Songfacts®:

• 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 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.
• Around 1977 Neil Young formed a band called The Ducks that included Jeff Blackburn. The band played for a $3 cover charge in the hip Santa Cruz club environment. "My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue)" came out of this period and Jeff Blackburn received co-writing credit on the track with Young.
  
  Jeff Blackburn recalled to Uncut magazine: "We were old friends going back to the '60s. I was playing in Santa Cruz with John Craviotto and Bob Mosley (Moby Grape) who were a great rhythm section, when Neil ducked into it. That was a great summer. We played about 30 shows with The Ducks, we played every night. It really was a mighty month.
  
  Neil and I swapped ideas. We both had material, we had ideas and things came together as we were rocking together pretty good. I had a song with the line, 'Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It's better to burn out than it is to rust.' Neil liked that and the whole rust thing came from that line - rust never sleeps. Not many people share a credit with Neil Young. It's hard to say why I got one, you'd need to ask Neil. But you never know what he's going to do next."
• Young released two versions of the song on the album: an acoustic rendition called "My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue)," and an electric version called "Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)" that he recorded with his band, Crazy Horse. Both versions were included on the single, with "Hey Hey, My My" the A-side, which is what most radio stations play. The electric version has slightly different lyric and omits the famous line, "It's better to burn out than to fade away."
  
  "My My, Hey Hey" is on the first side of the album, which is all acoustic.
• This was the first track on Rust Never Sleeps. Young released a concert documentary with that title the same day as the album.
• Kurt Cobain's suicide note contained a line from this song: "It's better to burn out than to fade away." That line has become one of the most famous song lyrics of all time. When Young was asked by Time magazine in 2005 about the line and Cobain's death, he said: "The fact that he left the lyrics to my song right there with him when he killed himself left a profound feeling on me, but I don't think he was saying I have to kill myself because I don't want to fade away. I don't think he was interpreting the song in a negative way. It's a song about artistic survival, and I think he had a problem with the fact that he thought he was selling out, and he didn't know how to stop it. He was forced to do tours when he didn't want to, forced into all kinds of stuff. I was trying to get a hold of him - because I had heard some of the things he was doing to himself - just to tell him it's OK not to tour, it's OK not to do these things, just take control of your life and make your music. Or, hey, don't make music. But as soon as you feel like you're out there pretending, you're f--cked. I think he knew that instinctively, but he was young and he didn't have a lot of self-control. And who knows what other personal things in his life were having a negative impression on him at the time?"
• Def Leppard used the burn out/fade away line at the beginning of their song "Rock of Ages."
• This was included on Live Rust, a concert album recorded later that year. Young performed these concerts with giant amps and microphones on stage as props.
• A line from this song, "rust never sleeps," was used as the album title. Young got the line from Mark Mothersbaugh, who is a member of the band Devo.
• Neil Young performed this as a duet with Devo and Booji Boy in his movie Human Highway. The full duet is about twelve minutes, and takes place during a hallucination scene in the movie. The movie itself is only good as a B-grade movie, but the live footage of Devo in costume and Neil Young together is worth the price on the video. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Jensen - Jackson, MO
• In the 1986 movie Highlander, the villain Kurgan quotes this song to people inside a church: "I have something to say! It's better burn out, than to fade away!" By this he means to glorify his ongoing perilous battle for immortality as opposed to living a normal humble life. This is quite an obvious metaphor for being a rock star. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Jussi - Pori
• The song explicitly deals with the struggles of being a rock musician. As quoted on Hyper Rust, Neil Young said, "The essence of the rock'n'roll spirit to me, is that it's better to burn out really bright than to sort of decay off into infinity. Even though if you look at it in a mature way, you'll think, "well, yes ... you should decay off into infinity, and keep going along." Rock'n'roll doesn't look that far ahead. Rock'n'roll is right now. What's happening right this second"
• Stephen King quoted the lyric "Out of the blue and into the black" in the epigraph to his 1986 horror novel, It. In the story, an evil entity disguised as a clown emerges from hibernation every 27 years to terrorize the town of Derry, Maine. In the film adaptation's 2019 sequel, It Chapter Two, King makes a cameo appearance as a shopkeeper who wears a Neil Young Harvest Moon T-shirt. Director Andy Muschietti told the Dutch online newspaper NU.nl he was surprised when the author seemed annoyed by the garment. King, who was in the midst of a cocaine addiction when he wrote It, said he wasn't really a Neil Young fan and was probably high when he quoted him in the novel.