The dad-rock jokes pretty much wrote themselves when news spread that the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) was sponsoring a special, one-night-only double feature of Neil Young's Human Highway and Rust Never Sleeps, both set for an upcoming DVD release following years being notably unavailable.
- Old man, take a look at my movies
- The Knitting Needle and the Damage Done
- It’s better to burn out than to put your retirement savings into a Roth IRA
You get the idea. But if the recent passing of David Bowie had taught us anything, it's that we should appreciate our Boomer icons amid their twilights, and in all their glorious contradictions. And there was probably no better place to appreciate Neil Young’s contradictions than at the Human Highway-Rust Never Sleeps-AARP screening this past Monday.
Predictably, the audience at the screening I attended in Boulder, Colorado skewed heavily towards to the 55 and up crowd. Balding pates. Scraggly white ponytails on several men. A few canes. Despite an influx of tech startups in the past decade (and a massive Google campus currently under construction on the edge of town), Boulder remains, for the moment, an aging hippie stronghold, where Grateful Dead tribute bands can easily sell out a multi-night stand at one of the city's largest theaters. But were these aging hippies ready to get lost on the Human Highway?
Maybe not.
"Are we at the right movie?" one attendee in the row behind me whispered to her companion about 15 minutes in. "This can't be the right movie." The pair exited soon, and I don’t think they ever came back. Maybe they decided to find out what that Gods of Egypt flick was all about.
Wherever they went, their mystified reaction is proof positive that Human Highway, first released in 1982, still retains its polarizing power. A semi-improvised apocalyptic musical comedy set in the fictional town of Linear Valley, getting through the film is a rite of passage for a Neil Young obsessive of a certain stripe. “How could it be be that bad?” countless fans have asked themselves, perhaps coming across the film on a dusty VHS tape back in the 1990s, or on YouTube in more recent times. “It’s got Neil Young, Dennis Hopper … and Devo!”
“It might just be the dorkiest movie ever made," Young wrote in his 2013 memoir, Waging Heavy Peace. And he's not wrong. Human Highway is stunningly dorky. Preternaturally dorky, even. You could call the film a vanity project—Young reportedly sunk $3 million of his own money into its making—but one look at Young as Lionel, a gawking, oil-stained garage mechanic, shot in unforgiving close-ups, is all it takes to realize “vanity” is not what Neil is interested in here. Maybe it was the opposite. Keep in mind that in 1978, when the project began, Young was coming off of string of commercial and critical successes that few of his peers could match; the aforementioned Mr. Bowie is perhaps the only real comparison here. Young had climbed to a peak of coolness in 1970s, but with Human Highway, Neil kicked off a decade’s worth of (sometimes intentional, sometimes-not) legend-dismantling.
During the semi-awkward live Q&A with filmmaker/writer Cameron Crowe that followed, Neil cited 1950s horror and sci-fi movies as Human Highway’s inspiration, along with one dangerously dorky influence: Jerry Lewis. The Nutty Professor is certainly lurking behind Young’s portrayal of Lionel, and the purposely artificial soundstage sets, cornball special effects and stilted performances all hark back to a pre-1960s filmmaking style. Neil might’ve been on to something: The almost lurid Americana vibes in the diner where most of the film’s action takes place verge on the Lynchian. Indeed, several of Human Highway’s principal actors went on to appear in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks; it’s slightly hilarious to see Hopper and Dean Stockwell trading broad comedic lines knowing the horrible things they’ll get up to Blue Velvet. Still, the diner scenes are mostly groan-inducing. Hopper, as a spaced-out short order cook, is at least mildly entertaining, but Young and Russ Tamblyn dominate the proceedings as the world’s least funny tag-team comic duo.
And so, Devo to the rescue! Human Highway’s existence may well be justified primarily by the presence of Devo, who play the Nukies, a group of singing, dancing nuclear reactor workers. The band also appears in a dream sequence, wherein Lionel imagines himself as a rock star who is a lot like Neil Young. Their raw, corrosive rendition of “Hey Hey My My (Into The Black)” (below) is truly unhinged, with Mark Mothersbaugh’s Booji Boy and Young engaging in an intense, scary synth/guitar duel. It’s something else.
Young’s ears must’ve still been ringing from his up-close-and-personal Devo-lution experience when he made Rust Never Sleeps, the classic 1979 concert film that followed Human Highway at the screening. Though the film kicks off with an acoustic set, it’s primarily valuable for the molten, definitive Crazy Horse-accompanied performances of “Like A Hurricane,” “Powderfinger,” “Sedan Delivery,” and other electrifyingly loud numbers. But seeing Rust back to back with Human Highway threw into relief the similarities the two films share: rock stardom as combination dream/nightmare; a healthily ambiguous attitude toward the Woodstock generation; occasionally inept editing; and just plain bizarre choices, such as Rust’s Jawa-like “Road-eyes,” who scurry about the stage throughout the show, sometimes commanded by towering Conehead-stype beings.
“We just made it all up as we went along,” Young said of Human Highway during the Q&A with a devilish chortle—and that might’ve been the M.O. on Rust as well. As an artist, Neil Young is willing to follow his muse wherever it takes him, whether it’s to pure, ragged rock ‘n’ roll glory, or to Jerry Lewis’ doorstep. It’s a twisted highway, for sure, but we’re lucky to have him guiding us down it.