Tonight's The Night

Few, if any, major artists in the rock pantheon have been as celebrated, as influential, and as thoroughly idiosyncratic as Neil Young. Since he left Buffalo Springfield to go out on his own in 1968, Young has famously followed his muse in unpredictable directions, rarely employing the same musical template for two albums in a row (and often presenting an entirely different musical statement by the time he gets around to touring behind a new LP). The constants in Young's catalog are few, but they're strong: the quality of his songwriting, which ranks with Bob Dylan for depth and emotional power; his commitment to spontaneous creation that values honesty and passion over technique; and the force of his guitar work, introspective in his acoustic work and roaring in his electric performances, especially with Crazy Horse. His two dominant styles have been gentle folk and country-rock (best typified by 1970's After the Gold Rush and 1972's Harvest), and crushingly loud electric guitar rock (1990's Ragged Glory and the second half of 1979's Rust Never Sleeps represent this facet at its peak). But he's just as likely to detour into jam-friendly rock (1969's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere), ragged blues-rock (1975's Tonight's the Night), electronics (1982's Trans), rockabilly (1983's Everybody's Rockin'), straight-ahead country (1985's Old Ways), politically themed concept albums (2003's Greendale and 2006's Living with War), and lo-fi interpretive sessions of songs from the past (2012's Americana and 2014's A Letter Home). Despite his enormous catalog and influence, Young continues to move forward, writing new songs and exploring new music. His restless spirit has ensured that he's one of the few rock veterans as vital in his old age as he was in his youth, still making fresh sounds and challenging his audience more than 50 years into his career.

Born in Toronto, Canada, Neil Young moved to Winnipeg with his mother following her divorce from his sports journalist father. Young began playing music in high school. Not only did he play in garage rock outfits like the Squires, but he also played in local folk clubs and coffeehouses, where he eventually met Joni Mitchell and Stephen Stills. During the mid-'60s, he returned to Toronto, where he played as a solo folk act. By 1966, he joined the Mynah Birds, which also featured bassist Bruce Palmer and Rick James. The group recorded an album's worth of material for Motown, none of which was released at the time. Frustrated by his lack of success, Young moved to Los Angeles in his Pontiac hearse, taking Palmer along as support. Shortly after they arrived in L.A., they happened to meet Stills, and they formed Buffalo Springfield, who quickly became one of the leaders of the California folk-rock scene.

Despite the success of Buffalo Springfield, the group was plagued with tension, and Young quit the band several times before finally leaving to become a solo artist in May of 1968. Hiring Elliot Roberts as his manager, Young signed with Reprise Records and released his eponymous debut album in early 1969. By the time the album was released, he had begun playing with a local band called the Rockets, which featured guitarist Danny Whitten, bassist Billy Talbot, and drummer Ralph Molina. Young renamed the group Crazy Horse and had them support him on his second album, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, which was recorded in just two weeks. Featuring such Young staples as "Cinnamon Girl" and "Down by the River," the album went gold. Following the completion of the record, he began jamming with Crosby, Stills & Nash, eventually joining the group for their spring 1970 album Déjà Vu. Although he was now part of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, he continued to record as a solo artist, releasing After the Gold Rush in August 1970. The album, along with its accompanying single "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," established Young as a solo star, and fame only increased through his association with CSN&Y.

Although Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were a very successful act, they were also volatile, and they had split by the spring 1971 release of the live Four Way Street. The following year, Young had his first number one album with the mellow country-rock of Harvest, which also featured his first (and only) number one single, "Heart of Gold." Instead of embracing his success, he spurned it, following it with the noisy, bleak live film Journey Through the Past. Both the movie and its soundtrack received terrible reviews, as did the live Time Fades Away, an album recorded with the Stray Gators that was released in 1973.

Both Journey Through the Past and Time Fades Away signaled that Young was entering a dark period in his life, but they only scratched the surface of his anguish. Inspired by the overdose deaths of Danny Whitten in 1972 and his roadie Bruce Berry the following year, Young wrote and recorded the bleak, druggy Tonight's the Night late in 1973, but declined to release it at the time. Instead, he released On the Beach, which was nearly as harrowing, in 1974; Tonight's the Night finally appeared in the spring of 1975. By the time of its release, Young had recovered, as indicated by the record's hard-rocking follow-up, Zuma, an album recorded with Crazy Horse and released later that year.

Young's focus began to wander in 1976, as he recorded the duet album Long May You Run with Stephen Stills and then abandoned his partner midway through the supporting tour. The following year, he recorded the country-rock-oriented American Stars 'n Bars, which featured vocals by Nicolette Larson, who was also prominent on 1978's Comes a Time. Prior to the release of Comes a Time, Young scrapped the country-rock album Homegrown and assembled the triple-album retrospective Decade. At the end of 1978, he embarked on an arena tour called Rust Never Sleeps, which was designed as a showcase for new songs. Half of the concert featured Young solo, the other half featured him with Crazy Horse. That was the pattern that Rust Never Sleeps, released in the summer of 1979, followed. The record was hailed as a comeback, proving that Young was one of the few rock veterans who attacked punk rock head-on. That fall he released the double album Live Rust and the live movie Rust Never Sleeps.

Rust Never Sleeps restored Young to his past glory, but he perversely decided to trash his goodwill in 1980 with Hawks & Doves, a collection of acoustic songs that bore the influence of conservative right-wing politics. In 1981, Young released the heavy rock album Re*ac*tor, which received poor reviews. Following its release, he left Reprise for the fledgling Geffen Records, where he was promised lots of money and artistic freedom. Young decided to push his Geffen contract to the limit, releasing the electronic Trans in December 1982, where his voice was recorded through a computerized vocoder. The album and its accompanying technology-dependent tour were received with bewildered, negative reviews. The rockabilly of Everybody's Rockin' (1983) was equally scorned, and Young soon settled into a cult audience for the mid-'80s.

Over the course of the decade, Young released three albums that were all stylistic exercises. In 1985, he released the straight country Old Ways, which was followed by the new wave-tinged Landing on Water the following year. He returned to Crazy Horse for 1987's Life, but by that time, he and Geffen had grown sick of each other, and he returned to Reprise in 1988. His first album for Reprise was the bluesy, horn-driven This Note's for You, which was supported by an acclaimed video that satirized rock stars endorsing commercial products. At the end of the year, he recorded a reunion album with Crosby, Stills & Nash called American Dream, which was greeted with savagely negative reviews.

American Dream didn't prepare any observer for the critical and commercial success of 1989's Freedom, which found Young following the half-acoustic/half-electric blueprint of Rust Never Sleeps to fine results. Around the time of its release, Young became a hip name to drop in indie rock circles, and he was the subject of a tribute record titled The Bridge in 1989. The following year, Young reunited with Crazy Horse for Ragged Glory, a loud, feedback-drenched album that received his strongest reviews since the '70s. For the supporting tour, Young hired the avant-rock band Sonic Youth as his opening group, providing them with needed exposure while earning him hip credibility within alternative rock scenes. On the advice of Sonic Youth, Young added the noise collage EP Arc as a bonus to his 1991 live album, Weld.

Weld and the Sonic Youth tour helped position Neil Young as an alternative and grunge rock forefather, but he decided to abandon loud music for its 1992 follow-up, Harvest Moon. An explicit sequel to his 1972 breakthrough, Harvest Moon became Young's biggest hit in years, and he supported the record with an appearance on MTV Unplugged, which was released the following year as an album. Also in 1993, Geffen released the rarities collection Lucky Thirteen. The following year, he released Sleeps with Angels, which was hailed as a masterpiece in some quarters. Following its release, Young began jamming with Pearl Jam, eventually recording an album with the Seattle band in early 1995. The resulting record, Mirror Ball, was released to positive reviews in the summer of 1995, but it wasn't the commercial blockbuster it was expected to be; due to legal reasons, Pearl Jam's name was not allowed to be featured on the cover.

In the summer of 1996, he reunited with Crazy Horse for Broken Arrow and supported it with a brief tour. That tour was documented in Jim Jarmusch's 1997 film Year of the Horse, which was accompanied by a double-disc live album. In 1999, Young reunited with Crosby, Stills & Nash for the first time in a decade, supporting their Looking Forward LP with the supergroup's first tour in a quarter century. A new solo effort, Silver & Gold, followed in the spring of 2000. In recognition of his 2000 summer tour, Young released the live album Road Rock, Vol. 1 the following fall, showcasing a two-night account of Young's performance at the Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison, Colorado, in September 2000. A DVD version titled Red Rocks Live was issued that December, and included 12 tracks initially unavailable on Road Rock, Vol. 1. His next studio project was his most ambitious yet, a concept album about small-town life titled Greendale that he also mounted as a live dramatic tour and indie film.

In early 2005, Young was diagnosed with a potentially deadly brain aneurysm. Undergoing treatment didn't slow him down, however, as he continued to write and record his next project. The acoustically based Prairie Wind appeared in the fall, with the concert film Heart of Gold, based around the album and directed by Jonathan Demme, released in 2006. That year also saw the release of the controversial Living with War, a collection of protest songs against the war in Iraq that featured titles such as "Let's Impeach the President," "Shock and Awe," and "Lookin' for a Leader." Restless, prolific, and increasingly self-referential, Young issued Chrome Dreams II late in 2007 and the car-themed Fork in the Road in 2009. Later in 2009, Young finally issued the first installment in his long-rumored Archives series, Archives, Vol. 1, a massive first volume that combined over ten CD and DVD discs in a single box. As he was prepping Archives, Vol. 2, Young entered the studio with producer Daniel Lanois and recorded Le Noise, which appeared in the fall of 2010.

Archives, Vol. 2 was not forthcoming, however, as Young stayed very active during the early 2010s. He finally reunited with Richie Furay and Stephen Stills as Buffalo Springfield for a pair of shows at his annual Bridge School Benefit in the fall of 2010. It wasn't a complete reunion, since bassist Bruce Palmer had died in 2004 and drummer Dewey Martin passed in 2009, but the three singers used drummer Joe Vitale and bassist Rick Rosas to fill in. The same configuration played six concerts in the spring of 2011 but reportedly did no studio work. Young continued going through his archives with the release of A Treasure in 2011, a single-disc set of live tracks recorded during his 1984-1985 tour with the International Harvesters that featured five previously unreleased Young songs mixed in with older songs like "Flying on the Ground Is Wrong" and "Are You Ready for the Country?," all done in the classic Harvest style. In 2012, Young reunited with Crazy Horse for Americana, a set of classic folk tunes like "This Land Is Your Land" and "Wayfarin' Stranger," followed several months later by the double-disc album of originals Psychedelic Pill, which again saw Young turning to the guitar garage stomp of Crazy Horse.

In September 2012, Young published his memoir, Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream. In the book, he wrote at length about his family and career, and also expressed his frustration with the low sound quality of digital music. Timed with the release of the book, Young announced the founding of Pono Music, originally a new audio format but later simplified to a music player and downloading service designed for audiophiles and listeners who had similar issues with sound quality. A Kickstarter campaign in 2014 raised $6 million, one of the largest digitally crowdfunded efforts in history, and the company started shipping the devices in the fall of 2014. On the recording front, Young entered Jack White's Third Man studios in Nashville to cut A Letter Home, a covers album featuring songs from Young's favorite songwriters. Within a few months, he announced another full-length for 2014, Storytone. The album was heralded with the release of an environmentally conscious song, "Who's Going to Stand Up?," that Young had been performing in concert.

Young's passion for environmental causes also informed his next album, 2015's The Monsanto Years, in which he took on the issues of genetically modified crops and agribusiness; the album found him backed by Promise of the Real, a band led by Lukas Nelson, son of outlaw country icon and Young's close friend Willie Nelson. Young and Promise of the Real supported The Monsanto Years with a tour, which became the basis for the 2016 live double album Earth. Just after the June release of Earth, Young wrote and recorded the protest album Peace Trail, which appeared in December 2016.

Young continued his burst of activity in 2017 with the release of "Children of Destiny." It was the first single from The Visitor, an album recorded with Promise of the Real that appeared in December 2017. The Promise of the Real also supported Young on Paradox, the soundtrack to the Daryl Hannah film starring Young and the band. Also in 2018, Young released two volumes in his Archives series: April saw the release of Roxy: Tonight's the Night Live, which was recorded in 1973, and November brought the release of Songs for Judy, a collection of highlights from his acoustic 1976 tour. Young unveiled another archival release in June 2019, Tuscaloosa, a live set recorded at an Alabama date on the same 1973 tour that produced Time Fades Away.

—Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Written and recorded in 1973 shortly after the death of roadie Bruce Berry, Neil Young's second close associate to die of a heroin overdose in six months (the first was Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten), Tonight's the Night was Young's musical expression of grief, combined with his rejection of the stardom he had achieved in the late '60s and early '70s. The title track, performed twice, was a direct narrative about Berry: "Bruce Berry was a working man/He used to load that Econoline van." Whitten was heard singing "Come On Baby Let's Go Downtown," a live track recorded years earlier. Elsewhere, Young frequently referred to drug use and used phrases that might have described his friends, such as the chorus of "Tired Eyes," "He tried to do his best, but he could not." Performing with the remains of Crazy Horse, bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina, along with Nils Lofgren (guitar and piano) and Ben Keith (steel guitar), Young performed in the ragged manner familiar from Time Fades Away -- his voice was often hoarse and he strained to reach high notes, while the playing was loose, with mistakes and shifting tempos. But the style worked perfectly for the material, emphasizing the emotional tone of Young's mourning and contrasting with the polished sound of CSNY and Harvest that Young also disparaged. He remained unimpressed with his commercial success, noting in "World on a String," "The world on a string/Doesn't mean anything." In "Roll Another Number," he said he was "a million miles away/From that helicopter day" when he and CSN had played Woodstock. And in "Albuquerque," he said he had been "starvin' to be alone/Independent from the scene that I've known" and spoke of his desire to "find somewhere where they don't care who I am." Songs like "Speakin' Out" and "New Mama" seemed to find some hope in family life, but Tonight's the Night did not offer solutions to the personal and professional problems it posed. It was the work of a man trying to turn his torment into art and doing so unflinchingly. Depending on which story you believe, Reprise Records rejected it or Young withdrew it from its scheduled release at the start of 1974 after touring with the material in the U.S. and Europe. In 1975, after a massive CSNY tour, Young at the last minute dumped a newly recorded album and finally put Tonight's the Night out instead. Though it did not become one of his bigger commercial successes, the album immediately was recognized as a unique masterpiece by critics, and it has continued to be ranked as one of the greatest rock & roll albums ever made.

—William Ruhlmann

In February 1972, Neil Young put out an album called Harvest and it became massive, going platinum and becoming the best-selling album of the year. In addition to changing Young's position in the marketplace, the album's runaway success made a mark on record shopping for years to come. Anyone who went to a store before the vinyl revival began in earnest can tell you that used copies of Harvest were utterly ubiquitous—like Cat Stevens' Teaser and the Firecat and Carole King's Tapestry, there was seemingly no thrift shop or garage sale without one. With Harvest, Young built on the commercial breakthrough of his work with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, mixing two sounds beloved by aging baby boomers—rootsy country-rock and intimate singer/songwriter folk. Harvest was the right record for this weird, post-'60s moment, and a shaggy Canadian singer-songwriter with the shaky voice was suddenly something approaching a pop star.Harvest had its share of wistful and breezy songs, but a number on the second side called "The Needle and the Damage Done" was a sign of things to come. It was a song, in part, about guitarist, singer, and songwriter Danny Whitten, Young's friend and a member of his frequent backing band, Crazy Horse, specifically Whitten's addiction to heroin. "The Needle and the Damage Done," recorded live in concert and solo, set a template for a certain kind of song about drug abuse: It's beautiful, elegiac, precise—a focused lament written with a great deal of craft, like Elliott Smith's "Needle in the Hay" or U2's "Running to Stand Still."

While he always excelled at this style, Young's approach to songwriting was about to shift drastically. "'Heart of Gold' put me in the middle of the road," he famously wrote of Harvest's big single in the liner notes to his 1977 collection Decade, perhaps thinking of his album in the bins next to those by massive sellers by Cat Stevens and Carole King. "Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch." Tonight's the Night, a noisy, harrowing scrape along the guardrail that sends sparks flying upward, was Young's most moving dispatch from his chosen place. As summer turned to fall in 1973, 18 months after Harvest hit stores, Neil Young was 27 years old. He was learning that bad things can start to happen when you reach your late twenties, especially when you're drinking too much and doing too many drugs and are hanging around people who do the same. Your late twenties is when you might find that certain people who once seemed like "they like to party" are going much further, and the situation is getting dangerous. Bodies that seemed indestructible in youth start to give out; good times suddenly aren't so good anymore.

In August of '73, when Young started the sessions that produced the bulk of Tonight's the Night, he found himself in the heart of such a scene, and the center could not hold.Two events in the previous 10 months had shaken Young to his core, and they shaped how this album came to be and how it was heard. In November 1972, Young was rehearsing the band he dubbed the Stray Gators to take them on tour in support of Harvest. Whitten was asked to join the group but it quickly became clear that his addiction had advanced to the point where playing shows was impossible, so Young fired him and gave him $50 and a plane ticket back to Los Angeles. Whitten died of an overdose of valium and alcohol within a day, and Young was overcome with guilt about his friend's death. In June of '73, two months before the Tonight's the Night sessions, Bruce Berry, a roadie for Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young and beloved member of Young's particular L.A. scene, died of an overdose of heroin. So Tonight's the Night comes freighted with a certain amount of legend, and people generally encounter it now through the lens of 40 years of rock writing.

If you've read enough about music, you've read the above "ditch" comment, and you'll have it somewhere in your mind the first time you press "play" or lower the turntable arm. The general understanding on Tonight's the Night is that it's dark, it's depressing, a record about loss and destruction and the end. If you listen to it knowing these things, you're in for a surprise. Because it is those things, but it's also so much more. Tonight's the Night is shocking the first time you hear it because for a record on the receiving end of so much first-generation rock criticism focusing on its sorrow and grief, it often sounds like a raucous party being thrown by a bunch of lovable knuckleheads having the time of their life.After the repetition of the opening "tonight's the night" refrain on the opening title track, the first two words on the album are "Bruce Berry," and the album's connection to Young's deceased friend go deeper.

In August '73, after some sessions at the L.A.'s Sunset Sound, Young decided a proper studio wasn't the right setting for the album he had in mind. So Young's producer David Briggs had the idea to record at a Studio Instrument Rentals, which was started by Bruce Berry and his brother Ken. In addition to renting equipment, S.I.R. had a small practice space in the back with an elevated stage. A mobile recording truck was parked behind the building and a hole was knocked in the wall to run cable to the truck. Young's band now consisted of the Crazy Horse rhythm section of Billy Talbot on bass and Ralph Molina on drums, young guitarist and sometime Crazy Horse member Nils Lofgren, and steel guitar player Ben Keith, who had worked with Young in Nashville on Harvest. Over the course of a month, they'd assemble in the evening with Briggs at S.I.R. to drink and do drugs and play pool and shoot the shit until they were ready to climb onstage and make music. The Tonight's the Night songs recorded in the practice space were cut live in this fashion, with no overdubs and minimal editing, and the album itself is one of the most sonically raw albums ever released by a major artist. The band is loose and well-oiled. At times Young is too close or too far away from the microphone, and his voice is often straining at the upper end of his range. Young was recording the month after Steely Dan had released Countdown to Ecstasy, and the rich possibilities of the recording studio were reaching a zenith, but he was recording in a dimly-lit room with a drunk band in the back of a retail store, noisily banging into microphone stands on takes that would eventually be used on an album by a label owned by Warner Brothers.

This off-the-cuff feel defines the album. Working with Young, producer David Briggs was about capturing performances, not making records. The album begins with a ghostly bit of tinkling piano and guitar that sounds like a brief warm-up, the kind of thing that would be cut from any record without a second thought. But here it's perfect, lending the kind of "here we go!" feeling of the best album-openers. Young's words on Berry are personal and almost uncomfortably specific, basically saying, "Here was this man; here is what he did, and now he's gone." Young talks about Berry picking up Young's guitar and singing late at night after gigs when everyone was gone, and being moved deeply by a voice that was "as real as the day was long." That kind of "realness" is the animating idea of this album. The meticulous craftsmanship that had carried Young to the top with Harvest had no place here; now it was time to make some noise. Tonight's the Night is an album not so much about death as about mourning. And while we might like to think of mourning as a dignified pursuit grounded in ritual—a black veil, food at the door, loved ones at beck and call—the truth is that mourning can be messy and out of control and it can sometimes look like something else entirely. Sometimes mourning can even look like a macabre celebration, embracing life with one arm while the black figure of death is curled inside the other. That's where Young and his band found themselves during this period. "Lookout Joe," one of a couple of songs on Tonight's the Night recorded in December '72, has a couplet that conveys the record's reckless spirit perfectly: "Remember Bill from up on the hill?/A Cadillac put a hole in his arm/But old Bill, he's up there still/Havin' a ball rollin' to the bottom."A few songs seem at first to exist more for the people playing them than the listener, but that conspiratorial sense of community between the musicians turns out to be a huge part of the appeal. "Speakin' Out" is the sound of a band feeling their way through the most basic chord changes possible, the kind of structure even the most intoxicated and most damaged musician could handle with no problem. The meaning lies in hearing these people in this room playing together, the feeling they conjure by the presence, and not in Young's lines like "I went to the movie the other night/The plot was groovy, it was out of sight." Tonight's the Night's beauty lies in its imperfections. "Mellow My Mind" has a similarly unfinished feel, but the strain of Young's voice is so palpable, every half-baked couplet swollen with ache, that it's almost unbearably affecting."Roll Another Number (For the Road)" is a song about the end of a long night of incapacitating inebriation performed by a band that sounds like they've just experienced a long night of incapacitating inebriation.

Young has always been, on one level, of the hippie generation's true believers—he did, after all, title the first volume of his memoir Waging Heavy Peace. But he can just as often be repelled by the soft-headedness of the movement. "I'm not goin' back to Woodstock for a while," he sings on "Roll Another Number," explaining that he's "a million miles away/From that helicopter day." The road so many of his generation had taken led him here, drunk on a dark stage singing songs about death and loss to nobody. Sometimes songs are knocked together and passed around, something to be used as much as something performed. And for songs like these, you grab whatever's at hand. Such a loose and generous approach led Young to a place where he could lift the melody of a song someone else had written wholesale and call his creation "Borrowed Tune" without shame or apology. "I'm singing my borrowed tune, I took from the Rolling Stones/Alone in this empty room, too wasted to write my own," he sings over minimal piano, voicing a melody first found on the Jagger/Richards composition "Lady Jane." Young's Stones' interpolation and blues changes suggest that the building blocks of music belong to us all, and we should take what we need and turn the raw material into a new expression. That feeling, of the possibility of transformation, extends to the record as a whole. There are so many loose ends, frayed connections, and smudgy borders, no single song has any one specific meaning.

Listening to the album becomes an act of authorship, as its slurred words and pugnacious spirit are mapped onto your own life. Ben Keith's pedal steel guitar playing is often astonishing in its beauty, which provides a layer of tension with the often-sloppy playing and rough sonics. In Keith's hands, the pedal steel imbues every song with a symphonic grandeur, and also a feeling of life-affirming dignity. His show-stopping number here is the gorgeous ballad "Albuquerque." While Young sings about disappearing western landscape ("So I'll stop when I can/Find some fried eggs and country ham/I'll find somewhere/Where they don't care who I am"), Keith conjures up huge, rich clouds of notes. No matter what else is happening on a given song, how loud the party gets, Keith lends a note of pathos, ensuring that the undercurrent of grief remains. Whitten's loss is honored by the inclusion of "(Come on Baby, Let's Go) Downtown," a song he composed with Young and sings, heard here on a version recorded at a 1970 Neil Young and Crazy Horse gig. That "Downtown" wound up on Tonight's the Night is kind of a twisted joke, because the song itself, despite being a joyous rave-up, is actually about scoring heroin. Whitten's death seems impossible when this song crackles with so much life. It's both a celebration and a lament. Hearing their voices in unison on the chorus is a kind of prayer, two music lifers realizing in a moment the power of what they could do together. And the album as a whole takes this idea and extends it outward, first to Young's fellow musicians, and then to us.

The three albums later grouped together as "The Ditch Trilogy" include the 1973 live album Time Fades Away (culled from the shows Whitten had hoped to play on) and 1974's On the Beach. They are very different documents bound together by the force of Young's vision. Though Tonight's the Night was recorded before On the Beach, it wouldn't be released for another two years. This turned out to be to the album's advantage, because its final presentation highlighted the fact that it was snapshot of a moment in time, and gave Young the opportunity to inflate its myth.When it finally emerged, it came inside one of rock's greatest sleeves, a spooky high contrast black-and-white photo of Young printed on blotter paper. On the LP itself, the Reprise label, usually tan, was black, and there were cryptic carvings in the run-out groove, "Hello Waterface" in the A-side and "Goodbye Waterface" on the B. An insert included with album features notes from Young with a sort of apology ("I'm sorry. You don't know these people. This means nothing to you.") and a lengthy article about Young written in Dutch. The article, as it turns out, was a harsh pan of a show from Young's tour following the completion of the Tonight's the Night material, undertaken a year and a half before the album's release. These shows, which are now the stuff of legend, were theatrical. "The stage set was very strange," reads a translation of the liner notes. "At the back a large palm tree; next to the piano and loudspeakers were hanging all sorts of women's boots and there were hubcaps laid all around. We were in total darkness when Neil and his band—Ben Keith, Nils Lofgren, Ralph Molina & Billy Talbot took the stage and slowly began playing the 1st number 'Tonight's the Night.' The sound was miserable, the band's coordination was miserable and Neil's piano and singing were miserable." During these shows, Young would often mix songs with long rants about his deceased friends. He was toying with his place in the entertainment machine, trying to figure out how to sneak these heavier feelings in. His "Miami Beach" routine was a way of externalizing the artifice of your typical music performance to make the real feelings at the core that much more intense. It was a rock show designed to feel like a seance, a way of communing with the dead. But in the end, Tonight's the Night is really a record about life. Like a drunk at the end of a long night or a boxer barely on their feet, the record staggers, stumbles, and lunges forward; it's prevailing mode is "unsteady." Nothing lands where it should, and it feels like it could collapse at any moment. But while a lurching gait can be a marker of damage or dysfunction, it can also be a sign of defiance. Because some force, whether it's from outside or it's something you bring on yourself, is trying to cripple you. But guess what: you're still standing.

— Mark Richardson, Pitchfork