Neil Young – Tonight’s the Night

My favorite Neil Young album of all time, most of the time, is Tonight’s the Night.  Dubbed by Young as “the first horror record,” it’s hand’s down his most intense collection of tunes on many levels, each descending deeper into the abyss of addiction, loss, and death.  The back story of it is rife with drama, substance abuse, and some of the most drunken takes of songs imaginable on a hit record.  It is a naked portrait of dealing with the pain of watching your friends die of heroin addiction (roadie Bruce Berry and former Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten both died of overdoses prior to the album’s recording).

The title song is heavy enough, especially when Young, in a voice thrashed and shredded from too much drink and despair, sings “it sent a chill up and down my spine, when I picked up the telephone, and heard that he died out on the mainline”, but the sequencing never lets up, strapping the listener in for the duration like a bad acid trip.  Other songs finish the Francis Bacon-like panorama with tales of being too wasted to write originally and literally stealing riffs from the Rolling Stones, drug deals gone bad, girls that took your money and left town, and even features a back from the grave Whitten singing about waiting for the man in “Come On Baby” from a 1970 concert.  Eerie and unsettling and god damn brutal.

Young recorded the album on a heavy diet of ‘tequila and burgers’ and some of the songs show a slurring singer somehow pulling it off.  Young was seen at shows from this time in a somewhat functional drunken haze and had him assuming an alternate persona, that of a sleazy Miami Beach bum/lounge singer cryptically referred to as “Waterface” in the liner notes of the album’s record sleeve.  Crazy Horse had a pre-E Street Band Nils Lofgren (providing some of the albums guitar high points) as Whitten’s replacement, the always spot-on pedal steel player Ben Keith, and Horse stalwarts Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina who serve up the famous “3rd best garage band” style back beat they are legendary for.

At the time (1973), Young’s manager, Elliot Roberts, couldn’t have been more convinced of the album being a total commercial suicide.  Inebriated first takes as keepers from the most credible part of the multi-million dollar super group CSN&Y (who, in 1974, had finished one of the biggest grossing stadium tours of the 70’s)?  As a result, he forbade its release and instead pushed for the as yet still un-rereleased “Time Fades Away” live collection and the arguably-even-more-out-of-it “On the Beach”.  Two years later, when Young played both his then-planned upcoming release “Homegrown” (an album that never got released but was so close to it that an album cover was created) and the “Tonight’s the Night” album for the Band’s Rick Danko.  Danko insisted Young release the forgotten masterpiece and shelve “Homegrown”.

One thing many critics failed to realize at the time was how much of an artistic leap the record was for someone who had just come off the major success of the stripped down “Harvest” album.  Young has stated many times that part of the album’s visceralness came from a total rebellion against the production excesses of the 70’s rock and roll machine.  He specifically wanted something that was unforgiving in it’s warts-and-all presentation and lack of polish.  Mistakes were left in and at times Young’s voice is on the verge of giving out from what sounds like pure and deliberate vocal chord torture.

And now we come to the artifact part of the blog.  The tee shirt posted at the beginning of this post is a rare one to be sure.  It’s a promotional tee shirt issued by Warner Bros. Records in 1975 for the album’s release and is one of two versions I know of.  There is another almost identical one that reads “Hello from Miami Beach” instead of “Hello Waterface” on the back.  Both of these phrases are written on the inner grooves of side one and side two respectively and add to the bizarro mystique of the lp’s artwork considerably.

Alright kiddies, that’s my rock and roll history lesson for this week.  Stay tuned for Mingus meets Mitchell (the jazz great’s collaboration with Joni Mitchell circa ’79), more metal mixes and pics of the week, and a little bit further down the line is a major piece I’m working on about what the MC5, Justin Timberlake, Jennifer Anniston and Levi’s all have in common.

P.S. Thanks Mr. Danko! (R.I.P.)