Neil Young - Tonight's the Night, 50 Years Later
- Abigail Devoe
- 7 hours ago
- 17 min read
If you could shoot an album in the stomach and have it live, it would be Tonight’s the Night.
Neil Young: vocals, guitar, piano on “Tonight’s the Night,” “Speakin’ Out,” and “Borrowed Tune,” harmonica
Nils Lofgren: piano, backing vocals, guitar on “Tonight’s the Night” and “Speakin’ Out”
Billy Talbot: bass
Ralph Molina: drums
Ben Keith: steel guitar, backing vocals
Jack Nitzsche: keys on “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown” and “Lookout Joe”
Tim Drummond: bass on “Lookout Joe”
Danny Whitten: lead vocals and guitar on “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown”
“Whenever Neil’s had a big success, he’s had to do something to counter it or he can’t appreciate it...After every big album he’ll do something insane – like put on blackface and do a minstrel show.” – Elliot Roberts
quoted from: Jimmy McDonough, Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography (2002)
Neil Young didn’t go as far as blackface on Tonight’s the Night, but he’d come pretty damn close to career suicide.
It wasn’t as simple as just the music. Spoiler alert: it literally never is. 1972 through 1973 turned Neil’s life upside-down. Through this time, he happened to release deliberately rough, uncut material unsuitable for radio play. Ah yes, the fabled “ditch trilogy.” It mirrored the turbulence in his own life.
It started with good turbulence. In September of ’72, he welcomed a baby boy with his girl, Carrie. Becoming a first-time parent completely changes your world view, but Neil wasn’t given time to process that. He had the biggest album of his career on his hands – it’s not every day someone releases Harvest! Reprise was to send him out on tour to support it. Neil really wanted Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten to be part of it. Neil did everything in his power to get Danny involved and with it, but it was clear they’d hit a wall; Danny was too addicted to function. Neil had no choice but to let him go. Soon after Danny got home, he passed away. He’d overdosed on the Valium he was using to try to wean himself off heroin. He was trying to get better.
The guilt tore Neil apart. For many years after, he felt responsible.
Time Fades Away, the first of the “ditch,” was supposed to be a studio album. But after months of agonizing rehearsals made worse by none of the guys talking through their grief, it became a live album. It just so happened to immortalize Neil’s worst tour to date. The winter of 1973 was the wrong band with the wrong instruments and wrong personalities at the exact wrong time. Neil was ready to move on, but all the crowds wanted to hear was “Heart Of Gold!”
After this mess of a tour cut short by a riot, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young got the band back together. Once again, everything game to a screeching halt. In June, the guys got the news that their longtime roadie Bruce Berry had passed away. The needle took another man.
Losing Bruce tripped something in Neil. He pulled the plug on whatever CSNY was supposed to do. CSN were pissed, they’d cleared their whole schedules for over a year expecting an album and a tour.
In typical Y fashion, he didn’t give a shit.
Though the majority of Tonight’s the Night was cut in the late summer and early fall of 1973, it wouldn’t see the light of day until the summer of 1975.
What the hell happened in those eighteen months? Try a film, two tours, and two albums!
The first shows of the Tonight’s the Night era came about because, I shit you not, there was a rumor Neil died. Reprise started drafting his obituary before they thought to give him a call! His shows at the Roxy confirmed his vitals. Where this tour lacked slightly in Time Fades Away’s belligerence, it made up for in weirdness. The Santa Monica Flyers were re-christened several times through the tour. They’d often play “Tonight’s the Night” threetimes a night. Neil was wearing Nils Lofgren’s ugly seersucker jacket, as seen on the album cover, and sometimes wore a Richard Nixon Halloween mask? He played the character of a bizarro each vendor and went on long, drunken rants about Bruce and Danny – the crowd didn’t know who either of these people were. As for the set dressing? Silver boots duct-taped around the piano, hubcaps everywhere, a palm tree strung up with Christmas lights, and a wooden statue of a Native American stolen from a store.
The album we heard in these eighteen months was On The Beach, part “two” of the “ditch trilogy.” Though Homegrown (part two-and-a-half) wasn’t released for another 46 years, the words to “Florida” can be found superimposed over the On The Beach album credits in Tonight’s the Night’s fold-out insert. It’s one of several surreal easter eggs, along with a negative review of a gig written in Dutch and a photo of Roy Orbison.
When Tonight’s the Night finally saw the light of day, it came into a weird year in rock-and-roll. Stadium rock hit critical mass. Pop rock was very pop. The pop was uber-sanitized; the number one song of the year was Captain and Tennile’s “Love Will Keep Us Together.” But there’s a subtle pull in another direction. The bitchiest friend trio in rock-and-roll – David Bowie, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop – were all in very different places, but it was about to get really interesting for them all. And a couple weeks before Tonight’s the Night’s release, a band called Talking Heads played their first gig at CBGB’s. One wonders if Neil had his finger to the wind and sensed something raw and confrontational was on the rise: what we came to know as “punk.”
For now, we’re stuck in this motherfucking ditch. Welcome to Miami Beach, ladies and gentlemen, everything’s cheaper than it looks.
Despite his best efforts to throw us off his trail, I just get Neil. Always have. Even when I’m not crazy about his detours, I always find his stuff interesting. “Honest and unmerciful,” as they say.
I lucked with out with just about the best Neil “starter pack” a girl could have: Buffalo Springfield Again, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Deja Vu, Harvest, and Rust Never Sleeps. It’s a great set, but there’s this big gap in the middle. After I’d lived and died by this armful of albums in college, Everybody Knows especially, I wondered, “What happened in the middle?” I wouldn’t park my car beside the ditch until my mid-twenties.
There, I found the real Neil Young, and he was even more compelling than the guy in the Daniel Boone jacket.
Allow me to set the scene. It’s the first random 90-degree day of the year. My air conditioning isn’t in yet, the motor in my ceiling fan is dying, and these little black gnats have taken over my open windows. If you live in New England you know exactly what I’m talking about, those little fuckers show up every year and there’s nothing you can do about it! It’s like 1:00 in the morning, I have to film the next day but it’s too hot to sleep. I’m sweating my ass off, half-naked and fumbling around for my vacuum to suck these goddamn bugs up. All this is happening in the pitch black, by the way. If I turn a light on, the bugs will attack me. I’m used to having my dad a bike ride away to help with the ridiculous stuff I get myself into. But he’s up and moved again, to where I do not know.
I say a quick prayer for these innocent annoyances, use my phone as a flashlight, and swing the vacuum hose around my head. Fuck me, it doesn’t work. There’s still gnats all over the place! Cursing and muttering all the way down the stairs, I just stand there for a moment, deciding if I’m gonna brave my bed again or give up and sleep on the couch with my dog. “I’m climbing this ladder, my head’s in the clouds/I hope that it matters, I’m having my doubts.”
It’s hot as hell, bugs are sticking to me, it’s so gross. In this absurd – totally absurd – but terribly lonely moment, Tonight’s the Night clicked for me. The air that night was similarly inhospitable. I’m not wasted in an empty room, singing over a Rolling Stones song. But the darkness I’m in feels pretty close.
While combing the beaches, my anthologies, and the worldwide web to see if my lord and savior Lester Bangs said anything about this album, I stumbled on this gem of a post on the Music Elitists blog. From Patrick Vecchio: “...some Young fans may find the record to be too raw, too unfinished – or maybe just flat-out too harrowing – and it’s certainly not a disc to throw into the car to listen to on a road trip. But there are times, plenty of them, when it helps to know that at least one other human being is even more down and out than you are.”
That instantly made me think of Les’s essay on Astral Weeks. Specifically:
“If you accept for even a moment the idea that each human life is as precious and delicate as a snowflake and then you look at a wino in a doorway, you’ve got to hurt until you feel like a sponge for all those other assholes’ problems, until you feel like an asshole yourself, os you draw all the appropriate lines. You stop feeling. But you know that then you begin to die. So you tussle with yourself. How much of this horror can I actually allow myself to think about?”
quoted from: Lester Bangs, “Astral Weeks” as printed in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (edited by Greil Marcus, 1988)
That’s Tonight’s the Night, really.
We drop the needle on a self-conscious piano, a distracted guitar, and drums that are quiet, but completely sure of themselves. Neil’s signature reedy voice calls, “Tonight’s the night...” Bass echoes with a motif we’ll get very familiar with over the next few minutes, often finishing the phrase when Neil casually drops off. “Dark,” “stormy,” and “heavy” can all be used to describe Tonight’s the Night, but its thesis is “on the fly.” You can hear Neil accidentally bump the mic with his chin or nose. People flub parts but play through them anyway. I’ve often said the first track of an album is its thesis statement, while the title track emphasizes what’s important to the artist. In this case, the title track is the first track. “Bruce Berry was a working man, he used to load that Econoline van.” It’s strange that such a plaintive description of Bruce would draw us in. Maybe it’s because we see Neil in his place, “He sang a song in a shakey voice that was real as the day was long.” The players fill out the story: after the line about Bruce and the guitar, Nils plays a fill.
The bass lurches through the second verse. Neil croaks as he sings the of the chill up and down his spine. Everyone pulls back as he drops the bomb: “I heard that he died! Out on the main line!” We can almost hear his eyes bulging maniacally out from that heavy brow bone. The “main line” is the vein a junkie would inject directly into. Neil’s addition of “out on,” though, softens it; makes “main line” feel like a place instead. “Oh, don’t worry about him, he’s just out on the main line. He’ll be back soon.”
Neil repeats the story of Bruce, just in case we didn’t catch the foreshadowing. After all, the line right after introducing Bruce condemns him to death: “A sparkle was in his eye, but his life was in his hands.” There’s something bone-chilling about how he repeats the last few “Tonight’s the night”s in a quiet, mocking keen. Tonight’s the night for WHAT, Neil? Do I want to know?
Speakin’ Out is a bluesy dive-bar slow dance about how much you love your girl...and whatever else is on your mind at the moment, I guess. Seeing as Neil’s girl at the time was an actress, this schmoozy lusty love song is peppered with lines of movies and TV. There’s a really funny review of the one he just saw, in fact! “The plot was groovy, it was outta sight.” Thanks for sharing, Neil, now let’s get you a bottle of water. His frank observations lead to occasional poetry: “I sat with my popcorn, out lookin’ for good times/Lost in the cartoon, I grabbed the lifeline.” The music is delightfully sloppy. The changes come about as quick as molasses, everyone’s feeling this out together like a band of merry fools wearing dark sunglasses indoors. “Speakin’ Out” contains a very rare instance on a Neil record: he verbally invites someone to solo! “Alright, Nils!” It might be technically “bad,” but the motif Nils pops out with is one of my favorite things anyone’s ever played on a guitar. He ambles through it like a ballerina in the dark; falling out of a turn but her lines, the angles she creates and flow of her movement, are still so beautiful that it looks intentional. Nils straight-up restarts a descent he flubbed partway through, twice, and maybe I should be annoyed, but it feels right somehow. Neil’s piano playing isn’t quite so graceful. The piano man was overserved.
You guys are gonna kill me for this. Like actually kill me. But “Steppin’ Out” feels like something Derek and the Dominos would’ve done. But!! It also bears resemblance to “You Gotta Move.” It makes sense; Neil was listening to those post-Brian classic-era records a lot at this time, and would have been familiar with the Stones’s recording on Sticky Fingers.
How World On A String came from the same day as the previous two tracks is beyond me. Everyone on this track is sharp, with it, and most importantly, awake! This must’ve been recorded before Jimmy Nine Fingers came back from the beer run.
The forever-descending chord progression with the turnaround make quick work of this song; two minutes and 25 seconds feels like a breeze after the five-minute songs before. Neil ruminates on the blockbuster fame he’s consciously trying to abandon: “It’s just a game you see me play/Only real in the way that I feel from day-to-day.”
“No the world on a string doesn’t mean a thing.” When someone close to you passes away, your whole perspective changes. Your priorities are completely re-ordered, living life means something completely different than it did before. Everything is cheaper than it looks. You could say the same for bringing new life into the world. This was a weird year for Neil to be a new dad. No big life change has ever come easy to him. He said as much to Rolling Stone in 1988: “Often in my life I’ve felt that I was singled out for one reason or another for extreme things to happen. This was hard to deal with.”
If Tonight’s the Night was one big party, it seems we’ve seen it backwards; Tarantino came in and scrambled the order of the scenes. Borrowed Tune jumps to the end of the night. Neil’s friends have all either left for the night or are snoozing on couches and in beds, leaving him alone with his piano, and his harmonica around his neck from earlier. One imagines streamers and silver glitter on the floor, bottles and cans to be dealt with in the morning. Maybe a girl carrying her shoes as she stumbles down the driveway to an awaiting car. The headlights peel down the road and we’re in the dark.
The guy admits he’s “too wasted to write his own.” On the surface, it’s little more than Neil singing over what he remembers of Rolling Stones B-side “Lady Jane.”
It winds up being the most revealing song of the bunch. In a tender, hushed voice, as to not wake anybody or maybe hoping we don’t hear: “I’m climbing this ladder, my head in the clouds/I hope that it matters, I’m having my doubts.” No man is infallible, and vices don't ever distract from the pain. They only amplify it. They don't make you say crazy things, they make you say things you were thinking all along.
One of the Elliot Roberts-influenced additions to Tonight’s the Night (the sequencing changed too many times to count before release) was a recording of Crazy Horse’s Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown from 1970 at the Fillmore East. It jolts Tonight’s the Night back to life. For three minutes and 30 seconds, Danny Whitten is back. He’s alive in the music, singing lead, urging us to go downtown for a drive. Some food, some dancing, and inevitably some drugs. Hey, this is the ’70s! It’s lively like downtown on a Friday night. It’s bright and fun, like you’re hoping to bump into someone you haven’t seen in a while and get in a little trouble. But be careful: “It’s pretty bad when you’re dealing with the man and the light shines in your eyes.” It’s only illegal if you get caught!
Side one closes with Mellow My Mind – emphasis on the “mellow.” Neil definitely took this dish of the oven before it was done. There’s half-finished ideas and lyrics that don’t totally link up. See “A situation that can casualize your mind.” Even the band’s not sure where it starts and ends! The ending strum comes quite late. Neil’s either sang or shouted his voice raw; he strains to reach the very top of these lines.
Side two opens with the ragged Roll Another Number For The Road. It might have provided some comfort to those seeking the comfy-cozy Harvest sounds. It’s definitely got a country slant. You can almost hear the harmonies Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor might’ve sang. (Hell, even Robin Lane on “Round and Round!” She’s so underrated, I wish Neil had brought her back.)
Neil has written many a song about cars and driving (the man owns thirty-something cars) and this is one of those songs. We’re rolling a joint for the road before driving that last stretch home. Though we’re getting back to the comfort of our own bed and revisiting an old familiar sound, the Neil of current-day-1973 tells us thehippie-garb Neil of yore isn’t coming back anytime soon.
“I’m not going back to Woodstock for a while
Though I long to hear that lonesome hippie smile.
I’m a million miles away from that helicopter day,
No I don’t believe I’ll be going back that way.”
As soon as I heard the opening guitar thunder-rumble of Albuquerque, I knew it would become one of my favorite Neil songs. It sounds like the older brother of another long-time favorite, “Cortez the Killer” off Zuma.Where “Roll Another Number” was about being content to leave the past behind, “Albuquerque” is aboutdesperately wanting to escape your life. “I’ll find somewhere they don’t care who I am.” That feeling of late-stage unsettlement is just more than prescient today.
There’s a “crunch” when Neil bumps the mic during his harmonica solo. The piano glissades are gorgeous. Ben Keith, an artifact from the halcyon Harvest days, plays a line Emmylou Harris might sing. Neil knew how to contrast an arrangement with the grit in his voice. The extended “Albuquerque,” waving like a scarf in the wind, is my favorite moment on the whole album.
New Mama is another bright spot on Tonight’s the Night; presumably Neil remembering the joy he and Carrie felt when their son was born. Even then, he has the nagging feeling he can’t measure up: there’s something haunted about his admission of living in a dreamland. The harmonies recall the memory Crosby, Stills & Nash; I thought of “You Don’t Have To Cry” with the lingering darkness of “4+20.” “Each morning when I wake up to rise,” “in the morning when you rise,” “morning comes to sunrise and I’m laying in my bed.”
Lookout Joe was recorded back in ’72. It possesses a more manic energy than we’ve felt on Tonight’s the Nightso far. That makes sense: the Time Fades Away era was fucking bonkers. We have another song about coming home from a long time on the road; this time featuring all the down-and-out characters you met out there. Neil did meet a lot of interesting people at the ditch. Millie took his brain and forgot his name, apparently the woman we were with took all our money. Look at that crazy clown over there! And Bill? Well, a Cadillac put a hole in his arm. It seems we can’t escape the presence of drugs, specifically heroin. “Lookout Joe” begins to sound like “look out, Joe.” But old Bill’s having fun, at least. “Glory hallelujah” is another golden moment on the record, as Neil and the guys sing in unison.
Neil wrote Tired Eyes about an orgy/drug deal-gone-wrong out in Topanga in April of ’72. He only heard of it through word of mouth, and captures that perfectly in his delivery. “Well it wasn’t supposed to go down thatway...” “I mean, was he a heavy doper? Or was he just a loser?” Putting this seedy story with this beautiful arrangement feels like the end of a movie. Maybe it didn’t end the way we wanted it to. The only advice Neil provides the audience is, “Open up the tired eyes” Not “your,” the.
The album closes with Tonight’s the Night (Pt. II) With all the same lyrics and a more beefed-up, sinister arrangement, it’s more of a reprise than a “part two.” Our second time around feels like that regular at the bar who tells the same story every time he’s in, hoping the story will change. But it won’t. He’s still in that stool, he’s still the reason your barbacks never seem to have enough Jose Cuervo, and Bruce Berry still dies.
A few days after I wrote that, I read Dave Marsh’s August 1975 review of Tonight’s the Night for Rolling Stone. To my surprise, he said something eerily similar.
“...it feels as though Young is still absorbing the shock of his friend’s death, sometimes as though he is railing against mortality itself, sometimes as though he’s accepted it. But never as though he believes it.”
quoted from: Dave Marsh, “Tonight’s the Night” Rolling Stone, 8/28/1975
I’d love to have heard what Tonight’s the Night was “supposed to” be. By the time the clock was ticking down on its release, Neil suddenly decided he wanted all the drunken studio banter back in. Alas, the tape had degraded in quality such that the cut parts would never match up with the mixed-and-remixed core tracks. I wonder if modern technology could make the banter match up again – I wouldn’t be surprised if the Neil Young Archives were cooking up an official, restored release of David Briggs’s original mix for this album’s fiftieth.
If you could shoot an album in the stomach and have it live, it would be Tonight’s the Night. Neil called it “the first horror record.” You can smell the blood off this thing; dark, metallic, and crusty. Blood like that isn’t red. It’s thick and brown like mud. Like that line in "A House Is Not A Motel:" “The water’s turned to blood/And if you don’t think so, go turn on your tub/And if it’s mixed with mud you’ll see it turn to gray.” Everyone in that room sought healing in some way from Danny and Bruce’s passings. Everyone was raw, and so was the sound. They drink to forget, but they can only remembered. Tonight’s the Night isn’t nearly as dark as you’d think it was from this description. It’s not a Closer, Berlin, or Marble Index. It’s emotional gore. It’s grief. These guys are grieving together; stumbling through music the way you fumble through life after loss.
A while back, I hauled out to a cabin in New Hampshire with my college friends. This album made me think of something accidentally profound my buddy Matthew said to me on that trip. “Bipedal animals are constantly falling. Walking is to catch yourself from falling over and over again.” Tonight’s the Night is constantly falling; unsteady. Shakey. It catches itself over and over, or gets back on its feet when does trip over something in the pitch black. It keeps moving, to spite all the junk it pumps into itself. Fifty years later, that’s the magnetism of this album. Tonight’s the Night moves like we do in the dark. Blindly, imperfectly, brilliantly.
Personal favorites: both “Tonight’s the Night”s, “Speakin’ Out,” “Borrowed Tune,” “Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown,” “Albuquerque”
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Bangs, Lester. “Astral Weeks.” as published in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, edited by Greil Marcus, 1988.
Bunn, Scott. “Neil Young & The Santa Monica Flyers, Chicago, IL – November 20, 1973.” Recliner Notes, 6/10/2021. https://reclinernotes.com/2023/06/11/neil-young-the-santa-monica-flyers-chicago-il-november-20-1973/
Carter, Bry. “An Interview with Joel Bernstein.” Broken Arrow no. 33, 11/1988. https://sugarmtn.org/ba/pdf.ba/web/ba_viewer.html?file=%2Fba/pdf/ba033.pdf
Doggett, Peter. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. New York: Atria, 2024 ed.
Henke, James. “Interview: Neil Young.” Rolling Stone, 6/2/1988. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/interview-neil-young-79380/
Marsh, Dave. “Tonight’s The Night.” Rolling Stone, 8/28/1975. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/tonights-the-night-2-98967/
McDonough, Jimmy. Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography. New York: Random House, 2002.
Scoppa, Bud. “Neil Young: The Unwitting Superstar.” Creem, 11/1975. https://www.creem.com/archive/issue/19751101
Vecchio, Patrick. “A look back on Neil Young’s Tonight’s The Night.” The Music Elitists, 11/1/2011. https://themusicelitists.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/a-look-back-on-neil-youngs-tonights-the-night/
Young, Neil. Waging Heavy Peace. New York: Penguin, 2011.