Tonight's the Night (Neil Young album)

Tonight's the Night is a direct expression of grief. Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and Young's friend and roadie Bruce Berry had both died of drug overdoses in the months before the songs were written. The sessions were the first time the remaining members of Crazy Horse had played together since the passing of Whitten. The album was recorded at S.I.R. Studios, or Studio Instrument Rentals, a Hollywood studio managed by Bruce Berry's brother, Ken. Drummer Ralph Molina remembers in an April 2023 interview:

"We recorded Tonight’s The Night at Bruce’s brother’s rehearsal studio in Hollywood, the S.I.R. studio. We would shoot pool, and just walk around. The thing was, we all somehow got the mood at the same time, usually around midnight, and we all just walked to our instruments and began to play. The mood we had was light but at the same time dark, it was as one. The album with those great songs was magical. Neil, Billy, Ben, Nils and myself, were just one unit. The songs made it possible to play passionately."[7]

Young explains further in an August 1975 interview with Cameron Crowe for Rolling Stone:

"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. The Tonight's The Night sessions were the first time what was left of Crazy Horse had gotten together since Danny died. It was up to us to get the strength together among us to fill the hole he left. The other OD, Bruce Berry, was CSNY's roadie for a long time. His brother Ken runs Studio Instrument Rentals, where we recorded the album. So we had a lot of vibes going for us. There was a lot of spirit in the music we made. It's funny, I remember the whole experience in black and white. We'd go down to S.I.R. about 5:00 in the afternoon and start getting high, drinking tequila and playing pool. About midnight, we'd start playing. And we played Bruce and Danny on their way all through the night. 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."[8]

The title track mentions Berry by name, while Whitten's guitar and vocal work highlight "Come on Baby Let's Go Downtown"; the latter was recorded live in 1970. The song would later appear, unedited, on a live album from the same concerts, Live at the Fillmore East, with Whitten credited as the sole author. In interviews and on his website, Young has described an earlier, more somber version of Tonight's the Night. In a 1985 interview with Adam Swetting of The Melody Maker, Young explains that

"The original Tonight's The Night was much heavier than the one that hit the stands. The original one had only nine songs on it. It was the same takes, but the songs that were missing were Lookout Joe and Borrowed Tune, a couple of songs that I added. They fit lyrically but they softened the blow a little bit. What happened was the original had only nine songs but it had a lot of talking, a lot of mumbling and talking between the group and me, more disorganized and fucked-up sounding than the songs, but they were intros to the songs. Not counts but little discussions, three and four word conversations between songs, and it left it with a spooky feeling. It was like you didn't know if these guys were still gonna be alive in the morning, the way they were talking. More like a wake than anything else."[9]

Neil Young's father, Scott Young, wrote of it in his memoir, Neil and Me:

Ten years after the original recording, David Briggs and I talked about Tonight's the Night, on which he had shared the producer credit with Neil. At home a couple of weeks earlier he had come across the original tape, the one that wasn't put out. "I want to tell you, it is a handful. It is unrelenting. There is no relief in it at all. It does not release you for one second. It's like some guy having you by the throat from the first note, and all the way to the end." After all the real smooth stuff Neil had been doing, David felt most critics and others simply failed to read what they should have into Tonight's the Night – that it was an artist making a giant growth step. Neil came in during this conversation, which was in his living room. When David stopped Neil said, "You've got that original? I thought it was lost. I've never been able to find it. We'll bring it out someday, that original."

The band assembled for the album was known as The Santa Monica Flyers. It consisted of Young, Ben Keith, Nils Lofgren, and the Crazy Horse rhythm section of Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina. One track as stated above was taken from recordings of an earlier tour with Crazy Horse, and another from an earlier session with his band for Harvest, The Stray Gators.

The album was recorded in August and September of 1973, but not released until June 1975. The album was initially shelved. Instead, Young would record and release the album On the Beach, go on tour with CSNY and record the album Homegrown. At a listening party for Homegrown, Young would elect to release Tonight's the Night instead, as Young would explain to Cameron Crowe:

"I had a playback party for Homegrown for me and about ten friends. We were out of our minds. We all listened to the album and Tonight's The Night happened to be on the same reel. So we listened to that too, just for laughs. No comparison. I know the first time I listened back on Tonight's The Night it was the most out-of-tune thing I'd ever heard. Everybody's off-key. I couldn't hack it. But by listening to those two albums back to back at the party, I started to see the weaknesses in Homegrown. I took Tonight's The Night because of its overall strength in performance and feeling. The theme may be a little depressing, but the general feeling is much more elevating than Homegrown."[10]

Young would describe the experience of sharing the album for the first time with his record company in a November 1978 Tony Schwartz interview for Newsweek:

"When I handed it to Warner's, they hated it. We played it ten times as loud as they usually play things and it was awful. I mean, can you imagine listening to it at 1:00 in the afternoon in some corporate office? Well, I wasn't trying to make a masterpiece. I was trying to capture a moment. I didn't want to clean it up. I don't want the Carpenters to play Tonight's The Night. The album was recorded very high on tequila, and we did the same thing when we went out on the road with the "Tonight" tour. For me, it's very much like being an actor. I try to live the songs in my mind. Tonight's The Night was a story of death and dope. It was about a sleazy, burned-out rock star just about to go, about what fame and crowds do to you. I had to exorcise those feelings. I felt like it was the only chance I had to stay alive."[11]

Between the shelving of the album and its ultimate release, Young would tinker with the running order, re-recording some songs and adding new songs. In spring 1974, he would make a new attempt at the title track in an upbeat, power trio version recorded with Ralph Molina and Greg Reeves of CSNY. He would also record an acoustic version of "New Mama" and a banjo performance of "Mellow My Mind" at his ranch. Different running orders of the album were proposed, incorporating songs from the On the Beach sessions. An acetate of one such alternate version circulated as a bootleg and included the songs "Walk On", "For the Turnstiles", "Bad Fog of Loneliness", "Winterlong" and "Traces". The released album would ultimately reflect the original concept and running order. Archivist Joel Bernstein would explain in an August 1988 interview:

"There are a couple of Tonight's the Night acetates that have different running orders. There were many different versions of Tonight's the Night and the one that came out was actually one of the original ones. The sequence is a much earlier sequence. After that time he'd experiment with other songs like "Bad Fog of Loneliness". I think "Winterlong" was there too. Between 1972 and 1975 Neil had a lot of finished recorded songs that never made it on to an album, especially the 1974 period, the spring of 1974. Like "Barefoot Floors" for example."[12]

Young would share with Cameron Crowe how the final running order was selected:

"I only had nine songs, so I set the whole thing aside and did On The Beach instead. It took Elliot to finish Tonight's The Night. You see, a while back there were some people who were gonna make a Broadway show out of the story of Bruce Berry and everything. They even had a script written. We were putting together a tape for them and in the process of listening back on the old tracks, Elliot found three even older songs that related to the trip, "Lookout Joe," "Borrowed Tune" and "Come on Baby Let's Go Downtown," a live track from when I played the Fillmore East with Crazy Horse. Danny even sings lead on that one. Elliot added those songs to the original nine and sequenced them all into a cohesive story."[13]

The decision to release the album in 1975 presented considerable career risk. In a 1987 interview with Dave Fanning, Young recalls:

"I remember when I handed in the album, the President of Reprise Records, they were supportive no matter whether they liked it or understood it, but on this record they came back and said, 'Well, Neil, if you want to put it out you can put it out. You know you had Harvest then you put out On the Beach and it was kind of off the wall, you didn't sell that many. Time Fades Away, we didn't do very well with that. We think that if you put this album out it could be the end of your career.' So I said, 'Well, we better put this out right away then, because I think it's good."[14]

Included with the early original vinyl releases of Tonight's the Night is a cryptic message written by Young: "I'm sorry. You don't know these people. This means nothing to you."

On the front of the insert is a letter to a character called "Waterface"; scratched into the run-out grooves on side one is the message "Hello Waterface" while the run-out grooves on side two read "Goodbye Waterface". No explanation is given to this person's identity. In Jimmy McDonough's Shakey, Young says that "Waterface is the person writing the letter. When I read the letter, I'm Waterface. It's just a stupid thing—a suicide note without the suicide."[3] The picture of Roy Orbison in the insert is taken from a bootleg tape Young came across and, feeling bad that Orbison most likely did not know the bootleg existed, printed it in the insert for him to see.

The back of the insert has some text superimposed over the credits to Young's On the Beach album, released a year earlier. This text is reportedly the lyrics to a Homegrown-era unreleased song titled "Florida", characterized by McDonough as "a cockamamie spoken-word dream, set to the shrieking accompaniment of either Young or [Ben] Keith drawing a wet finger around the rim of a glass."[3]

When unfolded, a whole side of the insert features a lengthy article printed entirely in Dutch. It is a review of a Tonight's the Night live show by Dutch journalist Constant Meijers for the Dutch rock music magazine Muziekkrant OOR. In 1976 Young said he chose to print it "Because I didn't understand any of it myself, and when someone is so sickened and fucked up as I was then, everything's in Dutch anyway." Meijers later spent a week at Young's ranch in California: during this visit, Young explained that he chose the article after some Dutch girls who were visiting him translated the story and made him aware of the fact "that someone on the other end of the world exactly understood what he was trying to say."

The Reprise Records label on the vinyl copy was printed in black and white rather than the standard orange color, a process Young undertook again on the CD label art for 1994's Sleeps with Angels. Early editions of the sleeve were made on blotter paper.

In Shakey, Young maintains that along with the inserts there was a small package of glitter inside the sleeve that was meant to fall out ("our Bowie statement"), spilling when the listener took the record out. However, neither McDonough nor Young archivist Joel Bernstein have yet found a copy of Tonight's the Night featuring the glitter package.[3]

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[15]
Christgau's Record Guide	A[16]
Pitchfork	10/10[17]
Rolling Stone	[18]
Rolling Stone Album Guide	[19]

Dave Marsh wrote in the original Rolling Stone review:

The music has a feeling of offhand, first-take crudity matched recently only by Blood on the Tracks, almost as though Young wanted us to miss its ultimate majesty in order to emphasize its ragged edge of desolation. [...] More than any of Young's earlier songs and albums—even the despondent On the Beach and the mordant, rancorous Time Fades Away—Tonight's the Night is preoccupied with death and disaster. [...] There is no sense of retreat, no apology, no excuses offered and no quarter given. If anything, these are the old ideas with a new sense of aggressiveness. The jitteriness of the music, its sloppy, unarranged (but decidedly structured) feeling is clearly calculated.[20]

In a follow-up review published in the 1983 edition of The New Rolling Stone Record Guide, Marsh writes:

The record chronicles the post-hippie, post-Vietnam demise of counterculture idealism, and a generation's long, slow trickle down the drain through drugs, violence, and twisted sexuality. This is Young's only conceptually cohesive record, and it's a great one.

Chris Fallon of PopMatters said, "Tonight's the Night is that one rare record I will never tire of."[21]

• Neil Young – vocals; guitar on "World on a String", "Come On Baby Let's Go Downtown", "Mellow My Mind", "Roll Another Number", "Albuquerque", "New Mama", "Lookout Joe", and "Tired Eyes"; piano on "Tonight's the Night", "Speakin' Out", and "Borrowed Tune"; harmonica on "World on a String", "Borrowed Tune", and "Mellow My Mind"; vibes on "New Mama"
• Ben Keith – pedal steel guitar, vocal on "Tonight's the Night", "Speakin' Out", "Roll Another Number", "Albuquerque", and "Tired Eyes"; pedal steel guitar on "World on a String" and "Mellow My Mind"; vocal on "New Mama"; slide guitar, vocal on "Lookout Joe"
• Nils Lofgren – piano on "World on a String", "Mellow My Mind", "Roll Another Number", "Albuquerque", "New Mama", and "Tired Eyes"; vocal on "Roll Another Number", "Albuquerque", and "Tired Eyes"; guitar on "Tonight's the Night" and "Speakin' Out"
• Danny Whitten – vocal, electric guitar on "Come On Baby Let's Go Downtown"
• Jack Nitzsche – electric piano on "Come On Baby Let's Go Downtown"; piano on "Lookout Joe"
• Billy Talbot – bass all tracks except "Borrowed Tune", "New Mama", and "Lookout Joe"
• Tim Drummond – bass on "Lookout Joe"
• Ralph Molina – drums, vocal all tracks except "Borrowed Tune", "New Mama", and "Lookout Joe"
• Kenny Buttrey – drums on "Lookout Joe"
• George Whitsell – vocal on "New Mama"

Year End Album Charts

• Lyrics at HyperRust.org
• Liner Notes also at HyperRust.org
• Tonight's the Night at Myspace (streamed copy where licensed)