The album that “scared the hell out of” Neil Young
Let’s be realistic; Neil Young shouldn’t have anything to be afraid of.
Regardless of how good he believes his music is, he’s been operating at a level of notoriety for long enough that his fans will lap up his work every single time he comes to release something, and will retain a consistent level of interest in his work as a result.
Even so, his music and quality speak for themselves, and it’s rare that Young will ever put something out that feels subpar.
I say this, but everyone is afraid of something. There are things that will affect us all at some point in our lives, such as the inevitable ‘death and taxes’, and these are, admittedly, terrifying subjects that you probably wouldn’t want to have brought up at a dinner party. On an artistic level, however, there shouldn’t be much that the Canadian singer-songwriter has to worry about.
Again, that being said, there’s a little bit of a perfectionist in all of us, especially those who have already established that they’ve set themselves a high standard for all of their output. Considering that in 1973, Young was riding high off the back of an impeccable run of albums in Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush and Harvest, there’s always a fear that the next record might represent a slight dip in form.
Young was, of course, eager to maintain this hot streak, but the process of recording the follow-up to Harvest was marred by several issues, so much so that he delayed the release and put On the Beach out first. Young was becoming slightly jaded by the level of fame he’d reached and found himself feeling increasingly alienated by his level of stardom. Not only that, but he was stricken by grief, with two of his closest friends and colleagues in Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and his roadie, Bruce Berry, both having died of drug overdoses shortly before he began writing songs for the record.
The resulting album, Tonight’s the Night, would mark the end of his ‘Ditch Trilogy’. It remains a relatively divisive album in Young’s catalogue, largely due to the rawness and darkness that it exudes, and Young himself admitted in an interview with Creem Magazine shortly after its release that there were certain things he wasn’t pleased about.
“Tonight’s the Night didn’t come out right after it was recorded because it wasn’t finished,” he explained. “It just wasn’t in the right space, it wasn’t in the right order, and the concept wasn’t right. I had to get the colour right, so it was not so down that it would make people restless. I had to keep jolting every once in a while to get people to wake up so they could be lulled again. It’s a very fluid album”.
However, despite having to make tweaks to the album so that it would live up to his standards, he did concede that it ended up being a stellar album. “The higher you are, the better it is,” Young continued. “It really lives up to that, a lot of records don’t. If you put on Tonight’s the Night first thing in the morning, I mean, the title and the time of day just stands for…you should listen to it late at night. I tried that, and I couldn’t go to sleep afterwards. It scared the hell out of me.”
It might be scary because of its context and subject matter, and it might be scary because it almost didn’t turn out as hoped, but regardless of these minor flaws, it remains scarily good, and that shouldn’t be anything to worry about.
