302. Neil Young, "Tonight's the Night"

 


I mean, it's a well-known fact that Neil Young has put out more albums than a single person could listen to in an average lifespan, but not only is this the second Neil Young album we've seen on the List in the past three weeks (and past 10 spots), it's the second one that deals with the overdose deaths of his friends Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry.  This one was recorded before On the Beach but released after, and it's an even more stark yowl of pain and sadness and longing and emotion.

The first verse in the first song sets the mood:

Bruce Berry was a working man
He used to load that Econoline van
A sparkle was in his eye
But his life was in his hands

Berry was a roadie for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and a popular fixture in the LA music scene.  He OD'd just a couple of months after Whitten, who was the former guitarist in Crazy Horse until the drug use got out of hand.  Obviously their loss shook Young to the core, as it would anyone.

To say this album is "loose" is an understatement.  Recorded mostly live in a practice studio, you can hear Young bumping into the mic and slurring some words and generally sounding like he's playing with a headful of tequila and weed, which he was.  This album is critically adored - it's another Pitchfork 10 - and it definitely has its moments.  I like "Roll Another Number (For the Road)" because it's a song about getting fucked up being played by people who are certainly fucked up.  "New Mama" has some just great acoustic guitar and somehow the band manages to sing some beautiful harmonies.  And "Albuquerque" has one of the oddest line readings of the word "Albuquerque" you will ever hear but you know, it works.

"Borrowed Tune" has a melody literally borrowed, from "Lady Jane" by the Stones.  That kind of put me off until a friend pointed out it fits perfectly with the album's overall theme of fuckups:

I'm singin' this borrowed tune
I took from the Rolling Stones
Alone in this empty room
Too wasted to write my own

The one outlier on the album is "Come on Baby Let's Go Downtown," recorded at a Neil Young and Crazy Horse show years earlier.  It's a song Whitten wrote and sings on and is, fittingly enough, about scoring heroin.  It's a rollicking rocker, unlike anything else on the album.  It's the "Before" picture, and the rest of the album is the "After."

I can't say I loved this album.  There are some genuinely moving moments, and it's a powerful portrait of grief and loss, but some of it really does just sound like guys dicking around with a half-finished song, which is what some of it was.  

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? I'm gonna get shot for this, but no.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

103. De La Soul, "Three Feet High And Rising"

Image
  Sorry for the service interruption!  Monday I had, like, work stuff to do and yesterday I was picking my wife up at the airport and they lost her bag and we had to file a claim about that and by the time I got home it was well into my Work Hours and you know, I'm just sorry.  (This was tail end of quite a journey for my wife that found her taking off in Ireland and landing in Newark, New Jersey, and then sitting in a plane for almost three hours and then the flight just getting cancelled and then staying in the Courtyard by Marriott in downtown Newark, NJ [not recommended, she says] and then getting on a flight to SFO at 6:30 am and finally getting back here a solid 14 hours later than expected.) Speaking of the greater New York City metropolitan area, a group of kids from Amityville, Long Island, got together in 1988 and started making songs and released this album, one of the best in hip hop or any other genre, in 1989.  De La have been called the "Beatles of hip hop"
Read more

3. Joni Mitchell, "Blue"

Image
  Do you want the good news or the meh news first?  The good news is that this album is better than the other Joni Mitchell albums we've seen , or at least better for me.  I hated one of them and barely tolerated the other, so I was not expecting to like this, and after three listens yesterday, it was not as bad as I'd feared it would be.  The meh news?  I still don't love Joni Mitchell and I don't particularly like this album. Obviously, since it's the number 3 out of the Top 500 albums ever made, a lot of people feel differently.  Pitchfork called it "possibly the most gutting break-up album ever made," which may be true, who knows, but if it is it's about breaking up with a whole series of dudes, from Graham Nash to James Taylor to some guy named Carey.  (In Pitchfork's estimation, this is the 86th best album of the 1970s, so not exactly in number 3 overall territory). One thing that bugs me is Joni Mitchell's voice, which I find kind of g
Read more

1. Marvin Gaye, "What’s Going On"

Image
  500 albums later and we're out of albums.  This album was number 6 on the last iteration of the Rolling Stone list and has now moved up to number 1 (displacing Sgt. Pepper , which was the last album to hold that spot).  I think it's a lovely album with maybe three absolutely incredible songs, a fair amount of average-to-good, and some not great songs.  I'm not a voter and will never be a voter but I just don't think this is the best album of all time. In fact, I would be perfectly fine with this list if they just sawed off the top 3 and left the rest as is: 1. Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life 2. Beatles, Abbey Road 3. Nirvana, Nevermind 4. Fleetwood Mac, Rumours And so forth.  But let's take this album on its own merits. The first of the three absolute bangers is the title track, "What's Going On," the scene-setter for the rest of the album, a loose concept album that's told from the point of view of a Vietnam vet returning to a country th
Read more