as possible by a return to recording with Crazy Horse and Nils Lofgren, with whom Young recorded his 1970 masterpiece,
After the Gold Rush.Yet even Crazy Horse isn't what it once was: Lead guitarist Danny Whitten died last year of a drug overdose. The track on which he appears, "Come on Baby, Let's Go Downtown," recorded at Fillmore East four years ago, serves as a metaphor for the album's haunted, frightened emotional themes. Musically, Whitten's guitar and voice complement, challenge and inspire Young. The rest of the album strains to keep up.
It does so only occasionally but the effort is almost quixotically exhilarating. The successes—the ironic "Tired Eyes," the deceptively sweet "Albuquerque," the thunderous "Lookout Joe" and the two versions of the title song—are Young's best music since Gold Rush. Lofgren's guitar and piano are forceful and direct, Ralph Molina's drumming apt on both the rockers and the weepers (the latter driven by Ben Keith's steel guitar). Young's playing, on piano, harp and guitar, is simple but constantly charged.
Still, the album shares with On the Beach a fully developed sense of despair: The stargazer of "Helpless" finds no solace here. 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. "Borrowed Tune," for example, is set against Young's stark harp and piano. The tandem guitar and bass on the opening version of the title song sounds like the crack of doom itself and Young's singing—especially on the concluding version — alternates between sheer panic and awful Old Testament threat. "Tonight's the night," he shouts, threats, begs, moans and curses, telling the story of roadie Bruce Berry, who ODed "out on the mainline." Sometimes it feels as though Young is still absorbing the shock of his friend's death, sometimes as though he is railing against mortality itself, sometimes as though he's accepted it. But never as though he believes it.
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. Dedicated to the dead Berry and Whitten, its cover, liner and label are starkly black and white. The characters of the songs are shell-shocked, losers, wasted, insane, homeless—except for the ones who are already corpses. The happiest man in any of them, the father in "New Mama," acknowledges that he's "livin
Part of the genius of Neil Young's dark masterpiece Tonight's the Night is that it could easily have sounded like shit: The soused bar-band stomp of Young's backing outfit Crazy Horse constantly threatens to careen out of control, and Young sometimes sounds so depressed it's a wonder he managed to tune his guitar. Recorded in 1973 but not released till 1975, Tonight is Young's most hauntingly powerful album, full of cracked folkie ballads, ferocious rockers and bleak reveries inspired by the heroin deaths of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry. It's a glorious mess, with Young and Crazy Horse thrashing through the wilderness and giving death the finger. More than most Young albums, Tonight is an uncanny blend of light and dark, delicate and heavy: Even when he mourns the death of the Sixties on the vicious "Roll Another Number," his folk-schooled sense of melody and the heart-rending empathy in his thin voice shine through. The twin comedowns "Albuquerque" and "Tired Eyes" rank among Young's most beautiful songs, with slo-mo choruses and cascading harmonies keeping his head above water. "Come On Baby Let's Go Downtown" plays like a creepy joke. It's a rollicking live cut from 1970, with Whitten singing about good times not long before they killed him. By 1975, Young had been well recognized as a talented eccentric, but his early-Seventies output had been fairly clean-cut -- long on straight-ahead jams and tidy country rock. With Tonight's the Night, Young was becoming the weirdo genius he is today -- a world-weary guitar poet following his whims, dreaming of a distant paradise and steadfastly refusing to go gently into that good night.
