Neil Young: Tonight's the Night

High in the Ditch: Creem Album Review, 1975

Writing this past summer in The Atlantic, the prodigious critic Elizabeth Nelson, whose Substack is

Please Take My Advice

, and whose band is The Paranoid Style, refers to the 1973-1975 Neil Young albums Time Fades Away, On the Beach, and Tonight's the Night as "The Ditch Trilogy." She quotes Young's liner notes to his 1977 compilation Decade. He was bored with the middle of the road success of "Heart of Gold," Young had written, "so I headed for the Ditch." These are still my three favorite Neil Young albums. The last one has always been the masterpiece for me, and I wrote this review of Tonight’s the Night serving time as the editor of Creem in Birmingham, Mich., in 1975.

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Wayne Robins Creem September 1975

IF YOU THOUGHT [Lou Reed's] Berlin was depressing, wait till you hear Tonight's the Night. Even the label is black. It is an album of resolute drugginess and obsession with death, brimming with the OD'd spirit of Danny Whitten, Neil's musical sidekick, and Bruce Berry, the roadie with star fantasies of his own who died "out on the mainline." But mostly, it is about Neil Young and his nightride into devastation.

The atmosphere Young creates is that of a solitary figure riding through this album: a rootless, drug saturated hippie, cruising the west in search of the ultimate burnout. In a song like ‘Albuquerque’ independence equals loneliness equals identity loss. You roll some more reefer; you rent a car and head off down the road. In ‘Tired Eyes’, there's bad news: "Well he shot four men in a cocaine deal/Left 'em in an open field..."

This is not the work of a detached, millionaire pop star. Young has assimilated the collective unconscious of the knife wielding, gun toting, dope burning street people who populate western towns like Boulder or Santa Fe, the acid casualties of the counter-culture who'll call you brother but kill you for some spare change. [When I first moved to Boulder in the summer of 1970, I lived in a rooming house adjacent to the headquarters of the nasty STP gang, a kind of biker gang without wheels. Years later, one of my cousins, rejecting a life of privilege, disappeared and was presumed murdered by a cult in the mountains of Colorado or New Mexico.]

Perhaps it's the life Neil's been living all along. In ‘Tired Eyes’, he is so strung out that he's barely articulate. Strong piano lines disintegrate, aggressive vocals degenerate into impassioned slurs. "Tell me more, tell me more. Was he a heavy doper? Or just a loser?"

He is not making believe. ‘Borrowed Tune’ amplifies the sense of drug verité. The artist is at the piano, the tapes rolling, the head a mess: he searches vainly for a tune, and ends up playing the chords to ‘Lady Jane’:

I'm singing this borrowed tune/I took from the Rolling Stones/ Alone in this empty room/Too wasted to write my own.

In Young's similarly harrowing 1974 album On the Beach (also the name of a novel about nuclear holocaust), Neil Young came to grips with the Southern California of Charles Manson, the horror of the Dune Buggy Night.

But the terror of Tonight's the Night is more immediate: the worst lies just around the corner. It's the difference between mass murder and spiritual death. To escape his own violent impulses, the drifter keeps moving, a compulsive seeker who finds nothing but disillusionment. In the good-timey but agonized ‘Roll Another Number’, there's no doubting his reasons for singing:

"I'm not going back to Woodstock for awhile. Though I long to hear that lonesome hippie's smile/ I'm a million miles away from that helicopter day/And I don't believe I'm going back that way."

But that's all right, because neither are we. But Young has taken it further than anyone since Sly Stone, whose disgust with the easy answers of ‘Wanna Take You Higher’ led him to its antithesis, and his most haunted album, There's A Riot Goin' On (1971). Like Sly in Riot, Neil Young seems to be a desperate man attempting to find salvation by riding the edge. But don't let the one-take, rough mix sloppiness fool you. The only way to make an effective album about incoherence is to be incoherent while you're making it. The result is straight cheap tequila, tough on the first swallow, but with a vicious kick: the listener is numbed, baffled, stoned, sick for days.

Young's vehicle for this journey to revelation is the Crazy Horse band: Nils Lofgren, Ralph Molina, Billy Talbot and Ben Keith. They seem no less impassioned in their involvement with the material, no less wasted in the execution. Their finest moment, perhaps, is ‘Lookout Joe’, rocking raw as a razor cut. "Those times were good times," Young sings, but his teeth sound clenched, as if to keep the voice within from calling back, "they'll never be that good again." (To tempt the ghosts, there's also a live version of ‘Come On Baby Let's Go Downtown’ by Crazy Horse, with Whitten singing lead.) And if you thought Neil Young was never much of a singer, listen to After the Gold Rush after you play this. By comparison, the old Neil sounds like Johnny Mathis. On Tonight, he croaks, staggers, exhorts, even howls, which only reinforces the paralyzing immediacy of the material.

Which becomes even more amazing when you realize that this album was recorded in 1973, finished before On the Beach was begun. One wonders, however, what this band, built around Neil Young and Nils Lofgren, could achieve now. While it would almost certainly make them the most formidable band in rock 'n' roll today, such a collaboration might be too frightening to tolerate. Tonight's the Night is so dark, so personal, so filled with needles that go bump in the night, that one can only wonder how long Neil Young could survive if he didn't have a time warp to give his natural life a little distance from the real blade that he insists on teasing against his own throat.

Thanks to Rock’s Back Pages library of London for digitizing so much of my early work.

© Wayne Robins, 1975, 1999, 2024