Tonight's The Night (1975)

Amongst Neil Young’s catalog, Tonight’s the Night is the album fans speak about in hushed tones. It has received decades later accolades from every music publication you can think of. The story of the album is just so compelling and heavy that it invests the album with meaning and gravitas. If you back up and take it at face value, does it hold up? It’s complicated and that equivocation is what I’ll be grappling with in this look at the album. To recap, this album was recorded and toured before On The Beach ever happened but held back for various reasons. Neil and David Briggs couldn’t settle on the track order, with Elliott Roberts proposing a musical-like version of it at some point, but mostly the emotion in this album makes it extremely raw to listen to. The studio wasn’t thrilled about it and Neil’s reputation was somewhat in dire straits after the drunken antics of the tour that followed recording. So it sat on a tape for awhile until The Band’s Rick Danko heard it randomly and told Neil he would be crazy to not release it.

In the wake of the Time Fades Away tour, Neil was exhausted and that exhaustion was expressed in an outpouring of grief for Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry. He drafted Briggs to produce, assembled the remaining Crazy Horse members, Stray Gator Ben Keith, and their old friend from After The Gold Rush, Nils Lofgren, then tried recording at the ranch. Soon they decamped to Los Angeles, first at Sunset Sound, before settling on the place where the vibe of Tonight’s the Night would be finalized. Bruce Berry and his brother Ken (as opposed to his brother Jan of Jan and Dean fame) had a store called Studio Instrumental Rentals that rented equipment out. Briggs discovered they had a small rehearsal space, so he punched a hole in the wall and fed cable from a mobile recording truck into the space. The band would drink and do coke until late in to the night, then finally start recording around midnight. You can hear this in Neil’s voice immediately.

“Tonight’s the Night” is a very common concert finale or encore tune, a song Neil has returned to over and over through the years. It clearly means a lot to him. There’s no denying that ominous opening bass line from Billy Talbot and the mantra-like lyrics make it feel like a ritual. It bookends the album. The opener is spookier than “Part II.” That little piano tinkling followed by Billy’s iconic bassline slinks in and sets the stage. This is Neil’s take on the blues, a genre he loves and returns to in his career but never quite like this. His voice is already cracking and strained. There’s a hoarseness to it that must have been shocking to people expecting the gentle folk crooner and his sweet harmonies. Instead of talking about Whitten, this song is centered around Berry. It’s an interesting choice given how close Neil was to Whitten. I assume Berry is what made him reexamine his pre-Time Fades Away shock and grief.

Even more strung out is the lackadaisical “Speakin’ Out,” a boozy number that features Nils doing guitar solos and Neil’s abrupt titling of the song at the end. The song seems to be about his fraying relationship with Carrie Snodgress, a situation no doubt affected by the rollercoaster of the last few years. I love “World on a String,” which trades the blues for a more country-fried rock akin to Time Fades Away. Even it’s subject matter struggling with fame slots into that prior album really well. “Borrowed Tune” is a slight song that lifts the melody of the Rolling Stones’ “Lady Jane” as a way to say that he is so preoccupied with grief he can’t even write his own song, but still needs to express himself. That’s art in a nutshell. An overriding need to express an emotion no matter what the medium or outcome.

Elliott Roberts came up with the brilliant idea of including a live performance “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown” on Tonight’s the Night. Just as Neil starts expressing his grief in the prior songs, Danny Whitten’s voice blasts out of the speakers in a song he wrote about scoring heroin. It’s sad, poignant, shocking, but also the most fun and upbeat song on the album. It’s a shock to the system. And Danny sounds so good. The little twang he has is gorgeous when he’s singing the lead here (Neil sings a quieter harmony in portions and he apparently only wrote a couple lines for this song). As horrifying as the subject matter is, the song is full of life and I’ve frequently played this song over and over. When the applause kicks in and Danny says thank you, it gets me every time.

“Mellow My Mind” is infamous for the moment where Neil lets his voice crack. The strung out lyrical matter is enhanced by that vocal performance but it’s still hard to hear. It’s not a song I’d play for anyone to convince them that Neil’s voice is actually great (personally, I think there’s nothing realer than his voice, but this is a place where you imagine the record company tearing their hair out). Another live staple is “Roll Another Number (For The Road),” a somewhat tongue-in-cheek ode to pot in which he takes a couple shots at the transformation of the hippie movement into celebrity-filled mess of fame chasing. This is popular in concerts because it’s such a sing-a-long with a light feeling. Having it follow “Mellow My Mind” is a Neil quirk to be sure.

The way that Ben Keith plays on “Albuquerque” is just beautiful, for my money his best work with Neil. His pedal steel works so well to create the feeling of wide open spaces and lonely plateaus, perfect for Neil’s lyrics. It’s a gorgeous song not at all hampered by the unique way they stretch out the name of the song in the chorus. It sounds like travel sometimes feels, an endless twisting in the wind. I’ve come around on “New Mama” in recent times. First, the guitar playing is lovely, but second, it’s just a beautiful ode to Carrie. Knowing how fraught things would become in their relationship, it’s sweet to hear this nicely harmonized ode with minimal instrumentation.

I’ve never paid much attention to “Lookout Joe” but it’s actually a pretty cool song sympathizing with GIs coming home from Vietnam to a country that didn’t know how to feel about them. I can imagine Neil felt similar to them when he was going out into the world after Times Fades Away. The blues rock of the song works really well. Less successful for me is “Tired Eyes.” I’m all for Neil trying something different, but the faux storyteller styling of his vocal here is the only moment on the album that feels like a put-on instead of from the heart. The actual harmonizing and music is good, despite the clear inebriation that bleeds through in the singing. Neil is relating a real event about a drug deal at a party he was at that ended in deaths. The “please take my advice” refrain is slightly nebulous unless you consider the entire album a cautionary tale.

We return to the title track with “Part II” and things have gotten a little livelier. The more upbeat version is led by guitar instead of piano now and there’s something celebratory about it instead of the spooky lament of the previous version. It’s like they got to the point that they had to work their grief out with energy instead of extreme inebriation and mourning. This is the tenor the following tour would take on (still very inebriated, though). While I only “enjoy” parts of this album, it’s a necessary period of Neil’s career and among the most true musical moments in rock history. There’s nothing manufactured or polished about Tonight’s the Night. It’s just pure feeling. It changed the course of a musician’s life and built his fanbase in unique ways. Listeners felt like they were privy to a very personal, very emotional side of a difficult to know artist. There was a familiarity from being let in to the grief that created a tighter relationship between Neil and his audience. He feels like a real person after this, and not just a musical celebrity.

Top 3:

1. Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown
2. World on a String
3. Albuquerque

Cut song: Tired Eyes

In Shakey, Jimmy McDonough spends a significant amount of time talking about the much discussed “original Tonight’s the Night.” David Briggs had put together a version of the album that included a lot of the drunken studio ramblings (affectionately known as “raps” in Neil world). Whether it was miscommunication or a difference of opinion, Neil and Elliott Roberts came up with the final released version, that cut all the raps and added some non-SIR tracks (“feepy versions” as Briggs called them). At one time, there was an idea for a musical based on Bruce Berry that would use Tonight’s the Night recordings. This musical idea is what lead to the final version. Briggs hated it and played his own version for McDonough. It’s impossible to recreate fully as versions of songs with the raps haven’t been released. However, mining the Neil Young Archives, you can find find a few bits to get closer to that original track list and sequence.

What it’s like? It has a more consistent feel with songs like “Bad Fog of Loneliness” and “Walk On” in place of “Borrowed Tune” and “Lookout Joe.” That comes at a price, though. Briggs called it “unrelenting” and he’s not wrong. Having a few moments where the intensity is dialed back helps Tonight’s the Night be more listenable. I also miss the stroke of genius to have Danny Whitten’s voice hit you between the eyes on “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown” in the middle of his wake. Losing “World on a String” is similarly a shame. Is it better? Hard to say without the raps for context. My guess is the raps add a lot of to the mood of the album and give a better sense of the “drunken wake” feel.

There are now two officially released live documents of the Tonight’s the Night tour. If you want to hear what alcohol sounds like, check them out. I talked about Roxy: Tonight’s the Night Live a little bit when discussing Neil Young Archives Vol. 2. It’s from the band’s initial opening run at the Roxy in LA. The other live album is an official release of a legendary bootleg. Somewhere Under the Rainbow was recorded by legendary fan and writer Pete Long and his original tape is the source for this release. It’s very distant sounding, one step above a typical 70s audience recording. This was recorded in the UK and you can hear why Neil alienated his English audiences so much one outlet said “The real Neil Young is dead.” It’s pretty rough to listen to. However, Neil has gone on record saying he had a lot of fun on this tour and Nils has said every night the band were exorcizing that grief and having fun. They clearly needed this.

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