The drug overdose deaths of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry hit Neil Young hard. Young’s best album, Tonight’s the Night, served as a musical wake for them.
Recorded in 1973 as a follow up to Harvest (which included the number one hit “Heart of Gold”), Tonight’s the Night was the opposite of easy listening and was shelved until 1975. But before that decision was made Young and his band, provisionally titled The Santa Monica Flyers, took the stage for three nights in September of 1973 to christen the 500-seat Roxy nightclub in Hollywood. Opening acts were Graham Nash and Cheech & Chong.
As a companion piece to its studio namesake, Tonight’s the Night Live shows how deeply the masterful Young and his band dug into this material, which the audience is hearing for the first time. (Young would similarly confound his fans debuting new songs on subsequent tours for his albums Times Fades Away and Greendale.)
Opening and closing with the title tune, the music veers from elastic to claustrophobic. Some tunes offer attempts at sun-dappled reverie (“Mellow My Mind,” “New Mama”) but Young is at his best at his weariest (“World On A String,” “Albuquerque”). While he goes so far as to dedicate “Roll Another Number For the Road” to the policemen in the audience and David Geffen (with whom Young would later tangle in legal battles for “not sounding like Neil Young”), the masterpiece here is “Tired Eyes,” the audio vérité look at a drug deal gone wrong that asks:
Well tell me more, tell me more, tell me more
I mean was he a heavy doper or was he just a loser?
He was a friend of yours.
What do you mean, he had bullet holes in his mirrors?
Ever the contrarian, Young introduces the encore “Walk On” as an “old one.” It would not be released for another year.
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