The third and final entry in the so-called “Ditch Trilogy” of albums Neil Young released following the major success of 1972’s Harvest, Tonight’s The Night, sounds like the most abrasive of them all, five decades later. If the 1973 live album, Time Fades Away, which featured all unreleased material, epitomized the Canadian rock icon’s difficulty in handling the acclaim of his popular breakthrough. The following year’s studio work, On The Beach (released 6/20/75) documented that insular dislocation.
N/eil Young’s return to the land of the living–in the somewhat contradictory form of touring stadiums with CSN in the summer of 1974–only ended up exacerbating his alienation. And, in the wake of the deaths of two close to him–guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Danny Whitten of Crazy Horse and Bruce Berry, a member of the CSNY road crew–the inveterate iconoclast had to exert a concerted effort to keep himself from going into a tailspin both personally and creatively.
Neil never mentions the former specifically during Tonight’s The Night, preferring to offer a poignant homage to his former bandmate with the prominence of the man’s self-composed “Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown” (taken from a March 1970 New York and Chicago concert at the Fillmore East). The latter casualty, however, is the focal point of this title song, decidedly rough takes of which bookend the LP’s dozen cuts and reinforce Young’s fragmented state of mind at the time.
Yet even if Neil is a bit more candid about himself than the audience for the twee “Heart of Gold” might prefer, he remained resolute about the value of this album, despite initial dismay from his Reprise record label. The quiet acoustic intimacy of “New Mama” is the most polished performance on Tonight’s The Night and, given the generally loose-to-a-fault performances like “World On A String” and “Speakin’ Out,” that’s not saying much. But this paean to parenthood sounds all the more sparkling in such close proximity to “Borrowed Tune.”
Lacking inspiration of his own, Young here co-opts the melody for the Rolling Stones’ “Lady Jane,” then openly confesses by song’s end that ‘[he’s] too wasted to write [his] own.’ Virtually the whole of this song cycle finds the former Buffalo Springfielder wrestling with such ambivalence (manager Elliot Roberts completed the project after Neil shelved it).
The subdued, unsettling desperation of “Mellow My Mind” is at the other end of the spectrum from the raucous riffing of “Lookout Joe.” And while the (forced?) jollity of “Roll Another Number (For the Road)” may or may not counterbalance “Tired Eyes,” the halting expression of independence expressed in “Albuquerque” foreshadows the tour to support the now fifty-year-old album.
2018’s archival release, Roxy-Tonight’s The Night Live, captures the purposely (and over-the-top) spontaneous air of those live shows. The ragtag aggregation dubbed ‘The Santa Monica Flyers’–Crazy Horse’s rhythm section of drummer Ralph Molina and bassist Billy Talbot, lap/pedal steel player Ben Keith, and multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Nils Lofgren–maintained the chemistry they forged in the studio.
Self-indulgent as this public exorcism of demons seemed at the time, with the hindsight of a half century, Tonight’s The Night indeed served its purpose. And if Neil took a circuitous route indeed to reconnect with his muse, it was all worth it: the near-perfect LP Zuma, released just five months later, marks the first effort with a reconfigured Crazy Horse featuring Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro.
The now-retired multi-instrumentalist also collaborated with Young in a variety of contexts over the ensuing years. With the extended perspective of five decades, history reveals the inherent wisdom of “Tonight’s The Night.“ It is just one of several instances in this ever-so-idiosyncratic artist’s career where he followed his instincts to fruitful ends.
