40 years ago- Tonights the Night
“I have no idea where the fuck it came from..”
~Neil Young
The website “Drowned in Sound” takes a look back 40 years at the making of the infamous “Tonight’s The Night” album.
Andrew Wallace Chamings writes: “Forty years ago this week, Neil Young entered a makeshift studio on Santa Monica Boulevard in a state of deep depression and alcoholism and, in that single session, recorded the majority of the darkest album of his (or possibly anyone’s) career.
“Coping with the recent deaths of roadie Bruce Berry and Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten, Neil had seen heroin kill his closest friends, and he wanted to sing about it. That gloriously messy collection of songs about death would eventually be released as Tonight’s The Night two years later. Neil’s own father Scott once described the album as ‘a man on a binge at a wake,’ but that doesn’t quite do it justice.”
The album is a favorite to many die-hard Young fans who soak up the raw emotion of a man “real as the day is long.”
Chamings aptly observes: “But of course, desperation can not only be expressed through ethereal arpeggios and precisely arranged fifty-piece orchestras, it’s often released through singing what’s on your mind, in any key you want, and bending guitar strings until they break.”
Drummer Ralph Molina explained the band’s preparation; “We’d just get to a point where you get a glow, just a glow. When you do blow and drink, that’s when you get that glow. No one said ‘Let’s go play,’ we all just knew it was time. We never talked about what anyone was playing, who’s playing what part or any of that kinda shit. It was so fucking emotional.”
Read the well-thought out review and then pull out the album and take another listen, for old time’s sake.
memphish on 
Albert Stromann on 
liza on 
Baz on 
