Fun Out On The Mainline

We’re doing okay in the seventies, history is coming back, everything’s okay, Spiro says it’s alright …

This is a special one folks. Neil Young Roxy: Tonight’s The Night Live.

---

Picture the scene, late September 1973 your band gets the chance to open a brand-new music venue on Sunset Strip based in a former strip club and you should be flying high on the astonishing success of your last LP; only, life happens.

A bandmate and a good friend both OD, it hits you hard as you continue to medicate yourself to quite a heroic extent, sleeping all day and recording at night with your band. You cut some tracks, it doesn’t quite work out and then you gird your nostrils and channel it all into writing an astonishingly dark, painfully emotional yet utterly numb set of tracks that your record company would refuse to out out for another 2 years.

The Roxy gig happens as you are finishing off the tracks, you play 2 shows a day there for three days running. You name your band the Santa Monica Flyers as you ‘fly’ on down from there every evening while the ordinary decent folk are sleeping, eating, sporting and being ordinary.

Being the sort of chap who ploughs his own furrow you decide to treat the crowd to an entire set of new tracks, it isn’t about them anyhow. You give it absolutely everything.

You are Neil Young. Congratulations, possibly.

---

Being a 21st century boy, it absolutely flabbergasts me to think that the crowd were getting served up 10 tracks here they had never heard before, with an intensity and intent that they would never have heard from Mr Young before. In fact Tonight’s The Night would not be released until 1975, although gig closer ‘Walk On’ would be released on On The Beach in 1974; which doesn’t stop Neil introducing it by saying ‘we’re going to do an old tune for you now’, the audience cheers but then doesn’t seem to mind to much.

The crowd love it, of course. Lapping up Neil’s frequent strip club jokey asides and laceratingly heart baring songs with equal relish. Audiences were obviously better then too, try that now and you’d just be heckled by some dumb fuck shouting for the hits.

---

Okay some housekeeping. Roxy: Tonight’s The Night is a 2018 archival release from old Neil. It’s a beautifully packaged, perfectly recorded and mastered release too, everything here just shrieks quality. Which is as well, because music this good demands it.

---

The opening version of ‘Tonight’s The Night’ defies my limited vocabulary of super-super superlatives. It isn’t as cold and cutting as the studio version, there’s a warmth here amongst the anger, helplessness and frustration. The harmonies are perfectly imperfect and the performance is absolutely spine-tingling. Simply put this is Neil Young at his very best, almost nobody got anywhere near to being this good, ever.

The memory of Bruce Berry is perfectly honoured here, although it always makes me smirk when Neil sings,

Well, late at night when the people were gone
He used to pick up my guitar
And sing a song in a shaky voice
That was real as the day was long

I mean, Jesus hell! How shaky does your voice have to be for Neil Young to call you out on it? I can only imagine Feargal Sharkey duetting with Larry The Lamb whilst riding a bicycle down a cobbled street, that shakey.

But Roxy: Tonight’s the Night is more than a title track*, monumental though it is. There isn’t a duff moment here, only a single track does not improve on the studio version for me, ‘Roll Another Number (For The Road)’, which is just not as well fleshed-out. So we get gentle songs of camaraderie and peaceful yearnings (Mellow My Mind), the deceptive prettiness of ‘Tired Eyes’**, the desperate sighing fatigue of ‘Albuquerque’ and the wonderful propulsive folksy funkiness of ‘New Mama’. I also have a soft spot for the dignified booze-blues of ‘Speakin Out’.

Danny Whitten’s co-authored and sung, ‘Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown’, his ode to scoring the drugs that eventually killed him when he was sacked from the band for his habit is missing from this LP compared to the studio version, possibly as it was a Crazy Horse backed track, or possibly because Young wasn’t quite numb enough to sing those words yet; ‘sure enough they’ll be selling stuff when the moon begins to rise’.

As always Young’s singular magnetism holds total sway, even then he still sounded heavier than most metal bands just playing an acoustic guitar. He has a hell of a band backing him here though, arguably one of most responsive and flexible of his whole career. Nils Logfren is immaculate as ever, the amazing Ben Keith and the rhythmic drive of Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina make for a great listen, at times questing and at others decisive and joyous. I think Keith’s presence in particular stops these tracks being buried in any excess bombast, his slide and pedal steel colouring everything here.

---

I like the way that Roxy: Tonight’s The Night gives the lie to the assumption that Young was on the ultimate down trip at this time. His stage raps^ are amusing and there is goofy fun going on here. How else do you explain following the harrowing first version of ‘Tonight’s The Night’ with the band playing an impromptu version of ‘Roll Out The Barrel’? the audience hooting and hollering along with the only track they’d know that evening. Young’s obsession with the strip club past of the Roxy is front and centre, there is much talk of Candy Barr and a prize for the first topless girl up on stage; hey it was ’73! Neil keeps welcoming us to Miami Beach and even threatening to remove his shades at one point^^.

---

All told Roxy: Tonight’s The Night is a brilliant release and I couldn’t recommend it highly enough. Existential dread never sounded so good, or as fun again. Buy it.

1088 Down (and out on the mainline).

*for the sake of brevity let’s skip the second, faster version at the end which is warmer and looser still.

**’Well, he shot four men in a cocaine deal / And he left ’em lyin’ in an open field‘, always makes me think of No Country For Old Men.

^Spotify names them as separate tracks, which I think is a publishing trick to maximise profits.

^^I suspect after his late nights and consumption at the time, this would be a bit like the scene where the Nazis open the Ark Of The Covenant in ROTLA, if he’d actually obliged.