‘Tonight’s The Night’ (1975)
[archive review from 2005]
Recorded before ‘On The Beach’ but released after, messing up train spotters analysis of his artistic evolution at the time no doubt, this is THE great Neil Young album. It needs to be judged by different criteria than his other albums because of the context in which it was recorded & its intentions. On many other Neil Young albums, sloppiness & out of tuneness would be uuforgiveable, and this album is guilty of both on a regular basis, but it is a triumph of pure gut feeling, emotion & inspired, brilliant spontaneity over & above style & polish.
The title track is by turns seductive & bone chilling. Neil eases us into the song with the enticing but somehow unsettling promise ‘Tonight’s The Night’ over & over before his voice cracks into the sorry tale. So much has been said about this song, & said very well, I don’t want to say much more except that it is a superb song & performance & it truly is ‘as real as the day is long’. ‘Speakin’ Out’, it just occurs to me, is something of a dark twist on a mid 70’s Beach Boys song off, say, ‘Beach Boys Love You’. Monolithic banging rhythm piano with lyrics like 'I went to the movies, the other night, the plot was groovy, it was out of sight, I sat with my popcorn, out looking for good times’. But it’s a twisted take on one & the chorus goes somewhere else entirely, but the start does sound like a mid 70’s overweight & zombified Brian Wilson banging out a warped nursery rhyme. This actually predates ‘Love You’ by four years though. But I digress. This has a great expressive & pained vocal & some sweet stoned piano tinkling & steel.
‘World On A String’ is a stomping dismissal of rotten old fame & fortune. The musicians all sing different lines on the refrain. A very early (maybe even first) take; they hadn’t properly worked out (or were too out of it to notice or care) which line went where & wrongly anticipated which line Neil would sing. It is hilarious & it epitomizes the rough & ready spontaneity of the album. ‘Borrowed Tune’ is singular & incredibly intimate; you can feel the ‘ice frozen six feet deep’ & the loneliness & emotional isolation. The sparse piano/ vocal arrangement let’s no frills or excessive instrumentation get in the way of the bleak & uncomfortable emotions. ‘Come On Baby’ is a frenzied, drug-addled rock out recorded live in 1970, with Danny Whitten on guitar & lead vocals. It is an inspired inclusion, brilliantly reminding us of what was lost & of the lifestyle that inevitably led to the loss. The topic, lyrics & performance are all perfect in a functional sense as well as the song being strong in its own right.
‘Mellow My Mind’ is an extremely whacked out country dirge & it is brave & brilliant that Neil didn’t attempt to fix his most strained & out of tune vocal ever ‘lonesome whistle on the railroad track, ain’t got nothing on those feelings’. Wow! ‘Roll Another Number’ continues the stoned, whacked out rambling, but to me is the weakest track. It’s a bit too much of more of the same & the melody doesn’t really grab. ‘Albuquerque’ on the other hand is extremely evocative. I feel like I’m on a lost highway at night when I hear it: completely alone & desperately depressed with no idea where I’m going, nowhere to go & no one to care. It has a subtly beautiful melody & has some pained steel work. An under appreciated gem.
On ‘New Mama’, the sun bursts through the black clouds, but it is broken & brief. This one makes me teary sometimes. It is so fragile & beautiful & at times innocent sounding, but the lyrics reveal a wisdom & a sad knowing that can only come from experience & understanding of the ‘other’, the opposite of what he is talking about; what he has come from & gone through in recent times. The playing & harmonies are supremely tight & focused in this, making this song something of an oddity on the album, but not at all out of place. It gives the album balance & relief. ‘Lookout Joe’ is a fascinating, fuzzy, rumbling rock song. It has cryptic, Polaroid snapshot lyrics & a wonderful sludgy abandon in the performance & sound. The bridge lifts into a twisted gospel prayer & Neils’ lead guitar stabs gloriously falling back down from it. Another big favourite, this would make any Neil ‘best of’ that I had a hand in.
‘Tired Eyes’ I took an initial dislike to, probably because it seemed too rambling & too far removed from my frame of reference. It did not deserve my dislike though. It is crucial to the album. At this point Neil is so weary & so far gone, he doesn’t even bother to sing or maybe can’t sing anymore. He speaks the verses deadpan & seems to have no emotional reaction to the events of the song. He only lifts into song in the choruses with his whacked out band supporting him in fractured, uneven harmony. He sounds devoid of feeling & emotionally barren. The album ends with another version of ‘Tonight’s’; more rambling & wobbly than the first.
This album seems to have been a tribute offering to his friends lost & a catharsis for Neil so that he could move on for his own well-being & for those he loved & for those who loved him. After hearing it, you cannot doubt that he needed desperately the release of making this album. The album is also a warning; Neil put himself through a lot of pain & torment, in the manner of a method actor, to capture the feeling & (un)reality of the darker aspects of the music world & perhaps to warn others of its danger. Neil might just as well have slit his wrists into the boiling vinyl wax, for it is that brutal a journey. Nakedly emotional & unflinchingly honest, ‘Tonight’s The Night’ is a gift & a lesson to humanity.
Recorded before ‘On The Beach’ but released after, messing up train spotters analysis of his artistic evolution at the time no doubt, this is THE great Neil Young album. It needs to be judged by different criteria than his other albums because of the context in which it was recorded & its intentions. On many other Neil Young albums, sloppiness & out of tuneness would be uuforgiveable, and this album is guilty of both on a regular basis, but it is a triumph of pure gut feeling, emotion & inspired, brilliant spontaneity over & above style & polish.
The title track is by turns seductive & bone chilling. Neil eases us into the song with the enticing but somehow unsettling promise ‘Tonight’s The Night’ over & over before his voice cracks into the sorry tale. So much has been said about this song, & said very well, I don’t want to say much more except that it is a superb song & performance & it truly is ‘as real as the day is long’. ‘Speakin’ Out’, it just occurs to me, is something of a dark twist on a mid 70’s Beach Boys song off, say, ‘Beach Boys Love You’. Monolithic banging rhythm piano with lyrics like 'I went to the movies, the other night, the plot was groovy, it was out of sight, I sat with my popcorn, out looking for good times’. But it’s a twisted take on one & the chorus goes somewhere else entirely, but the start does sound like a mid 70’s overweight & zombified Brian Wilson banging out a warped nursery rhyme. This actually predates ‘Love You’ by four years though. But I digress. This has a great expressive & pained vocal & some sweet stoned piano tinkling & steel.
‘World On A String’ is a stomping dismissal of rotten old fame & fortune. The musicians all sing different lines on the refrain. A very early (maybe even first) take; they hadn’t properly worked out (or were too out of it to notice or care) which line went where & wrongly anticipated which line Neil would sing. It is hilarious & it epitomizes the rough & ready spontaneity of the album. ‘Borrowed Tune’ is singular & incredibly intimate; you can feel the ‘ice frozen six feet deep’ & the loneliness & emotional isolation. The sparse piano/ vocal arrangement let’s no frills or excessive instrumentation get in the way of the bleak & uncomfortable emotions. ‘Come On Baby’ is a frenzied, drug-addled rock out recorded live in 1970, with Danny Whitten on guitar & lead vocals. It is an inspired inclusion, brilliantly reminding us of what was lost & of the lifestyle that inevitably led to the loss. The topic, lyrics & performance are all perfect in a functional sense as well as the song being strong in its own right.
‘Mellow My Mind’ is an extremely whacked out country dirge & it is brave & brilliant that Neil didn’t attempt to fix his most strained & out of tune vocal ever ‘lonesome whistle on the railroad track, ain’t got nothing on those feelings’. Wow! ‘Roll Another Number’ continues the stoned, whacked out rambling, but to me is the weakest track. It’s a bit too much of more of the same & the melody doesn’t really grab. ‘Albuquerque’ on the other hand is extremely evocative. I feel like I’m on a lost highway at night when I hear it: completely alone & desperately depressed with no idea where I’m going, nowhere to go & no one to care. It has a subtly beautiful melody & has some pained steel work. An under appreciated gem.
On ‘New Mama’, the sun bursts through the black clouds, but it is broken & brief. This one makes me teary sometimes. It is so fragile & beautiful & at times innocent sounding, but the lyrics reveal a wisdom & a sad knowing that can only come from experience & understanding of the ‘other’, the opposite of what he is talking about; what he has come from & gone through in recent times. The playing & harmonies are supremely tight & focused in this, making this song something of an oddity on the album, but not at all out of place. It gives the album balance & relief. ‘Lookout Joe’ is a fascinating, fuzzy, rumbling rock song. It has cryptic, Polaroid snapshot lyrics & a wonderful sludgy abandon in the performance & sound. The bridge lifts into a twisted gospel prayer & Neils’ lead guitar stabs gloriously falling back down from it. Another big favourite, this would make any Neil ‘best of’ that I had a hand in.
‘Tired Eyes’ I took an initial dislike to, probably because it seemed too rambling & too far removed from my frame of reference. It did not deserve my dislike though. It is crucial to the album. At this point Neil is so weary & so far gone, he doesn’t even bother to sing or maybe can’t sing anymore. He speaks the verses deadpan & seems to have no emotional reaction to the events of the song. He only lifts into song in the choruses with his whacked out band supporting him in fractured, uneven harmony. He sounds devoid of feeling & emotionally barren. The album ends with another version of ‘Tonight’s’; more rambling & wobbly than the first.
This album seems to have been a tribute offering to his friends lost & a catharsis for Neil so that he could move on for his own well-being & for those he loved & for those who loved him. After hearing it, you cannot doubt that he needed desperately the release of making this album. The album is also a warning; Neil put himself through a lot of pain & torment, in the manner of a method actor, to capture the feeling & (un)reality of the darker aspects of the music world & perhaps to warn others of its danger. Neil might just as well have slit his wrists into the boiling vinyl wax, for it is that brutal a journey. Nakedly emotional & unflinchingly honest, ‘Tonight’s The Night’ is a gift & a lesson to humanity.
[Favourite to least favourite tracks: I'll spare this one, it works too well as a whole to pick it apart]
‘Zuma’ (1975) [archive review from 2005]
The opening ‘Don’t Cry No Tears’ has a sparkly, sunny pop sound that plays nicely against the bitter, defensive tone of the lyrics, the sugared pill. Apparently it was one of his earliest compositions & informed by the influence of one Roy Orbison, although I didn’t pick it in this one. ‘Danger Bird’ is too banal & overwrought lyrically for my liking (‘I can fly, fly away’) & melodically not in the league of some of his other epic guitar workouts such as ‘Like A Hurricane’. ‘Pardon My Heart’ is the highlight for me. A mellow, acoustic ballad with some lovely chord changes, sweet picking & exquisite hushed backing vocals ‘you brought it all on, oh but it feels so wrong’. Everything about it is perfection, not a word or note out of place. The outro just aches. ‘Lookin’ For A Love’ is wistful, sunny, country-ish pop & a real grower. ‘Barstool Blues’ is a great stomping rocker aptly titled. It has a great, high pitch, impassioned vocal ‘burn off all the fog & let the sun shine through the snow’.
On side two, ‘Stupid Girl’ is an anomaly, there’s not much like it in the Neil Young canon. The dual vocal works well & has an almost comic affect. The changing between two speeds & sections, like in ‘Sedan Delivery’ keeps interest & is not too intrusive. ‘Drive Back’ is another rock belter, with a startling, stabbing guitar intro. This is another grower. I don’t like cowbell generally, but it works a treat here. ‘Cortez The Killer’ is considered an undisputed classic, but I wouldn’t put it in my top 10 NY songs, probably not even top 20. It is a great work, lyrically & musically, but I don’t feel the urge to listen to it all that often. To me, the parts don’t add up to truly grab me as many other of his songs do. Excuse me while I put on a raincoat for the torrent of tomatoes.
While we’re at it, ‘Powderfinger’ (from ‘Rust Never Sleeps’) is another song I put in this category. If I seem to be unfairly dismissive of Cortez, let me put it this way, it is a great song & certainly among the top 4 songs on this album. It is probably better say than ‘Stupid Girl’, or ‘Don’t Cry No Tears’, both of which I have praised, but because it is seen as beyond criticism by most die hard fans & critics, I feel obliged to have just a little dig at it. I find the lyrics interesting & evocative, but I like a melody that grabs me by the throat & makes my heart sigh, “Transformer Man’, ‘Country Girl’ & ‘Here We Are In The Years’ do this every time. This one doesn’t reach the same melodic heights & overall the performance is less compelling & involving than ‘Like A Hurricane’ or ‘Revolution Blues’. I understand that this song is very definitely & deliberately a different stylistic animal to those I have mentioned, but it is a question of personal taste I suppose. It’s not that I don’t like slow burners (‘On The Beach’ for example). I don’t know why I’m a little at odds with most Neil fans and critics on this one.
‘Through My Sails’ is a sweet acoustic sigh at the end of a solid album, with help from CSN. This album, along with ‘Trans’ has gone through the biggest re-evaluation in my mind since I first heard them. It didn’t really grab me upon first listen back in the mid 90’s when I heard it on Mum and Dad's old turntable. I remember my throat feeling like it had a slowly unfurling razor wire coil inside it that winter day, so maybe it was my ill, distracted state. I didn’t really like it much at all in fact, there were no glaring stinkers on it, but believe it or not, nothing really grabbed me. I’d now rate it upper middle in a ranking of his albums & with no poor songs, the tracks are very difficult to rank.
[Favourite to least - ‘Pardon My Heart’, ‘Don’t Cry No Tears’, ‘Barstool Blues’ ‘Cortez The Killer’, ‘Driveback’, ‘Lookin For A Love’, ‘Stupid Girl’, ‘Through My Sails’, ‘Danger Bird’]
‘Zuma’ (1975) [archive review from 2005]
The opening ‘Don’t Cry No Tears’ has a sparkly, sunny pop sound that plays nicely against the bitter, defensive tone of the lyrics, the sugared pill. Apparently it was one of his earliest compositions & informed by the influence of one Roy Orbison, although I didn’t pick it in this one. ‘Danger Bird’ is too banal & overwrought lyrically for my liking (‘I can fly, fly away’) & melodically not in the league of some of his other epic guitar workouts such as ‘Like A Hurricane’. ‘Pardon My Heart’ is the highlight for me. A mellow, acoustic ballad with some lovely chord changes, sweet picking & exquisite hushed backing vocals ‘you brought it all on, oh but it feels so wrong’. Everything about it is perfection, not a word or note out of place. The outro just aches. ‘Lookin’ For A Love’ is wistful, sunny, country-ish pop & a real grower. ‘Barstool Blues’ is a great stomping rocker aptly titled. It has a great, high pitch, impassioned vocal ‘burn off all the fog & let the sun shine through the snow’.
On side two, ‘Stupid Girl’ is an anomaly, there’s not much like it in the Neil Young canon. The dual vocal works well & has an almost comic affect. The changing between two speeds & sections, like in ‘Sedan Delivery’ keeps interest & is not too intrusive. ‘Drive Back’ is another rock belter, with a startling, stabbing guitar intro. This is another grower. I don’t like cowbell generally, but it works a treat here. ‘Cortez The Killer’ is considered an undisputed classic, but I wouldn’t put it in my top 10 NY songs, probably not even top 20. It is a great work, lyrically & musically, but I don’t feel the urge to listen to it all that often. To me, the parts don’t add up to truly grab me as many other of his songs do. Excuse me while I put on a raincoat for the torrent of tomatoes.
While we’re at it, ‘Powderfinger’ (from ‘Rust Never Sleeps’) is another song I put in this category. If I seem to be unfairly dismissive of Cortez, let me put it this way, it is a great song & certainly among the top 4 songs on this album. It is probably better say than ‘Stupid Girl’, or ‘Don’t Cry No Tears’, both of which I have praised, but because it is seen as beyond criticism by most die hard fans & critics, I feel obliged to have just a little dig at it. I find the lyrics interesting & evocative, but I like a melody that grabs me by the throat & makes my heart sigh, “Transformer Man’, ‘Country Girl’ & ‘Here We Are In The Years’ do this every time. This one doesn’t reach the same melodic heights & overall the performance is less compelling & involving than ‘Like A Hurricane’ or ‘Revolution Blues’. I understand that this song is very definitely & deliberately a different stylistic animal to those I have mentioned, but it is a question of personal taste I suppose. It’s not that I don’t like slow burners (‘On The Beach’ for example). I don’t know why I’m a little at odds with most Neil fans and critics on this one.
‘Through My Sails’ is a sweet acoustic sigh at the end of a solid album, with help from CSN. This album, along with ‘Trans’ has gone through the biggest re-evaluation in my mind since I first heard them. It didn’t really grab me upon first listen back in the mid 90’s when I heard it on Mum and Dad's old turntable. I remember my throat feeling like it had a slowly unfurling razor wire coil inside it that winter day, so maybe it was my ill, distracted state. I didn’t really like it much at all in fact, there were no glaring stinkers on it, but believe it or not, nothing really grabbed me. I’d now rate it upper middle in a ranking of his albums & with no poor songs, the tracks are very difficult to rank.
[Favourite to least - ‘Pardon My Heart’, ‘Don’t Cry No Tears’, ‘Barstool Blues’ ‘Cortez The Killer’, ‘Driveback’, ‘Lookin For A Love’, ‘Stupid Girl’, ‘Through My Sails’, ‘Danger Bird’]
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