Neil Young

A man, a songwriter, the greatest of them all: pain and the manifestation of suffering, a cover as black as pitch, acid guitars and restless visions, the outer world internalized and then externalized as a neurasthenic, hallucinated lament, the timelessness of human urges, the indictment of the excesses of an ideal and the futile search for redemption, the sense of loss and inconsolable absence. Rock'n'roll, drugs, death, distilled into the point of no return of self-destructive madness set to music; Neil Young, a despairing chronicler, with "Tonight's The Night" — a diary-masterpiece and unrelenting harbinger of lives sacrificed on the altar of rock.

Describing feelings, or their outward expression, is as arduous a task as it is a futile one, because doing so means wrenching them out of the context of lived experience and dragging them into a realm inhabited by artificial constructs — the fruit of the commodification of ideas, of the sheer need to communicate; what results is a debasement of the message. Talking about “Tonight's The Night”, in particular, risks trivializing the depth of that experience, but talking about it also means describing its magnificence and hoping that kindred spirits will surrender to the corrosive flow of those notes. And so the drunken lament of “Tonight's The Night” opens the funeral, with the lines “Bruce Barry was a working man/ he used to load that Encoline van”, dedicated to Bruce Barry, Young's roadie and friend, who died of a heroin overdose, as did Danny Whitten, guitarist of Crazy Horse (the entire album would be dedicated to the two of them). Legend has it that the Canadian forced his musicians to play at night, running on almost no sleep, and the aching blues of “Speakin' Out” lets that sense of hallucinated exhaustion and veiled nervousness show through.

“Tonight's The Night” is an album that oozes pain — the pain of watching loved ones fall into the abyss of vice and never resurface. But here the outpouring of suffering is catharsis, not mere self-pity; it's a means of confronting loss, of hitting rock bottom before beginning the climb back up. We don't know whether Young truly managed it, but the fact remains that “Tonight's The Night” is one of those rare cases where art and real life become indissolubly intertwined, rendering the line between mere artistic expression and the outward release of feeling nonexistent, or at least vanishingly thin. In this sense, the heart-wrenching “Mellow My Mind” is emblematic: here the Canadian, accompanied by his inseparable harmonica, seems to be shedding tears rather than singing. Even the album's most driving rock'n'roll numbers are shot through with pain, like the hallucinated boogie of “World On A String”, where Young shows off his jittery guitar work over a drum part that pounds away like a metronome.

But the funeral proper resumes with “Borrowed Tune”, piano, harmonica and a thin voice still aching and wistful. The electric guitar returns to clatter front and center on “Come On Baby Let's Go Downtown”, a blues shuffle with a hummable chorus — perhaps the album's most easygoing track, recorded live at a Fillmore East show and featuring Danny Whitten on vocals. The mood relaxes again with the country of “Roll Another Number”, which harks back to the rustic ballads of “Harvest”, thanks above all to Ben Keith's steel guitar and the excellent background vocal work of Molina and Whitten.

“Albuquerque” is one of Neil Young's masterpieces: a slowcore avant la lettre with a martial gait, its guitars in dialogue — Young's acidic, Keith's desert-dry — dripping with psychedelia, a blueprint for the Canadian's most experimental songs (think of the magnificent “Cortez The Killer”).

The album closes with the dragging, funereal talking blues of “Tired Eyes”, in which Young tries to grant some peace to those weary eyes that have watched rock'n'roll take hold of and devastate the lives of loved ones. The instruments lock together perfectly, with piano and guitar serving as accompaniment to Young's viscerally anguished singing, while the only solo license granted goes to the harmonica, which, as ever, paints an utterly sorrowful melody.

“Tonight's The Night” is perhaps the first concept album about grief in the history of rock, in which Neil Young, with a clear-eyed view of his own era, manages to capture the excesses of an ideal, transposing it all into the context of his own lived experience, processing that experience, falling into cognitive dissonance with everything he had once believed in (a similar operation was carried out by the David Crosby of “If I Could Only Remember My Name”).

The greatness of “Tonight's The Night” lies in its being a fully rounded work, in which depth of content is conveyed through an original sound, one immensely influential on subsequent generations of musicians. In the hallucinated country-blues of “Albuquerque” lies much of the inspiration for Built To Spill, for instance, while the Canadian's jittery guitar playing is the sound of grunge and of many of the bands that spawned it (just speed up the tempo of any song from “Tonight's The Night” and you get Dinosaur Jr.). With this record Young reveals himself as a supreme philosopher of pain, the bearer of a universal, timeless message, precisely because it springs from individual experience rather than from socio-political events tied to a given historical moment — events to which the depth and reach of the message would otherwise necessarily be bound (a limitation found in much of Dylan's poetics). In a word: immortal.

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14/11/2006