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.