Tonight's the Night (album)

Infobox Album
Name = Tonight's the Night
Type = studio
Artist = Neil Young


Released = June 20 1975
Recorded = 1973
Genre = Country rock, Rock
Length = 44:52
Label = Reprise
Producer = David Briggs, Tim Mulligan, Neil Young, Elliot Mazer (track 10 only)
Reviews =
* Allmusic Rating|5|5 [http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:qpaxlfwe5cqp link]
* PopMatters (Positive) [http://www.popmatters.com/music/reviews/y/youngneil-tonightsthenight.shtml link]
* Robert Christgau (A) [http://www.robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php?id=989&name=Neil+Young link]
* "Rolling Stone" (not rated) [http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/neilyoung/albums/album/197063/review/5940431/tonights_the_night 1975]
* "Rolling Stone" Rating|5|5 [http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/album/_/id/197063 2005]
Last album = "On the Beach"
(1974)
This album = Tonight's the Night
(1975)
Next album = "Zuma"
(1975)

"Tonight's the Night" is a 1975 album by Neil Young.

Dark, heartfelt, and raw, "Tonight's the Night" was recorded in 1973 but initially rejected by Young's record company (a running theme in Young's career) as the second uncommercial release in a row and an unacceptable follow-up to his popular breakthrough, "Harvest", and too stark a contrast with Young's work with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

Young's album was a startlingly direct expression of grief: Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and Young's friend and roadie Bruce Berry had both died of drug overdoses in the months before the songs were written. The title track mentions Bruce Berry by name, while Whitten's guitar and vocal work highlight "Come on Baby, Let's Go Downtown", recorded live in 1970. (The song would later appear, unedited, on a live album from the same concerts, "Live at the Fillmore East".)

Track listing

As Young acknowledges in the lyrics and title, the melody of "Borrowed Tune" is taken from the Rolling Stones song "Lady Jane".

All songs written by Neil Young except as indicated.

ide one

# "Tonight's the Night" – 4:39
# "Speakin' Out" – 4:56
# "World on a String" – 2:27
# "Borrowed Tune" – 3:26
# "Come on Baby Let's Go Downtown" (Live) (Danny Whitten/Neil Young) – 3:35
# "Mellow My Mind" – 3:07

ide two

# "Roll Another Number (For the Road)" – 3:02
# "Albuquerque" – 4:02
# "New Mama" – 2:11
# "Lookout Joe" – 3:57
# "Tired Eyes" – 4:38
# "Tonight's the Night—Part II" – 4:52

Personnel

*Tracks 1-3, 6 (side one), 1-2, 5-6 (side two)
Neil Young & The Santa Monica Flyers

** Neil Young – piano, guitar, harmonica, vocal
** Nils Lofgren – guitar, piano, vocal
** Ben Keith – pedal steel guitar, vocal, slide guitar
** Ralph Molina – drums, vocal
** Billy Talbot – bass

* "Borrowed Tune"

** Neil Young – piano, harmonica, vocal

* "Come On Baby Let's Go Downtown"
Neil Young with Crazy Horse
** Danny Whitten – guitar, vocal
** Neil Young – guitar, vocal
** Billy Talbot – bass
** Ralph Molina – drums, vocal
** Jack Nitzsche – electric piano

* "New Mama"

** Neil Young – guitar, vocal, vibes
** Nils Lofgren – piano
** Ralph Molina – vocal
** Billy Talbot – vocal
** George Whitsell – vocal

*"Lookout Joe"
Neil Young with The Stray Gators
** Neil Young – guitar, harmonica, vocal
** Ben Keith – slide guitar, vocal
** Kenny Buttrey – drums
** Tim Drummond – bass
** Jack Nitzsche – piano

Liner notes

Included with the vinyl release of "Tonight's the Night" was a seemingly strange insert that added to Neil Young's claim that "Tonight's the Night" was the closest he ever came to art. Emphasising the personal nature of the album, the self-penned liner notes contained an apology: "I'm sorry. You don't know these people. This means nothing to you." The original inserts/liner notes included in the vinyl release were quite cryptic in their conveyance.

On the front of the insert is a letter to the mysterious "Waterface" character, no explanation is given to their identity, although in "Shakey: Neil Young's Biography" by Jimmy McDonough, Young says that "Waterface is the person writing the letter. When I read the letter, I'm Waterface. It's just a stupid thing - a suicide note without the suicide." (McDonough).

The back of the insert was equally puzzling, as it appeared in the insert superimposed over the credits to Young's "On the Beach" album, released a year prior. This passage is reportedly the lyrics to an unreleased song titled "Florida", referred to in "Shakey" as "A cockamamie spoken-word dream, set to the shrieking accompaniment of either Young or "(Ben)" Keith drawing a wet finger around the rim of a glass." (McDonough).

When unfolded, comprising a whole side of the insert was a lengthy article printed entirely in Dutch and is in fact a review of a "Tonight's the Night" live show by Dutch journalist Constant Meijers for the Dutch rock-magazine "Muziekkrant Oor". In 1976 Young said he chose to print it "Because I didn't understand any of it myself, and when someone is so sickened and fucked up as I was then, everything's in Dutch anyway." But Neil Young told Constant Meijers during a week's visit he made to Young's ranch in California, that he chose the article after some Dutch girls who were visiting him translated the story and made him aware of the fact "that someone on the other end of the world exactly understood what he was trying to say."

The Reprise Records sticker on the vinyl record itself was printed in black and white rather than the standard orange color, a process Young undertook again on the CD label art for 1994's "Sleeps With Angels". Original printings of the sleeve were done on blotter paper which proved quite costly as reprints of the album are no longer printed that way.

Also of note is that scratched into the run-out grooves on Side One is the message "Hello Waterface" while the run-out grooves on Side Two read "Goodbye Waterface".

The picture of Roy Orbison is taken from a bootleg tape Young came across and, feeling bad that Orbison most likely did not know the bootleg existed, printed it in the insert for him to see.

In "Shakey: Neil Young's Biography" by Jimmy McDonough, Young maintains that along with the inserts there was a small package of glitter inside the sleeve that was meant to fall out ("Our Bowie statement." (McDonough)), spilling when the listener took the record out. However, both Jimmy McDonough and Joel Bernstein (Young's archivist) have yet to find a copy of Tonight's the Night featuring the glitter package.

Critical reception

Dave Marsh wrote in the original "Rolling Stone" review:

"The music has a feeling of offhand, first-take crudity matched recently onlyby "Blood on the Tracks", almost as though Young wanted us to miss its ultimatemajesty in order to emphasize its ragged edge of desolation. [...] More than any of Young's earlier songs and albums-even the despondent On theBeach and the mordant, rancorous "Time Fades Away" -- "Tonight's the Night" ispreoccupied with death and disaster. [...] There is no sense of retreat, no apology, no excuses offered and no quartergiven. If anything, these are the old ideas with a new sense of aggressiveness.The jitteriness of the music, its sloppy, unarranged (but decidedly structured)feeling is clearly calculated."

In a followup review published ten years later, Marsh wrote: "The record chronicles the post-hippie, post-Vietnam demise of counterculture idealism, and a generation's long, slow trickle down the drain through drugs, violence, and twisted sexuality. This is Young's only conceputally cohesive record, and it's a great one."

The album peaked at #25 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart. RS500|331

Charts

Album

Billboard (North America)

External links

* [http://hyperrust.org/cgi-bin/ma.pl?16 Lyrics] at [http://hyperrust.org/ HyperRust.org]
* [http://hyperrust.org/General/TTNInsert.html Liner Notes] also at HyperRust.org