My My, Hey Hey
Neil Young wrote two versions of this song and put them both on the same record. “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)” opens Rust Never Sleeps — acoustic, alone, Young’s voice raw and close. “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)” closes it — electric, Crazy Horse behind him, the whole thing blown out and distorted and dangerous. Same words, mostly. Completely different animal. He wasn’t being clever. He was showing you something true about the nature of rock and roll itself: that the same fire burns quiet and loud, that the distance between folk and feedback is shorter than you think, that the song and its shadow are both the song.
The album came out in 1979. Kurt Cobain was twelve years old.
That’s the fact that has trailed this song for thirty years — the fact Young couldn’t have known when he wrote it and couldn’t escape after. “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” Cobain quoted those words in his suicide note. And the line, already freighted with myth, became something else entirely: an epitaph, a curse, an accusation, a question nobody had a clean answer to.
Young has said he’s had to live with that. He’s said it was the worst thing he ever wrote. He’s also said he still plays the song. Both things are true at the same time, and that’s about right for a line that was never as simple as it sounded.
Because the lyric isn’t a manifesto. It’s a negotiation. Young wrote it partly about Johnny Rotten — “Johnny Rotten’s sitting there, he’s waiting on the news” is in the earliest drafts of the song, later compressed to the more elliptical “the King is gone but he’s not forgotten” — and partly about the broader question of what it means to survive rock and roll. How do you keep making it without it becoming costume? How do you stay dangerous when danger is what they’re paying to see? The punks had one answer: burn everything down and walk away. Young had a different one: keep moving, keep rusting, keep making the thing even when it embarrasses you.
“Rock and roll will never die.” He sings it right after the burning-out line, and people always skip over that part. The song isn’t choosing between burning out and fading away — it’s insisting that neither option is the point. The music outlasts both. That’s the consolation and the terror of it.
The title comes from a conversation between Young and Jeff Blackburn, a musician from the Bay Area who’d been kicking the phrase around for years. My my, hey hey — four syllables, pure rhythm, nothing semantic. Young borrowed them, built something around them, gave Blackburn a co-writing credit. The phrase sounds like a sigh and a shout at the same time, which is maybe the whole song in two words.
The acoustic version is the one I keep coming back to. Young recorded it in San Francisco in 1978, playing alone, his guitar slightly out of tune in the way that only sounds right on certain songs. There’s a moment near the end where you can hear him breathing, and it’s one of those recording accidents that becomes the whole point — the song is about mortality and irrelevance and the desperate strange act of making music in the face of both, and there he is, breathing, still here, still doing it.
[PERSONAL: a moment when this song hit differently — driving somewhere late, the acoustic version on after something hard, the line about burning out landing in a way it hadn’t before.]
The electric version is something else. Crazy Horse turns it into a dirge that moves. Frank Sampedro’s guitar hangs in the mix like smoke. Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina lock into a groove that never quite resolves, always pressing forward, always slightly unsteady. Young solos over the top of it in a way that sounds less like showing off than like searching — like he’s looking for the end of the song and can’t find it. When he finally gets there, it stops abruptly. No fade. Just: done.
Rust Never Sleeps was recorded partially at a series of Young’s live shows, staged with elaborate theatrical props — giant amplifiers, roadies in Jedi robes, the whole arena turned into a kind of fever dream. The album’s structure, the acoustic-to-electric arc, mirrored the show’s arc. But the song anchoring each end of that structure was always going to outlast the staging, outlast the tour, outlast most of the context that produced it.
That’s the thing about writing “rock and roll will never die” in 1979, on the edge of everything that was about to change. Young couldn’t have known how right he was. He couldn’t have known who would quote his words back at him, and in what circumstances, and what it would cost him to keep playing the song after that. He kept playing it anyway.
Two versions, one truth, delivered in opposite directions. The acoustic version burns out. The electric version refuses to. Put them together and you’ve got something close to the whole argument about how to make something that matters — and how to keep making it when the world has decided it knows what you meant better than you do.
The King is gone. The song is still here.
