“We’re still here”: The album Neil Young was happy to live through
It’s well known that Neil Young has always had a turbulent relationship with fame, but that was really only ever part of the story. Back at his musical height, there were relationships, break-ups, and betrayals aplenty to keep his aching heart suffering, but in turn create some of his finest sonic masterpieces. In the midst of it all, there was also grief – and it was the power of this charge, above anything else, that almost knocked Young off course.
To all intents and purposes, 1973 should have been the best of times for the singer, except it turned out to be one of the worst. Harvest had sent him sailing into the big leagues the year prior, but notoriously plagued by anxiety over his newfound lack of anonymity, Young couldn’t settle. The result was his ‘Ditch Trilogy’, a flurried trio of records which represented, in many ways, the darkest depths that a human can reach on their journey of life. They may not have all reaped the commercial rewards, but that was of no matter. This was Young at his truest, most twisted self.
When you’re already at rock bottom, it’s hard to conceive how you could even travel to further depths, but indeed, with the last instalment of the trilogy in Tonight’s the Night, that was exactly the unfettered space Young found himself in. By his own admission, the album was an “act of survival” through a period that, despite his already melancholy state, threatened to derail him even further, so he was forced to find a way of pushing through.
The crux of Tonight’s the Night was born out of the grief of losing both Crazy Horse bandmate Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry within months of each other from drug-related causes. For Young’s entire musical brand, which was underpinned so tightly by a sense of family and connection, the losses well and truly shook the ship to its core, leaving him in a fragile state of vulnerability from which the terrifying, cataclysmic overtures of the 1975 record emerged.
Being able to survive such a traumatic chain of events is one thing, but then to be able to mine the scraps and describe it as a “good musical period” despite all the heartache is quite the other. However, surprisingly, this was exactly how Young viewed the turbulent time of Tonight’s the Night in retrospect, as he reflected on the rushes of that moment in a 1990 interview. “I’m glad I lived through it,” he said. “Could have gone under a couple of times during that period. But not because I wasn’t having fun. We were rolling pretty heavily. But we’re still here; the act of survival is right here.”
As such, Young revealed the true answer to his troubles right there – still having fun. Naturally, you can imagine this wouldn’t have come without its starker moments and possible brushes with illegality, but above all else, it was a sense of tenacity, spirit, and raucous revelling that saw him through when the going got tough, which is a greater testament to the power of the despair of the ‘Ditch Trilogy’ than perhaps anything else.
Some half a century down the line, you wonder how Young reflects on that time in the modern context, when the landscape of the world has changed so much, but the heart of his music never altered. Indeed, we may have a chance to find out in a few weeks’ time, when he headlines Worthy Farm. Will it be a celebration of life and all that came before, or more so, a beacon to the future? We’ll just have to wait and see.
