‘My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)’ is a song by Canadian musician Neil Young. An acoustic song, it was recorded live in early 1978 at the Boarding House in San Francisco, California. Combined with its hard rock counterpart ‘Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)’, it bookends Young's 1979 album Rust Never Sleeps. Inspired by electropunk group Devo, the rise of punk and what Young viewed as his own growing irrelevance, the song significantly revitalized Young's career.
The line, "it's better to burn out than to fade away" was taken from one of the songs of Young's bandmate in the short-lived supergroup The Ducks, Jeff Blackburn. It became infamous after being quoted in Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain's suicide note. Young later said that he was so shaken that he dedicated his 1994 album Sleeps with Angels to Cobain.
This deals with the fleeting nature of fame and how hard it is to stay relevant as an artist. Going "out of the blue and into the black" is when the popularity wanes and the singer fades from memory. Young handled this by adopting a blithe disregard for popular taste, making music however he saw fit. Young compared the rise of Johnny Rotten with that of the recently deceased "King" Elvis Presley, who himself had once been disparaged as a dangerous influence only to later become an icon. In 1977, Rotten responded by playing a song by Young on a radio program.
Young alludes to three specific artists in the lyrics:
- "Rock and roll is here to stay" - This is the title of a 1958 song by Danny & the Juniors, a vocal group best known for their hit "At The Hop." They proclaim, "Rock 'n roll is here to stay, it will never die."
- "The king is gone but he's not forgotten" - "The King" is Elvis Presley, who died in 1977, two years before this song was released.
- "This is the story of a Johnny Rotten" - Johnny Rotten (real name: John Lydon) was lead singer of punk rock pioneers The Sex Pistols. He often seemed hell-bent on self destruction to ensure he would burn out and not fade away, but ended up having a very long and productive career.
The song may best be known for the line "It's better to burn out than to fade away". The line occurs during the introduction to Def Leppard's 1983 song "Rock of Ages". It was also used in the movie Highlander (1986), when the Kurgan (Clancy Brown) exits a church after meeting the Highlander (Christopher Lambert). Kurt Cobain's suicide note ended with the same line, shaking Young and inadvertently cementing his place as the so-called "Godfather of Grunge"
Label – Reprise
Songwriters – Neil Young, Jeff Blackburn
Producers – Neil Young, David Briggs, Tim Mulligan
SONG LYRICS
[Verse 1]My my, hey hey
Rock and roll is here to stay
It's better to burn out than to fade away
My my, hey hey
[Verse 2]
Out of the blue and into the black
They give you this, but you pay for that
And once you're gone you can never come back
When you're out of the blue and into the black
[Verse 3]
The king is gone but he's not forgotten
This is the story of a Johnny Rotten
It's better to burn out than it is to rust
The king is gone but he's not forgotten
[Verse 4]
Hey hey, my my
Rock and roll can never die
There's more to the picture than meets the eye
Hey hey, my my
[Harmonica Solo]
[Outro]
Hey hey, my my