’)Tonight's the Night by Neil Young
As hauntingly bleak and beautiful as the American Southwest, Tonight's the Night by Neil Young is a tribute to the lives of roadie Bruce Berry and Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten, who both died of drug overdoses shortly before the album was recorded.The album finds Neil Young at one of the emotional low points of his life (I hesitate to say lowest, as very strong cases can be made for Time Fades Away and On the Beach being Neil's most dismal work). The album's misanthropic, isolated, and paranoid tone show Neil at a crossroads, reflecting on his past work and questioning his relationship with people and society as a whole.
The album opens and closes with “Tonight's the Night,” a song eulogizing Bruce Berry and documenting Neil's response to the news of his death, “because people let me tell you, it sent a chill up and down my spine, when I picked up the telephone and heard that he died out on the mainline.” Neil's voice is close to cracking; clearly he is overcome with grief evident in the leading electrical version's dissonant piano and the closing acoustic version's down and out bottleneck slide guitar.
Neil questions his worth and past with honesty: “I've been a searcher, I've been a fool”, “you know I lose, you know I win, you know I call for the shape I'm in.” His past success is small consolation “the world on a string doesn't mean a thing. It's only real in the way that I feel from day to day.” He seems poised for a retreat from public life. Neil is “not going back to Woodstock for a while” -- he is “a million miles away from that helicopter day.” He wants to retreat from the public, as he declares in “Come on Baby, Lets go Downtown”, a song recorded in tribute to Witten and featuring his voice on the chorus, being surrounded by others makes Neil paranoid, “pretty bad when you are dealing with the man and the light shines in your eyes” (although the song is definitely also about scoring dope, suggesting that perhaps he sees drugs and people as inexorably linked).
Trying to escape his sorrows, Neil wants to “find somewhere where they don't care who I am,” so he takes to smoking joints and driving alone, he has “time to roll a number and rent a car” as discussed on one of the finest songs on the album, “Albuquerque.” Neil has been “starving to be alone, independent from the scene that [he has] known” but he can't escape the paranoia, as he says in “Roll Another Number (For the Road),” “before too long I might see those flashing red lights.”
Neil is deeply cynical about human relationships and what people have to offer, “remember Millie from down from down in Philly? She took my brain and forgot my name. The woman you were with was about the same. She took your money and left town,” although he longs for companionship: “new momma's got a sun in her eyes, no clouds are in my changing skies. Each morning when I wake up to rise, I'm living in a dream land.” This song could also be seen as discussing drug use, perhaps indicating that rather than finding a human companion, many (Neil included) have turned to drugs to ease the pain.
The whole album is recorded in wonderfully low fidelity and dissonant tone with off tempo drums and strung together instrumentation. Rather than giving the album a half-assed feel, it makes it gives the album the legitimate feeling of being overcome by grief: merely recording was a painful endeavor, polishing was just not going to happen. As “Borrowed Tune” declares “I'm singing this borrowed tune, I took from the Rolling Stones, alone in this empty room, too wasted to write my own.”
Tonight's the Night leaves the listener longing for a simpler time before painful lessons taught, and with a dire warning that Neil doesn't seem to expect people to heed, to “please take my advice, open up the tired eyed” before more tragedy occurs.