‘Tonight’s The Night’: The album Neil Young “felt” more than any other he ever made
There probably aren’t many more impeccable album runs in the history of rock music than the six-record streak that Neil Young delivered between 1969’s Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and 1975’s Zuma. Having separated from his two previous bands, Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, his earliest solo ventures took the best of what he had to offer to those groups and amplified his contributions to an incredible degree, helping cement his position as one of the most formidable names in rock music.
However, as fruitful as it may have been, this period didn’t come without its difficulties for Young, and the trials and tribulations of the culture that surrounded the Canadian songwriter ultimately began to take their toll by the end of this period, during the recording of Tonight’s The Night. Perhaps his most raw release of the period, the 1975 album is wrapped up in despair and is grief-stricken throughout, and much of the pain that Young is attempting to exorcise was due to tragic incidents happening around him.
Growing sick and tired of the hippie culture that had surrounded him for years leading up to this point, the sudden deaths from heroin overdoses of two close friends had Young determined to distance himself from the junkie scene. After losing both his Crazy Horse guitarist, Danny Whitten, and his roadie, Bruce Berry, the agony that he felt rose to the forefront of his songwriting and resulted in an emotional rollercoaster of an album being constructed.
It’s by no means a polished record and has all the scrappiness of an impromptu jam session, but this is what helps to carry the emotional heft of the record. Young isn’t trying his hardest to find the right words to say, he’s simply expressing his anguish in the most raw and unfiltered way possible. One notable track from the record that epitomises this feeling is ‘Roll Another Number (For the Road)’, where he reluctantly denounces hippie culture, saying that he won’t be “going back to Woodstock for a while, though I long to see that lonesome hippie smile.”
The title track is also a tough listen, and directly references the death of Berry by saying “his life was in his hands” and how “it sent a chill up and down my spine when I picked up the telephone and heard that he’d died out on the mainline”, with the mainline being a reference to his heroin use. Death is also on his mind on ‘Borrowed Tune’, with him referencing “ice frozen six feet deep” in reference to the typical depth of a grave.
In the biography Neil Young: Long May You Run, Young commented on how the tragic drug-related deaths affected him during the recording of the album and was quick to distance himself from the dangers of heroin. “I’m not a junkie,” Young quipped, “and I won’t even try it out to check out what it’s like.” However, he did comment that other substances played their part in the album, and added to the grim mood of Tonight’s The Night.
“We all got high enough right out there on the edge where we felt wide-open to the whole mood,” he added. “It was spooky. I probably felt this album more than anything else I’ve ever done.” It’s one of the toughest and rawest listens of his discography, but its ramshackle presentation of grief also makes it one of his most rewarding and honest records.
