, but due to a technical issue it wasn’t recorded properly and is absent from ‘Way Down in the Rust Bucket’. This performance is pretty great, but with ‘Cowgirl’ this had the prospect to be a 10/10 classic. Without it we’re left to ponder ‘What if…?’  

If this album had come out in the 90s, teenage me wouldn’t have fully appreciated it. Having to wait this long to finally hear it has made it so much better. Again, though, we return to the question “If Neil had this and ‘Homegrown’ in the vault, what else is there?” Hopefully, we won’t have to wait long for that to be answered.

9/10

Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Way Down in the Rust Bucket (2021)

From pitchfork.com

Recorded in 1990 at a small Santa Cruz club, this joyous live document flips the energy of 1991’s Weld on its head, swapping out incendiary arena rockers for oddball picks and warm, woolly vibes.

Neil Young entered the 1990s acting as if his erratic 1980s never happened. He spent the bulk of the ’80s sowing wild oats while in an unhappy union with Geffen Records. The label was so aggrieved by the mercurial singer-songwriter’s behavior that they filed suit against Young, accusing him of purposefully delivering uncommercial albums. Perhaps they had a point: Once he returned to his old home at Reprise, he started making music like he had in the old days. Buoyed by the creative and commercial rebirth of 1989’s Freedom, Young reconnected with Crazy Horse, the ambling backing band who had supported him through good times and bad since way back in 1969. Picking up a fuzzy strand left hanging from Rust Never Sleeps, the 1979 album that represented their last great triumph, Young and Crazy Horse knocked out Ragged Glory at his Broken Arrow Ranch in a few weeks. The quick sessions resulted in an album with a spontaneous feel; it was the liveliest and loudest Crazy Horse had ever sounded in the studio.

As a full-bore rock’n’roll record, Ragged Glory was an ideal album to take out on the road, which is precisely what Neil Young and Crazy Horse did, spending the first four months of 1991 roaring through North America’s arenas with supporting acts Sonic Youth and Social Distortion in tow. Young’s decision to bring a pair of prominent alternative rockers on tour underscored the wild, untamed character of his work with Crazy Horse, with its swirls of distortion and primitive thump. The ensuing live 2xLP, Weld, and feedback-laden Arc EP tapped into the arena-sized aggression that fueled the band at its peak, all the way back to 1979’s incendiary Live Rust. Way Down in the Rust Bucket, the 12th live album in Young’s ongoing (and now absurdly active) Archives series, flips that energy on its head. Here, Crazy Horse aren’t interested in assaulting their audience; instead, they’re grooving along alongside them.

Some of this change in tone is surely due to the change in venue. Way Down in the Rust Bucket captures a November 13, 1990 gig at the small Santa Cruz club the Catalyst, a hometown bar that became Young’s regular stomping ground in 1977, when he spent the summer figuring out whether his ill-fated group the Ducks had a future. The Ducks didn’t survive 1977, but Young’s connection to the Catalyst endured; it became a place for him to limber up before heading back out on the road. That’s precisely what happened in November 1990: With two months to go before a big arena tour, the time was ripe to kick off the cobwebs. Playing in their own backyard—for fans who were close enough to be friends, and friends who were more like family—shaped the concert from its setlist to its execution. Gone are expected crowd-pleasers like “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” “Powderfinger,” “Rockin’ in the Free World” and “Tonight’s the Night,” all swapped out for oddball selections designed to scratch some itch of the band: American Stars ’n Bars’ cornpone romp “Homegrown,” a revved-up reading of the Re·ac·tor deep cut “Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze,” plus the inane blues stomp “T-Bone.”

As silly as it sounds, “T-Bone” provides the key to unlocking many of Way Down in the Rust Bucket’s charms. It’s not much of a song—there are no other lyrics than “Got mashed potatoes/Ain’t got no T-Bone”—yet hearing Crazy Horse lock into a primal rhythm then remain there for nearly seven minutes, as Young delivers each repetition of its lone line as if it’s a new punchline, is as invigorating as his elongated solos. There’s a direct line connecting this rave-up with “Farmer John,” a frat-rock classic from Don & Dewey by way of the Premiers that wound up as a touchstone on Ragged Glory: They’re party tunes played by a band intent on having a hell of a good time.

Young spent 1990 absolutely giddy with the monstrous, transportive racket he could make with Crazy Horse, but those high spirits don’t always come through on Weld. Blame some of that on the arena setting; blame some of it on timing. During those early months of 1991, Crazy Horse toured as Operation Desert Storm descended on Iraq, so Young sobered up, putting an earnest and angry version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” in a prominent position in the set list, then leaning into the group’s harder edges. Way Down in the Rust Bucket, recorded just months earlier, has no socio-political undertones and no angst; here, “Fuckin’ Up” doesn’t play as self-immolation, it’s merely a heavy shrug. Crazy Horse’s immense volume camouflages a sweet hippie heart, an empathy that’s apparent in both the selected songs and the warm, woolly performance. This is a joyous record, where even the melancholy epics “Like a Hurricane” and “Cortez the Killer” skirt sadness. Crazy Horse lumber toward bliss, goosed along by a leader who seems so enraptured by his own solos he doesn’t want to break the spell. Context also gives these seemingly endless workouts a different vibe. They’re surrounded by garage rockers and reconstituted anthems of the counterculture, songs designed to be played and heard in a communal setting. For a dirty, grungy rock’n’roll band, there’s no better place to hold communion than the local pub, where the separation between artist and audience can be so thin, it may as well be nonexistent. Maybe that’s why Way Down in the Rust Bucket feels transcendent: It captures the world’s greatest bar band in their spiritual home.