The 1976 concert Neil Young was always ashamed of: “On my way out”
Neil Young didn’t want to grow up to be someone who had too many regrets.
The whole point of his career was to have songs that were bulletproof, and he wasn’t going to bend to the will of label heads who told him everything that his music was supposed to sound like. He had a much better agenda for himself when working on his own, but that didn’t mean that he had to look back on everything that he ever made as completely perfect.
Because if you look at the way that he has moved throughout his career, Young wasn’t above making an album that was far from his finest work. There were occasional moments where he could be hilariously bad, like on Everybody’s Rockin’, but especially when you look at albums like Landing On Water, Young comes off like the kind of artist that was completely unequipped for what the 1980s were going to be. But that didn’t mean that he was going to apologise for those records, either.
He wanted the chance to experiment whenever he could, and that also extended to when he was working on the live show. Every single iteration of Crazy Horse was always about pushing the boundaries, and even at his lowest moments in the studio, no one could deny that the guy could absolutely kill onstage. He was locked in a battle with his own music half the time, but around the mid 1970s, he did think that some of the biggest moments of his career did have more than a few flaws.
Tonight’s the Night is one of the most open-hearted albums that he ever released, and yet it doesn’t exactly sound like an all-time classic or anything. He was trying to barely hold himself together after losing one of his closest bandmates, and even if he was making some of the best music of his career, he wasn’t exactly taking care of himself once he decided to go onstage around the same time.
But he wasn’t going to turn down an offer to join The Band during their final shows. The rootsy rock icons had been coming to the end of their career for a while, and while The Last Waltz was the perfect excuse for everyone to see them off, not all of their buddies were in the best of health. Eric Clapton already said that he wished he could take back some of his moments onstage, but Young figured that he would rather everyone see how bad a shape he had become when he kicked off his songs.
His version of ‘Helpless’ is still beautiful for what it is, but Young said that he wished he wasn’t as out of it on drugs as he was, saying, “I was fried for the Last Waltz. I was on my way out, falling onstage, and someone said, ‘Here, have some of this.’ I’d been up for two days, so I had some. And I was gone, you know? I’m not proud of it; I don’t think people should see that and think, ‘Wow, that’s cool.’”
Especially considering what Young was going through at the time, it was never about him looking like one of the coolest artists on the planet when he played that show. He knew that music would help him through all of his personal pain, and even if he couldn’t get the right sound that he wanted out of his voice, it was as if the rest of The Band was holding him up to make sure that he didn’t fall apart during the show.
This might have been a low light from Young’s performing career, but it did at least draw a line in the sand to a certain extent. He never wanted to get into this state of mind ever again, and the least that he could do was make music from that point forward that had a lot more passion behind it than having to watch himself go through the motions all over again.
