Neil Young - Tonight's the Night

Pitchfork 100

In February 1972, Neil Young put out an album called Harvest and it became massive, going platinum and becoming the best-selling album of the year. In addition to changing Young’s position in the marketplace, the album’s runaway success made a mark on record shopping for years to come. Anyone who went to a store before the vinyl revival began in earnest can tell you that used copies of Harvest were utterly ubiquitous—like Cat Stevens’ Teaser and the Firecat and Carole King’s Tapestry, there was seemingly no thrift shop or garage sale without one. With Harvest, Young built on the commercial breakthrough of his work with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, mixing two sounds beloved by aging baby boomers—rootsy country-rock and intimate singer/songwriter folk. Harvest was the right record for this weird, post-‘60s moment, and a shaggy Canadian singer-songwriter with the shaky voice was suddenly something approaching a pop star.

Harvest had its share of wistful and breezy songs, but a number on the second side called “The Needle and the Damage Done” was a sign of things to come. It was a song, in part, about guitarist, singer, and songwriter Danny Whitten, Young’s friend and a member of his frequent backing band, Crazy Horse, specifically Whitten’s addiction to heroin. “The Needle and the Damage Done,” recorded live in concert and solo, set a template for a certain kind of song about drug abuse: It’s beautiful, elegiac, precise—a focused lament written with a great deal of craft, like Elliott Smith’s “Needle in the Hay” or U2's "Running to Stand Still." While he always excelled at this style, Young’s approach to songwriting was about to shift drastically. “‘Heart of Gold’ put me in the middle of the road,” he famously wrote of Harvest’s big single in the liner notes to his 1977 collection Decade, perhaps thinking of his album in the bins next to those by massive sellers by Cat Stevens and Carole King. “Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch.” Tonight’s the Night, a noisy, harrowing scrape along the guardrail that sends sparks flying upward, was Young’s most moving dispatch from his chosen place. 

As summer turned to fall in 1973, 18 months after Harvest hit stores, Neil Young was 27 years old. He was learning that bad things can start to happen when you reach your late twenties, especially when you’re drinking too much and doing too many drugs and are hanging around people who do the same. Your late twenties is when you might find that certain people who once seemed like “they like to party” are going much further, and the situation is getting dangerous. Bodies that seemed indestructible in youth start to give out; good times suddenly aren’t so good anymore. In August of ’73, when Young started the sessions that produced the bulk of Tonight’s the Night, he found himself in the heart of such a scene, and the center could not hold.

Two events in the previous 10 months had shaken Young to his core, and they shaped how this album came to be and how it was heard. In November 1972, Young was rehearsing the band he dubbed the Stray Gators to take them on tour in support of Harvest. Whitten was asked to join the group but it quickly became clear that his addiction had advanced to the point where playing shows was impossible, so Young fired him and gave him $50 and a plane ticket back to Los Angeles. Whitten died of an overdose of valium and alcohol within a day, and Young was overcome with guilt about his friend’s death. In June of ’73, two months before the Tonight’s the Night sessions, Bruce Berry, a roadie for Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young and beloved member of Young’s particular L.A. scene, died of an overdose of heroin.

So Tonight’s the Night comes freighted with a certain amount of legend, and people generally encounter it now through the lens of 40 years of rock writing. If you’ve read enough about music, you’ve read the above “ditch” comment, and you’ll have it somewhere in your mind the first time you press “play” or lower the turntable arm. The general understanding on Tonight’s the Night is that it’s dark, it’s depressing, a record about loss and destruction and the end. If you listen to it knowing these things, you’re in for a surprise. Because it is those things, but it’s also so much more. Tonight’s the Night is shocking the first time you hear it because for a record on the receiving end of so much first-generation rock criticism focusing on its sorrow and grief, it often sounds like a raucous party being thrown by a bunch of lovable knuckleheads having the time of their life.

After the repetition of the opening “tonight’s the night” refrain on the opening title track, the first two words on the album are “Bruce Berry,” and the album’s connection to Young’s deceased friend go deeper. In August ’73, after some sessions at the L.A.’s Sunset Sound, Young decided a proper studio wasn’t the right setting for the album he had in mind. So Young’s producer David Briggs had the idea to record at a Studio Instrument Rentals, which was started by Bruce Berry and his brother Ken. In addition to renting equipment, S.I.R. had a small practice space in the back with an elevated stage. A mobile recording truck was parked behind the building and a hole was knocked in the wall to run cable to the truck. Young’s band now consisted of the Crazy Horse rhythm section of Billy Talbot on bass and Ralph Molina on drums, young guitarist and sometime Crazy Horse member Nils Lofgren, and steel guitar player Ben Keith, who had worked with Young in Nashville on Harvest. Over the course of a month, they’d assemble in the evening with Briggs at S.I.R. to drink and do drugs and play pool and shoot the shit until they were ready to climb onstage and make music.

The Tonight’s the Night songs recorded in the practice space were cut live in this fashion, with no overdubs and minimal editing, and the album itself is one of the most sonically raw albums ever released by a major artist. The band is loose and well-oiled. At times Young is too close or too far away from the microphone, and his voice is often straining at the upper end of his range. Young was recording the month after Steely Dan had released Countdown to Ecstasy, and the rich possibilities of the recording studio were reaching a zenith, but he was recording in a dimly-lit room with a drunk band in the back of a retail store, noisily banging into microphone stands on takes that would eventually be used on an album by a label owned by Warner Brothers.

This off-the-cuff feel defines the album. Working with Young, producer David Briggs was about capturing performances, not making records. The album begins with a ghostly bit of tinkling piano and guitar that sounds like a brief warm-up, the kind of thing that would be cut from any record without a second thought. But here it’s perfect, lending the kind of “here we go!” feeling of the best album-openers. Young’s words on Berry are personal and almost uncomfortably specific, basically saying, “Here was this man; here is what he did, and now he’s gone.” Young talks about Berry picking up Young’s guitar and singing late at night after gigs when everyone was gone, and being moved deeply by a voice that was “as real as the day was long.” That kind of “realness” is the animating idea of this album. The meticulous craftsmanship that had carried Young to the top with Harvest had no place here; now it was time to make some noise.

Tonight’s the Night is an album not so much about death as about mourning. And while we might like to think of mourning as a dignified pursuit grounded in ritual—a black veil, food at the door, loved ones at beck and call—the truth is that mourning can be messy and out of control and it can sometimes look like something else entirely. Sometimes mourning can even look like a macabre celebration, embracing life with one arm while the black figure of death is curled inside the other. That’s where Young and his band found themselves during this period. “Lookout Joe,” one of a couple of songs on Tonight’s the Night recorded in December ’72, has a couplet that conveys the record’s reckless spirit perfectly: “Remember Bill from up on the hill?/A Cadillac put a hole in his arm/But old Bill, he’s up there still/Havin’ a ball rollin’ to the bottom.”

A few songs seem at first to exist more for the people playing them than the listener, but that conspiratorial sense of community between the musicians turns out to be a huge part of the appeal. “Speakin’ Out” is the sound of a band feeling their way through the most basic chord changes possible, the kind of structure even the most intoxicated and most damaged musician could handle with no problem. The meaning lies in hearing these people in this room playing together, the feeling they conjure by the presence, and not in Young’s lines like “I went to the movie the other night/The plot was groovy, it was out of sight.” Tonight's the Night's beauty lies in its imperfections. “Mellow My Mind” has a similarly unfinished feel, but the strain of Young’s voice is so palpable, every half-baked couplet swollen with ache, that it’s almost unbearably affecting.

“Roll Another Number (For the Road)” is a song about the end of a long night of incapacitating inebriation performed by a band that sounds like they’ve just experienced a long night of incapacitating inebriation. Young has always been, on one level, of the hippie generation’s true believers—he did, after all, title the first volume of his memoir Waging Heavy Peace. But he can just as often be repelled by the soft-headedness of the movement. “I’m not goin’ back to Woodstock for a while,” he sings on “Roll Another Number,” explaining that he’s “a million miles away/From that helicopter day.” The road so many of his generation had taken led him here, drunk on a dark stage singing songs about death and loss to nobody.

Sometimes songs are knocked together and passed around, something to be used as much as something performed. And for songs like these, you grab whatever’s at hand. Such a loose and generous approach led Young to a place where he could lift the melody of a song someone else had written wholesale and call his creation “Borrowed Tune” without shame or apology. “I’m singing my borrowed tune, I took from the Rolling Stones/Alone in this empty room, too wasted to write my own,” he sings over minimal piano, voicing a melody first found on the Jagger/Richards composition “Lady Jane.” Young’s Stones’ interpolation and blues changes suggest that the building blocks of music belong to us all, and we should take what we need and turn the raw material into a new expression. That feeling, of the possibility of transformation, extends to the record as a whole. There are so many loose ends, frayed connections, and smudgy borders, no single song has any one specific meaning. Listening to the album becomes an act of authorship, as its slurred words and pugnacious spirit are mapped onto your own life. 

Ben Keith’s pedal steel guitar playing is often astonishing in its beauty, which provides a layer of tension with the often-sloppy playing and rough sonics. In Keith’s hands, the pedal steel imbues every song with a symphonic grandeur, and also a feeling of life-affirming dignity. His show-stopping number here is the gorgeous ballad “Albuquerque.” While Young sings about disappearing western landscape (“So I’ll stop when I can/Find some fried eggs and country ham/I’ll find somewhere/Where they don’t care who I am”), Keith conjures up huge, rich clouds of notes. No matter what else is happening on a given song, how loud the party gets, Keith lends a note of pathos, ensuring that the undercurrent of grief remains.

Whitten’s loss is honored by the inclusion of “(Come on Baby, Let’s Go) Downtown,” a song he composed with Young and sings, heard here on a version recorded at a 1970 Neil Young and Crazy Horse gig. That “Downtown” wound up on Tonight’s the Night is kind of a twisted joke, because the song itself, despite being a joyous rave-up, is actually about scoring heroin. Whitten’s death seems impossible when this song crackles with so much life. It’s both a celebration and a lament. Hearing their voices in unison on the chorus is a kind of prayer, two music lifers realizing in a moment the power of what they could do together. And the album as a whole takes this idea and extends it outward, first to Young’s fellow musicians, and then to us.

The three albums later grouped together as “The Ditch Trilogy” include the 1973 live album Time Fades Away (culled from the shows Whitten had hoped to play on) and 1974’s On the Beach. They are very different documents bound together by the force of Young’s vision. Though Tonight’s the Night was recorded before On the Beach, it wouldn’t be released for another two years. This turned out to be to the album’s advantage, because its final presentation highlighted the fact that it was snapshot of a moment in time, and gave Young the opportunity to inflate its myth.

When it finally emerged, it came inside one of rock’s greatest sleeves, a spooky high contrast black-and-white photo of Young printed on blotter paper. On the LP itself, the Reprise label, usually tan, was black, and there were cryptic carvings in the run-out groove, “Hello Waterface“ in the A-side and “Goodbye Waterface” on the B. An insert included with album features notes from Young with a sort of apology (“I’m sorry. You don’t know these people. This means nothing to you.”) and a lengthy article about Young written in Dutch.

The article, as it turns out, was a harsh pan of a show from Young’s tour following the completion of the Tonight’s the Night material, undertaken a year and a half before the album’s release. These shows, which are now the stuff of legend, were theatrical. “The stage set was very strange,” reads a translation of the liner notes. “At the back a large palm tree; next to the piano and loudspeakers were hanging all sorts of women’s boots and there were hubcaps laid all around. We were in total darkness when Neil and his band—Ben Keith, Nils Lofgren, Ralph Molina & Billy Talbot took the stage and slowly began playing the 1st number ‘Tonight’s the Night.’ The sound was miserable, the band’s coordination was miserable and Neil’s piano and singing were miserable." During these shows, Young would often mix songs with long rants about his deceased friends. He was toying with his place in the entertainment machine, trying to figure out how to sneak these heavier feelings in. His “Miami Beach” routine was a way of externalizing the artifice of your typical music performance to make the real feelings at the core that much more intense. It was a rock show designed to feel like a seance, a way of communing with the dead.

But in the end, Tonight’s the Night is really a record about life. Like a drunk at the end of a long night or a boxer barely on their feet, the record staggers, stumbles, and lunges forward; it’s prevailing mode is “unsteady.” Nothing lands where it should, and it feels like it could collapse at any moment. But while a lurching gait can be a marker of damage or dysfunction, it can also be a sign of defiance. Because some force, whether it's from outside or it’s something you bring on yourself, is trying to cripple you. But guess what: you’re still standing.