History is evidently much on Young's mind—the fact that it's the tenth anniversary of Woodstock matters a great deal to him. He first made his legend as an elegist for the Sixties, and one reason why his oeuvre during the long period of willful obscurantism that followed Harvest (1972) didn't loom as large as it should have was that he hadn't found another theme of commensurate scope. For Young, 1979 represents the end of another epoch, and this seems to have spurred him into action. What he's trying to do on Live Rust is to set himself up as a rock & roll Tiresias, sounding warnings for the future, and to somehow tie his songs of the last ten years into a vast and singular history of the times. Live Rust covers almost every aspect of Young's career, and it's all been arranged and presented as a sprawling epic of...