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A few significant albums attest to Classic Rock's ability to transcend its typical testosterone-fueled, "party forever" ethos and delve into deeply personal territory. John Lennon's 1970 "Plastic Ono Band" definitely helped expand the genre beyond mere aesthetics and introduced a potentially therapeutic dimension. Its stripped down arrangements, primal scream vocals and lyrics that dealt with pain, loss and death brought psychology to the music charts. With such a stark and brilliant precedence, others soon followed and produced some of Rock's most enduring, if not its best selling, material. An agonized Neil Young found himself drowning in guilt-riddled depression following the drug overdose death of Crazy Horse alumnus Danny Whitten in late 1972. Whitten had fallen into heroin use at least partially for relief from rheumatoid arthritis, but it completely consumed him, leading to dismissals from both Crazy Horse and Young's 1972 recording sessions. The very night that Young sent him packing, Whitten overdosed and died. Young has stated that he afterward struggled with feelings of personal responsibility. Whitten had also apparently inspired Young's "The Needle and the Damage Done." Sadly, Whitten supposedly turned roadie Bruce Berry onto heroin and Berry, who had worked with Young, followed Whitten by overdosing and dying in June, 1973. Young's career had just peaked following the extremely popular album "Harvest" and he had originally planned a similar sounding, and probably more crowd-pleasing, follow-up. Instead, in August of 1973, after returning from the tour that produced "Time Fades Away," Young and his assembled band recorded a bleak, stark, uncompromising, rough-hewn, dreary, melancholic and undeniably powerful collection of songs. "Harvest II" it wasn't. The spirits of both Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry, along with their untimely ends, drift and loom over the entire proceedings. For many reasons, including record company apprehension, the songs sat unreleased for two years. Not until mid-1975, and in place of the only recently released "Homegrown," did the album "Tonight's the Night" finally appear, drenched in the color black. Many "Harvest" fans had already backed off in confusion following the rough "Time Fades Away" and the often despairing "On the Beach." This new album, perhaps Young's penance, coping mechanism or guilty catharsis, won over critics, but many listeners still don't know what to make of this gritty album hailed by the music press, and many fans, as a solid masterpiece.
Throughout much of the album, Young's voice creaks, strains, goes out of tune, mistakes occur, instrumentation becomes wobbly and drunken and the entire production at times feels a bit off. Sometimes the performances seem to teeter on virtual collapse. To some listeners, this might come across as shoddy, rushed, as not having recorded enough takes to save money, of not practicing enough, or perhaps a result of the band playing recklessly under heavy drug use. So why release these takes? Another classic album may help illuminate such questions. Captain Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica," though far more abrasive than anything Young ever recorded, becomes slightly more comprehensible once one realizes that the artists intended the album to sound the way it does. It strives to fulfill a particular sonic vision. Though not everyone may enjoy the results, this insight can help conceptually unlock more innovative or unfamiliar music. Similarly, Young wanted "Tonight's the Night" to sound exactly as the listener experiences it, as strange as this may sound to some people. Overall, the album exudes a one-off, single take, extemporaneous feel, as if attempting to capture raw emotion over the polish of heavily produced, edited and overdubbed music. It goes to the source, in this case the pain, grief, guilt and anguish that Young felt over the deaths of the people that he personally knew. Layers of production, splicing takes against one another and "correcting" mistakes would likely obscure or impede the overwhelming feelings that Young wanted to capture and convey. Straight pop music rarely allows such heartfelt outpourings, it instead aims for mass acceptance and thus often lowest common denominator depersonalized expressions, mainly to heighten mass appeal. Young inverted this and, in essence, pushed his craft to an entirely different emotional level. Not everyone appreciated it, of course, but no one could deny that he pushed boundaries and didn't trod the simple path by simply repeating his past successes. In other words, Young challenged both himself, via a critical self-portrait, and his audience with new sounds, concepts and themes. He arguably never challenged them more than with "Tonight's the Night."
Light piano, sounding almost like fiddling, opens the album followed by the half-sung, half-chanted vocals of the title track. Stark simplicity descends on the scene as Young conjures up the memory of Bruce Berry, including the moment he heard of his death. Memories of Berry playing songs, singing "real as the day was long" get sung through an unprocessed microphone, giving the song even more immediacy as it pops and varies in volume relative to Young's distance from it. The song feels off-the-cuff and almost unrehearsed, though apparently an "original version" of the sessions exists. This particular take captures the intensity of an emotional purge, where the point remains getting the feelings out rather than playing "perfectly." Young uses his own version of "primal scream therapy" throughout the album. "Speakin' Out" features a dropout type figure, accompanied by dance hall piano, looking for good times while depending completely on others. It presents a different, and far less romantic, view of the "wandering searcher." Similar themes pervade the driving "World on a String," where again a "searcher" appears more like a meandering "drifter" in that "the world" seems "only real in the way that I feel from day to day." The narrator doesn't seem to stand on any solid ground, nor does he seem to care to. With its vocal flubs, the song almost appears to fall apart in places, but that just emphasizes its themes and adds to its power. "Borrowed Tune" openly steals melodies from the Rolling Stones' 1966 "Lady Jane," presumably because the narrator, probably Young himself, remains "too wasted to write my own." Alone with only piano and harmonica, the song could represent Young questioning the meaning of his own success or "climbin' this ladder," followed by "I hope that it matters," but "I'm havin' my doubts." "Come on Baby Let's Go Downtown" shatters the relative stillness of "Borrowed Tune" with a blistering rendition of a song written and performed by Danny Whitten and recorded live in 1970. Whitten, whose sudden appearance feels somewhat ghostly given the context, sings lead vocals with Young and Crazy Horse backing. If the band always played the song this well, it must have driven crowds wild in its day. Tragically, its lyrics revolve around selling drugs or "stuff" and the sinking feeling of getting caught in the act. "Mellow My Mind" takes vocal expression to extremes as it yearns for relief and satisfaction in simple things. It features an arrangement straight off of "Harvest," but Young's painfully strained vocals launch it into another dimension.
On the original vinyl release, "Mellow My Mind" concluded "Side One." Listeners then had to flip the physical record to continue. An inebriated jaded hippie anthem greeted them when the needle surfed the grooves of "Side Two." "Roll Another Number (For the Road)" again revisits burnout territory, as the drugged narrator claims "though my feet aren't on the ground" and declares "I'm not goin' back to Woodstock for a while." Young would continue to question hippie idealism later in his career. "Albuquerque," with its grungy distorted guitars, seeks escape, likely from Young's own fame, which, given everything, may have started to feel meaningless or puerile. The lyrics crave anonymity, simple things, independence and likely a sense of freedom from the burgeoning institution that Young had doubtless become. A lonely, desperate and unfulfillable longing fills the song, arguably one of the album's best. "New Mama," the album's most beautiful and most polished number, doesn't seem to fit with the album's overall murky themes, at least on a cursory glace. Inspired by the 1972 birth of Young's son Zeke with the late actress and then Young's wife, Carrie Snodgress, the lyrics invite multiple interpretations. The "sun" in "New Mama's" eyes, likely Snodgress herself, could represent clarity or obscurity. The "dreamland" could also likewise represent unbridled happiness or vapid detachment. Presented in the context of the album, the pretty perfect harmonies seem undergirded by doubt or at least by a heavily guarded optimism. "Lookout Joe," a raucous track, predates the other songs on the album, but still manages to fit in thematically. "Joe" apparently refers to "G.I. Joe," or military veterans who experienced their world turned upside down upon returning from service. Drug dealers now inhabit the old neighborhood. A previous lover "took your money and left town." The refrain "old times were good times" suggests societal degeneration. "Tired Eyes," with it mostly spoken vocals and gorgeous pedal steel guitar, contains violent tales of drug deals, shootings, killings and burnouts. It pleads for an awakening and a stop to the excesses of drug use. The repeated line "he tried to do his best, but he could not" suspects that such pleas may prove futile. A lumbering refrain of "Tonight's the Night" bookends and closes the album. Perhaps an inserted alternate take, it has even more of that passionate "sloppy rock" feel to it than the first version. The lyrics haven't changed, but the rhythm now has a heavier driving beat that concludes the album with a classic rock flourish.
"Tonight's the Night" paints a bleak and inconsolable portrait of the sometimes romanticized early 1970s, of Young himself and, to a certain extent, of human nature. Especially juxtaposed against a backdrop of hippie idealism, or, in some cases, because of it, many people just seem hopelessly messed up and lost. Modern life, despite all of its argued advantages and lifestyle technologies, can also easily destroy people. The album doesn't even attempt to offer solutions. After all, how can music fix such ominous problems? Young questions all of it, including the meaning and relevance of his own work, on this groundbreaking album. One wonders if Young believed that the pressures of success and his career also indirectly contributed to the death of Whitten and Berry. As such, the entire collection reflects on whether something is terribly out of whack with both Young himself and with his world at that time. In an early interview on his California ranch, Young described himself as a "rich hippie," but his disillusionment with that movement and its influence became all too clear on his early-mid 1970s work, especially on "Tonight's the Night." Many of his fans just wanted another relatively upbeat "Harvest." He didn't give it to them, perhaps fearing dire consequences both for them and for himself. Getting lost in fame has the potential to damage both the famous and their fans as both wither away in fantasy and escapism. Young seemed painfully aware of this, and, though it never lead him to retirement, it informs all of his subsequent work. The "Tonight's the Night" recordings have now aged almost 50 years. In the interim, Rock has taken a definite backseat to other genres and has mostly lost any of the "naughtiness" or rebelliousness it once had. It has also arguably begun to lose its cultural relevance, which inevitably happens to any aging pop culture format, and has become more a medium of consoling nostalgia for specific age groups. Though by no means dead, the outlook doesn't look too promising for Rock as its fans and artists gradually fade into legend. No one knows what future generations will do with this very twentieth century mass media platform, or whether it will even speak to them at all. They will have their own problems and distractions. Much like the questions that Young raised on his most acclaimed album, no answers really exist for these questions, either. The album may fade into oblivion or experience periodic rebirths as the human species inexorably glides toward wherever it thinks it's going, assuming that it has any control over where it's going. Regardless, "Tonight's the Night" and its timeless themes will likely remain a landmark of Rock music and of the album format as long as people maintain an interest in its period of history and its culture.
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Well, I'm biased. I became a Neil fan with "Deja Vu", on which his contributions outshined the others'. "Everybody Knows..." was pure power, and "Gold Rush" got me through a difficult 1971. "Harvest", albeit an icon, seemed uneven, but, already hooked, I scarfed up "Time Fades Away" as soon as it appeared in the store; it's still my favorite. Next "On The Beach"--boffo. So "Tonight's The Night" was automatic. And satisfies. I confess total unawareness (at the time) of whatever factored into Neil's "Ditch" era efforts, but certainly knew that the boozy vocals and superlative musicianship were the perfect balm for the angst of the end of the Nixon era. "World on a String" is a taut, terse rocker that can be heard on the "Jerry Maguire" movie soundtrack. A live cut, "Come On Baby Let's Go Downtown" features the late Danny Whitten, of "Every Knows This Is Nowhere" fame, on guitar and vocals. "Speaking' Out", actually a cover of some (50's?) song I've heard but cannot name, showcases Nils Lofgren's guitar talent, perfectly matched to Ben Keith's pedal steel and Neil's piano. "Roll Another Number (For The Road)" is the only "number" I ever heard on the radio at the time the album was released, and sounds like the coda of a guy who's been playing and drinking along with the audience all evening. The title song, two versions of which are bookends to the album, lay out the pain of the events that ushered in the "Ditch" period, sort of like "Needle and the Damage Done" rocked hard and cranked up tp 11. I could go on, but know there is no filler on this record. I bought the disc to play in the car. I had the vinyl but gave it to my kids. I got the cassette but have nothing to play it on. "Tonight" is something I just gotta have around. Hope new ears can dig it too. Thanks for reading.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2020
Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2021
Well, I'm biased. I became a Neil fan with "Deja Vu", on which his contributions outshined the others'. "Everybody Knows..." was pure power, and "Gold Rush" got me through a difficult 1971. "Harvest", albeit an icon, seemed uneven, but, already hooked, I scarfed up "Time Fades Away" as soon as it appeared in the store; it's still my favorite. Next "On The Beach"--boffo. So "Tonight's The Night" was automatic. And satisfies. I confess total unawareness (at the time) of whatever factored into Neil's "Ditch" era efforts, but certainly knew that the boozy vocals and superlative musicianship were the perfect balm for the angst of the end of the Nixon era. "World on a String" is a taut, terse rocker that can be heard on the "Jerry Maguire" movie soundtrack. A live cut, "Come On Baby Let's Go Downtown" features the late Danny Whitten, of "Every Knows This Is Nowhere" fame, on guitar and vocals. "Speaking' Out", actually a cover of some (50's?) song I've heard but cannot name, showcases Nils Lofgren's guitar talent, perfectly matched to Ben Keith's pedal steel and Neil's piano. "Roll Another Number (For The Road)" is the only "number" I ever heard on the radio at the time the album was released, and sounds like the coda of a guy who's been playing and drinking along with the audience all evening. The title song, two versions of which are bookends to the album, lay out the pain of the events that ushered in the "Ditch" period, sort of like "Needle and the Damage Done" rocked hard and cranked up tp 11. I could go on, but know there is no filler on this record. I bought the disc to play in the car. I had the vinyl but gave it to my kids. I got the cassette but have nothing to play it on. "Tonight" is something I just gotta have around. Hope new ears can dig it too. Thanks for reading.
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Top reviews from other countries
B.A.S.
Ohhhhhhh Aaaaaaaalbuquerque...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 5, 2015
John Harvey
The gospel according to the hardcore
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 20, 2009Mr. David Bancroft
Catching up with back catalogue
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 2, 2020B. Andrews
Old times are good times!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 14, 2011
