CD Odyssey Disc 422: Neil Young

Just back from a good workout, and with a belly full of pizza, I’ve returned to amaze and entertain you, dear readers, with more random music reviews.

Disc 422 is…Tonight’s the Night

Artist: Neil Young

Year of Release: 1975

What’s up with the Cover?  For the second review in a row, we get another black and white shot of the artist.  This time it is Neil Young, looking well and truly out of it, but still totally in control of the microphone in front of his unkempt face.  That’s Neil, alright.

How I Came To Know It: This is just me being a Neil Young fan, and drilling through his back catalogue.  I bought this album fairly recently – certainly in the last decade or so.

How It Stacks Up:  I have fifteen Neil Young albums, and I like all of them to varying degrees but this one couldn’t quite keep up.  I’d say it is 13^th or 14^th on the list.

Rating:  3 stars, which tells you how consistently good Neil Young albums are.

Ever wonder what happened to all those hippies from 1967’s summer of love?  Sure, most of them probably went off and got jobs, but what about those few who were still drifting around Haight-Ashbury and other haunts?  By 1975, they’d be in their mid to late twenties.  Likely a little more disillusioned, and maybe a little more disposed to a harder and sadder edged folk music.  I’d like to think they were listening to this album.

“Tonight’s the Night” has Neil showing a bit more of a rock edge to his folksy, thoughtful music.  He works in blues riffs, and the electric guitar is dirty, and with a hint of deliberate distortion.  This album’s sound heralds the coming many years later of hard-edged rock albums like “Freedom” and “Sleeps with Angels.”

Unfortunately, Neil is still finding his feet with this sound back in 1975, and it shows.  The music hits a lot of deliberately discordant notes, but instead of sounding innovative, it just knocks you out of your enjoyment of the song.  The big exception to this is “Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown” which is the perfect blend of hippy protest music with straight ahead southern guitar rock.  This song had me thinking about another Neil Young song that was a minor hit twenty years later, “Downtown” with a similar sound and vibe.  It would be hard to imagine the later track without his early work on “Tonight’s the Night.”

Other songs are softer and much more in the hippy folksy tradition of Neil’s earlier albums.  In particular, “Mellow My Mind” and “Roll another Number (for the Road)” – songs which deliver exactly the vibe their titles suggest they will.  I love the opening lines of “Roll another Number”:

"It's too dark

 To put the keys

 In my ignition,

 And the mornin' sun is yet

 To climb my hood ornament."

While not quite as brilliant as Gordon Lightfoot’s opening to “Early Morning Rain”, these lines paint a pretty fine picture of the end of an all-night bender.  Instead of finding himself at the end of a runway, Neil wakes up in his car which is probably a step up.  It could go tragically from here, but Neil keeps the mood light, praising the ‘open hearted people’ he’s been meeting along the way.  If it weren’t for the hood ornament reference, I’d have guessed he was driving an old VW bus.

Much as there are bright spots on this album (and I’ve just mentioned a few) overall, the record doesn’t grab me the way it should.  It feels a little unfinished, and the production values may be deliberately rough around the edges, but they’re too rough and they mostly serve to distract.

The guitar work is pretty in many places, and brilliant in a few, and Neil’s high and yearning vocals always transport me, but the odd chord choices in places seem deliberately in quest of the new sound that he won’t master for another few years yet.

Recently I was out with friends listening to music, and someone put on a Neil Young song that sounded familiar, but that I couldn’t place.  When I asked what it was, they said it was from “Tonight’s the Night” and it surprised me, since I own this album.  But the truth is I don’t put it on much, and that’s because it is just a bit uneven, and in places Neil loses me in his own musical meanderings.

This record has all the makings of greatness, but it can’t seem to find its focus.  That was probably OK for hippies in 1975, but for me in 2012, I wish it were just one notch better.  Yes, it is good, but Neil is so much better than good.

Best tracks:  Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown, Roll another Number (for the Road), Tonight’s the Night Pt. 2.