If you’re going to undertake Tonight’s the Night by Neil Young, I hope you have a lot of time on your hands. It’s a record that requires multiple spins on your turntable. Just be prepared for the consequences, as you will, as I have, become spellbound by the unbridled raw emotion of the record, and at the same time fall into a pretty bleak and hopeless depression. It’s not a record for the faint of heart, and it’s certainly not a record for the casual fan. I mean, if you’re just getting into Neil Young and looking for a place to start than you may want to go with Harvest, After the Gold Rush, or Decade. You need to work your way up to this record, and I’m telling you right now that there hasn’t been another record like this one in the history of recorded music before or after. The only one that comes close in terms of the mood is Exile by the Stones, but for as dark as that one truly is, this one is about as dire as it gets, and I’m talking way more depressing than anything Leonard Cohen ever put down and not in lyrical content, mind you, but just in atmosphere as Neil probably should’ve been on suicide watch while making this one and the let it roll attitude of the loose recording sessions captures not so much the beauty of the songs but doccuments the pervasive sadness and grit.

A little history, if you will. Though this was released in 1975, the recording took place in Miami Beach 1973. Neil Young was in full crisis mode. He’d become a mega star beyond his wildest dreams with the release of Harvest in 1972. Just before the tour and record release that was doccumented on the still unreleased on CD Time Fades Away, Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten died of a heroin overdose. See “The Needle and the Damage Done.” Then, his friend and roadie Bruce Berry died thanks to the needle as well. Compounding this was the overwhelming stardom and catagorization of Neil Young that he himself was not ready or prepared for. Neil wrote a contemplative country rock record that put him in the middle of the road, so as he says, he went for the ditch. While guzzling epic amounts of tequila, Neil and Crazy Horse came together and let the tapes roll.

What happened was some of the rarest stuff in rock n’ roll. I mean, real art. Neil Young was wasted and it shows, and usually when rock stars are wasted on whatever chemical, the results are very bad. Cocaine’s usually the worst. It’s a pattern that continues to this day, rock n’ roll band makes a great debut record, gets a whole bunch of money and they buy a whole bunch of coke and spend months in the studio trying to create a masterpiece because the coke lets them stay up all night. The record sucks and they’re never heard from again (see Hot Hot Heat). But I mean, Neil Young was completely gone, not even able to sing. Just smashed and singing his guts out while totally gone about Danny and Bruce.

It’s not that simple, though, because Neil is also depressed because the movement that once showed so much promise is dead. “I’m not going back to Woodstock for awhile, though I long to see that lonesome hippy smile? I’m a million miles away from that hellicopter day and I don’t think I’ll be going back that way. Think I’ll roll another number for the road.” The hippy dream was completely dead. Nixon was elected to a second term, and instead of pushing forward, everybody just got drunk and high and stayed that way into the 80’s, and damn it, Neil was right there with them, but he wasn’t happy about it. The man just wanted to be alone.

But fuck it, I can’t tell you anything that you: a. don’t already know about the record. b. will actually understand the record through the words I write.

So I’m going to tell you this. We can analyze records to death, we can write books dedicated to single songs that are as pompus and overwrought as anything else, and we can act scholarly in our pursuit of finding contextual clues and answers in rock n’ roll. Or, better yet, we can just take it for what it is. The hippy dream died a long time ago and Neil Young saw it coming, yes yes. Neil Young saw the death of his peers and heroes and it made him sad and hopeless, oh yes. But Tonight’s the Night ain’t just about that, it’s about you and me and everyone else in any period of time on earth. People die who are close to us, some important people die way too young. The hippy dream didn’t just die, our ideals die daily, little by little and it’s depressing. Right now, we elected a President who was supposed to take us away from the moral decay and do what’s right by ALL of us and you watch him marginalize himself and move to a direction that you never wanted to appeaze the nutjobs in this country. This shit that Neil Young sang about in this record happens every single day, every single moment, in human existence. We have our ideals, and our morals, but we throw them in the toilet without thinking twice. You take this record for what it is and it opens undeniable truths about you, me, and everyone else in this goddamned world. It’s not just so much a testament to the inner turmoil of Neil Young, he’s not just baring it all like an exhibitionist, it’s the mirror he’s holding up. Look at yourselves!

Tonight is the night, every night is the night. The night where the breaking point lies. You can’t build back up what’s fallen apart. Better just to throw it all away, head out to Albuquerque, find a place to be alone so as to not let the world get to you. Get everything off your back and maybe not start over, because you can’t start over and you can’t outrun your problems but you can run far enough away to where your problems are just your problems and you don’t have to burden anyone else or nobody’ll probe you about them. And let’s be honest with ourselves, it’s been a long time since any of us have actually given a shit about what the next person goes through. You can act like you live in a neighborhood, but there’s no community, no neighborhood, no nothing, just you in some house in the middle of a plan with winding roads and everything looks the same right down to the vinyl siding but you might as well just be off in Albuqerque, alone in a diner, strangers staring you down like some circus freak. And you just go about your business, roll another number and ride off to Santa Fe. Less than ninety miles away.