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.
The album was recorded on November 13, 1990 at The Catalyst in Santa Cruz, CA, where the band was warming up for their upcoming Ragged Glory tour. The show consisted of three sets and an encore, featuring most of recently released Ragged Glory, as well as older fan favourites and deeper cuts.[2] Due to 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 to limit the release format to two CDs/four LPs). "Cowgirl in the Sand" appears only on the DVD version, with dropout sections augmented by lower-fidelity FOH mix. [3]
Young announced the release on his site on January1, 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.[4] This album was initially scheduled to come out on October16, 2020 before being postponed to January15, 2021[5] and later February26. Young has also 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.[6]