"Powderfinger"

You have to love Neil Young. If he wasn't singing gentle, post-hippy comedowns like "Heart of Gold", or pissing off the Southerners in his thin, reedy warble of a voice, then he was cranking up the monitors to 11 and stamping on the electro-fuzz-distorto-crunch pedal with the guys in Crazy Horse, and pissing off the Spanish instead. Ain't no pleasing some folk. Anyway, a lot of people reckon "Live Rust" is one of the best live albums made, and it's hard to disagree when you hear him lurch into "Powderfinger" here. You can't help but get the feeling that this song was meant to be acoustic, but here it gets the electro-fuzz-distorto-crunch treatment. It puts me in mind of the Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", the sense of a way of life fading before the bright light of war, and it makes sense that this should be a Neil Young song. I mean, he wrote the book on intelligent, if occasionally impenetrable, lyrics.