Life, dope and death: Neil Young on the most emotional record he ever made
Neil Young has never been the kind of person to pour his heart out for anyone to hear him. The man has been known to be incredibly blunt in interviews and, more often than not, looks like just an ordinary guy who’s more than a little bit annoyed that someone would ask him so much about his job. If most of the public had listened to his songs, though, Young would probably have been an open book, as evidenced by Tonight’s the Night.
When looking at how Young works on his material, there’s usually very little editing done behind the scenes. Sure, he might switch the verses around here and there and take out stuff that he thinks he doesn’t need. Still, the majority of his works feel like they’re trying to capture the feeling behind the performance rather than trying to make the kind of multilayer masterpieces that The Beatles had done.
While Young had flirted with sounding “pretty” on albums like After the Gold Rush, you can’t really blame him for getting more intimate on Tonight’s the Night. Since the last few years saw him lose some of the most important members of Crazy Horse, Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry, Young sounds like he’s on the verge of a mental breakdown across many of these tracks.
If a song like ‘The Needle and the Damage Done’ was a cautionary tale about what heroin could have done to someone like Whitten, this is the tragic sequel to that story. Even though a number of pieces on the album feature parts that Whitten recorded shortly before his death, Young is talking to his old friend like a long-lost lover at times, becoming completely destroyed knowing that he’s never going to get to play music with him again.
When talking about the album to Rolling Stone, Young would claim that this was one of the most personal projects that he had ever made, saying, “Tonight’s The Night is like an OD letter. The whole thing is about life, dope and death. When we played that music, we were all thinking of Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry, two close members of our unit lost to junk overdoses…I’m not a junkie, and I won’t even try it out to check out what it’s like. But we all got high enough, right out there on the edge, where we felt wide open to the whole mood. It was spooky. I probably feel this album more than anything else I’ve ever done.”
Compared to the other relationships that musicians have, though, there’s something that can hardly be put into words when you find someone to collaborate with. Romantic relationships are their own thing, but if someone can have a telepathic relationship with you whenever they strap on a guitar or sit behind the drumkit, it hits much harder when they are no longer part of the picture.
As time passes, the kind of pain Young is talking about here feels like it resonates even more. Now that many of Young’s peers have fallen by the wayside either to drugs or natural causes, it’s hard not to think of many of these songs as a way for Young to work his way through the pain, almost like he’s exorcising some demon from his body.
No amount of playing was going to be able to bring Whitten or Berry back, but Tonight’s the Night is still a firm look at what loss feels like. It can be a painful album if you’ve gone through that kind of loss, but pain demands to be felt before you can even think about healing.
