Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  Despite the protests of management, press and the general public, the Santa Monica Flyers rolled on, returning to America for a handful of dates that began on November 15 at Queens College, which featured a magnificent graveyard-tempo “I Believe in You.” An incandescent performance took place in Cleveland on the nineteenth, and with the next day came Chicago, where Murray McLauchlan caught an image out the tour-bus window that summed up the depravity of the entire Tonight’s the Night experience. “It was just pissing down rain, and standing out on the sidewalk was a girl. This onetime hippie-looking girl, with long hair, the proverbial floral-print dress—but very bedraggled, because she’s soaking wet and covered in speed zits, very wasted—with a sign around her neck hung with binder twine. Written in some kind of crayon on the sign were the words WHERE’S THE BAND STAYING?”

  That night, an incredibly loose show had Young again berating a noisy audience. “Shut up!” he snapped. “Some of you people are fucked! You all scream out so much, why don’t you stay home and listen to yourself talk. There’s a lotta things you can say up here if you don’t have to fight your way through a buncha idiots that are just yellin’ to hear their own voices.” Young went on to play a truly scary, surreal thirty-six-minute “Tonight’s the Night,” invoking the names of Ricky Nelson and James Brown as he preached. Again came the tale of Bruce Berry, with Young screaming over and over, “No … no … no!”

  The last show of the tour was in Berkeley on November 23, and the band whooped it up. Willie B. Hinds surprised Young with an entirely new tourist outfit complete with white shoes, and when Young asked for the palm tree to be lit, Hinds was standing there dressed to the nines with a tray of cocktails in his hand. “Neil went without singin’ the whole next verse, he was laughin’ so fuckin’ hard. I was sittin’ there just totally Palm-Beached out. I got him good.”

  Young had one last joke to pull on the audience. When he introduced one of the opening acts, he wore the bearded shipwrecked look he’d perfected over the course of the tour. Then he went backstage, shaved and, when he returned to play his own set, as Tim Foster remembers, “nobody knew who he was.”

  Although Young had told audiences that the Tonight’s the Night album would be coming out in January 1974, he continued to fiddle with it, much to the annoyance of David Briggs, who considered the project finished. “After we stopped recording I gave the tape to Neil. I said, ‘Here’s the record.’ It was done. It was a masterpiece.

  “Then we go into Neil’s studio with whatever kind of pathetic console Elliot Mazer convinced him to buy, and I tried to mix Tonight’s the Night with and without Neil, and he tried to mix it with and without me—but it was always through the Compumix.” The Compufuck, as Briggs dubbed it, was the first computerized mixing console—an expensive, unwieldy piece of technology that had caused major problems on Time Fades Away. “That thing almost ruined Tonight’s the Night,” said Briggs. “What a fuckin’ nightmare.

  “This went on for months, for fuckin’ months, and every time I’d do a mix I’d say, ‘Man, this sounds like shit, what’s the fuckin’ matter here? Something’s wrong here.’ Finally I said, ‘Hey, we gotta get outta here. Your studio sucks and your consoles suck. We’ll go down to Heider’s and mix the fucking thing.’ Now, neither he—or especially me—had it in us at all to mix it again.”

  Young went on to record two other albums and complete a massive CSNY tour before returning to the project. By that time, the between-song raps were gone and new material added. Just bringing up the subject made Briggs livid. “To me, Tonight’s the Night was a masterpiece when it was done. Then they put on these fuckin’ feepy versions of songs and took all the raps off. Most people think Tonight’s the Night is the real deal, but I know better—it’s the watered-down version.”

  For Briggs, the original unedited S.I.R. version is the only Tonight’s the Night. “It never let up. There was no attempt to make it nicer. It was unrelenting from minute one to minute last. I felt once you started that mood, you had to go all the way, a hundred percent, give it the full dose—to try and insert stuff into it was bogus.

  “Tell you the truth, I can’t listen to Tonight’s the Night because of those things on it. I did the record, I thought it was fucking great, and Neil and Elliot and the record company backpedaled.

  “They ruined the real Tonight’s the Night, hid it away on a shelf, in a closet, like a monster thing. Pissed me off so much I didn’t wanna see or speak to any of ’em.”

  Well, Briggs never mentioned that to me. Never said a thing about it. And Tonight’s the Night came out in the same year as two other records we did together. So we were together when that happened.

  The record was so outthere, I sort of held on to it for a while. In those days—1973—you could make a cassette copy, but they never sounded good. So I’d go home and play it back on a reel-to-reel. And at one point my son Zeke got a tape recorder, and he was playing with the masters of Tonight’s the Night, which he was rolling back and forth and having a good ol’ time. For about six months he played with ’em. And the record never came out. We just held on to it.

  That record is very unusual. A lotta things happened to it. On the record, the mixes are original—they were all done on this two-track board at S.I.R. Briggs would do a rough right there as we were doing the record. Then when we tried to mix it, of course, it was too fucking late—it was already mixed.

  The pure Tonight’s the Night was a nine-song deal. * It was great. But the way it came out was a record. I diluted it. I had to. That’s where the other songs came from. They held it together, but they diluted it a little bit. The pure, essential Tonight’s the Night was more of a work of art than what came out, because it was the original shit—in order, the way we listened to it all the time with all the raps in it—mumbling shit, all kinds of weird stuff that entered into the songs and left off at the end. There was a whole bunch of that stuff, and it made it so eerie. It’s just so fuckin’ drunk and hysterical. We were really outthere—swearing, knocking the microphone, giggling and carrying on. It’s funny how different it was.

  We had a rough mix of the whole thing—it had the raps and everything. Then somehow the raps got cut out. I don’t know how that happened. If Briggs said he finished the record and that was it, that’s not true. ’Cause if he thought it was done, we wouldn’t have been fucking around with those masters.

  We tried to put the raps back in. The emulsion, the magnetic shit, was scraped off of it—the sound on the tape had changed and we couldn’t get it back. We couldn’t make it work—we couldn’t cut it, we couldn’t crossfade it, because we had a different mix of the raps. If we had been able to match the raps to the original mixes, it all would’ve been in there.

  We could re-create the original Tonight’s the Night with digital. We could go and put it back together again and get the whole fuckin’ thing, ’cause we got the masters and we got the raps.

  Ironically, it would be Elliot Roberts—the man made most distraught by the entire Tonight’s the Night era—who came up with the key for finishing the record. Roberts briefly toyed with the very odd idea of turning the story of Bruce Berry into a Broadway show. Mel Frohman—husband of Elliot’s secretary, Mary, and an award-winning writer—even wrote a surreal twenty-four-page treatment that had little to do with the actual participants. Berry became “Joey Superstar” and was joined by a girlfriend, “Hey Chick,” plus black choruses “The Dudes” and “The Sisters.” In the process, three older songs were added to flesh out the score—a live version of “Come On Baby, Let’s Go Downtown” from the 1970 Crazy Horse Fillmore shows, plus “Borrowed Tune” and “Lookout Joe” from the Time Fades Away period.

  Sandy Mazzeo was present when Young looked over the treatment. “Neil didn’t really like the play, but he said, ‘Look at this order of songs.’” At the time Young was finishing an album entitled Homegrown, he and Mazzeo were staying at the Chateau Marmont in the bungalow that John Belushi would later OD in. It was in this room
that another catalytic event would occur.

  “It was late at night. We were all pretty fucked up, listenin’ to tapes, on the edge,” Young remembered. Present were Richard Manuel and Rick Danko of the Band, the great Louisiana singer/songwriter Bobby Charles, Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot of Crazy Horse, maybe others—no one present for this hazy event is quite sure of anything. “Danko, Neil and me were sittin’ around the piano singing,” recalled Molina. “I think we’d done a little meth, because when you do methedrine, the fuckin’ harmonies are so beautiful. We fuckin’ sang and sang. It was Godlike.” After they listened to Homegrown, Tonight’s the Night—which happened to be on the same reel—came on. “Danko freaked. He said, ‘If you guys don’t release this fuckin’ album, you’re crazy.’” Young did just that, much to the consternation of Warner Bros., who were anticipating Homegrown as somewhat of a return to the commercial sound of Harvest.

  Warner Brothers was kinda thinkin’ it might not be that great of an idea to put Tonight’s the Night out at that point in my career, but they always said, “If you wanna put it out, we’ll put it out. Whatever you wanna do.” But that was the first time they said, “Well … you’re sure you wanna put this out?”

  Everybody thought it was awful. Everybody I knew. CSN? Oh, they hated it—wouldn’t even mention it. “That’s not a record.” Then you get guys like the Eagles, Glenn Frey especially—when we did that tour, they thought we were fuckin’ crazy. Glenn would come over and say, “Why are you doing this to yourself?”

  —He wasn’t alone. Elliot thought you were nuts, too.

  “What Elliot thinks is the right thing to do for my career is the last thing we give a shit about. It’s like he thinks he’s steering the ship, and when it gets out of control, he thinks he’s not—and he doesn’t know what the fuck’s going on.

  But y’know, Tonight’s the Night was just an attitude that was ahead of its time—or behind its time. For that time, that record was pretty wild. I just knew it was a good record. There’s something irreverent about it. Tonight’s the Night doesn’t care—and that makes you feel good about it. There’s no pretense.

  When you first listened to it you thought, “Oh my God. What’s happened to these people—are these guys lost?” Real music—played by people who have nothing else to do than play music, not because they’re recording, or anything. This shit had to come out. When they put out Harvest on CD, I made them put out Tonight’s the Night. I said, “If you wanna put out my biggest hit, I want you to put out my best record.” So a lot of audiophiles get to hear tape hiss and fucking microphones popping and all kinds of shit that they wouldn’t normally be able to hear—plus music that was out of tune and fuckin’ crazy that they probably wanted to turn down anyway.

  —Some critics maintain it’s an anti-drug record.

  Anti-drug record, huh? [lets out a breath after taking hit off joint]

  Sort of like “Kicks” by Paul Revere and the Raiders is an anti-drug record?

  I think Tonight’s the Night is a druggy kinda record, but is it a prodrug record? I dunno … I hope it doesn’t glorify drugs. That’s just the way I saw that story.

  The album jacket for Tonight’s the Night is as ominous as the music inside it. On the front is a murky, high-contrast shot of a disheveled Young in his seersucker jacket and Fastback shades, waggling a crooked finger like a man selling French postcards from his trench coat. On the back is an equally demented Joel Bernstein photo of the band next to the hole in the wall. Young’s handwritten scrawl is all over the place and everything about the album’s look is pitch-black and grimy.

  “There’s a package that drove everybody crazy,” said artist Gary Burden. “That was printed on blotter paper. It’s meant to age quickly and fall apart, because I guess Neil was around a lotta things that were just falling apart.” Inside the record is an odd leaflet with Meijers’s infamous Dutch article, a blurry Bernstein shot of Young’s ’48 Buick speeding off to the Roxy opening and a typewritten letter to the mysterious “Waterface,” who is also addressed in messages scratched into the run-out grooves of the record itself. “Hello Waterface,” read side one; “Goodbye Waterface,” said the flip.

  The back page of the insert is perhaps the most obscure. The words to “Florida”—a strange unreleased recitation—are superimposed over the credits to On the Beach, a record Young had already released. To top it all off is a tiny picture of Roy Orbison that Young nicked from a dubious cassette he picked up on the road.

  They put out one of these bootleg cassettes of Roy. I saw it and said, “Aw, fuck, look at this picture—Roy doesn’t know this fuckin’ record’s even out.” So we said, “Well, that’s okay—we’ll use the picture on our record, then.” And it had all the credits from another record—now that was beautiful.

  Everything had to be different with that record—even the label had to be a different color from all the other records on the label—it had to be black, like all the labels in the old, old days.

  In the original Tonight’s the Night there was a little package of glitter in a plastic container, so when the whole thing opened, the bag of glitter fell out. And you’d open the bag of glitter and of course you’d get glitter all over everything. The platform boots and the tinsel in the album … that was our Bowie statement.

  They had to use so much fuckin’ ink on that record. It’s like they used enough material for twenty times as many records as they actually made. Blotter paper would just eat up the presses. But I knew what I wanted. I knew exactly how it had to be. It’s hard with CDs. It’s not expressive. What ya gonna do—put all that artwork into a CD? It’s so fuckin’ small you gotta have a magnifying glass to look at it.

  See, Tonight’s the Night was the closest to art that I’ve come. But you really have to be detached. The whole thing was just me and it. You can’t struggle to get there. It’s just gotta happen—a set of circumstances that make those things take place, and if the circumstances ever come together for me again to do something like that, I’ll do it.

  —Who is Waterface?

  Waterface is the person writing the letter. When I read the letter, I’m Waterface. It’s just a stupid thing—a suicide note without the suicide.

  I vividly remember when Tonight’s the Night finally came out in June 1975. The charts were full of pop confections like the Bee Gees’ “Jive Talkin” and John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” Hearing a blast of reality like Tonight’s the Night was, oddly enough, a lifesaver.

  For me, the seventies can be summed up by just three things: those grotesque early shopping malls, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Tonight’s the Night. Decay, but with a gleam in its eye. This was an album shockingly different from the output of Young’s California folk-rock buddies, with their liberal niceties, babbling on about saving whales. Young was definitely a million miles away from the helicopter day of Woodstock, as well as just about everything else about the music business, which he made clear in interviews when the album was released. “If you’re gonna put a record on at eleven in the morning, don’t put on Tonight’s the Night,” Young told Cameron Crowe in 1975. “Put on the Doobie Brothers.”

  “Art is supposed to take you out of your chair,” said Bob Dylan. “It’s supposed to move you from one place to another.” Well, Tonight’s the Night put me on the moon. Everything about the record moved me, down to the fuzzy blotter-paper cover. It looked so mysterious and sounded so real. I went through ten copies of the fucker, wearing out one after another. If I was in a record store and saw somebody with a copy of Harvest under their arm, I’d launch into a twenty-minute harangue on why they should put it back and buy Tonight’s the Night instead. They usually did, too—probably out of fear I’d kill them if they didn’t. I was fifteen, and the record would be my best friend for a long, long time.

  You know how it is when you’ve been up too long, the apartment’s trashed, everything is silent, the sun’s about to come up and you’re feeling like some germ stuck to a big cold rock hu
rtling through space—and somehow you don’t mind? Here is a record that induces that state automatically. Hearing somebody so totally fucked up rant about the ills of extremism is liberating. Tonight’s the Night made no judgments. Young knew the attraction—and the rewards—of being wasted out of your skull, and had no illusions about the price paid, which for some was the boneyard. The record was shot through with a sardonic humor that deflated any pretense of a Big Statement, which somehow made it even heavier. Unlike Briggs, I feel that the additional material helps tell the story. When gone-dead Danny Whitten’s voice jumps out of the speakers singing “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown,” it just hits you in the gut that much harder.

  Painter Francis Bacon once said, “The job of the artist is to deepen the mystery.” You’d have to get into a diving bell to descend any lower than Tonight’s the Night.

  While the album sold poorly, the critics salivated in Rolling Stone and The New York Times. But the most interesting reviews come from Young’s own parents. Scott Young devotes an entire chapter in his book to the record, calling it “essential” and describing his son as “a man on a binge at a wake, a long happy bout of not giving a shit.”

  Rassy was less complimentary. She attended the Berkeley show on the Tonight’s the Night tour and “had a hemorrhage over it,” she told me, frowning. When I asked her opinion of the album, her brow furrowed further. “That’s the one about everybody dead? I can’t stand it. No way. I’ve never played it all the way through and I ain’t a-gonna play it. There’s too many Johnny Rottens around. Ruins me. No thanks.” Rassy refused to discuss it any further.

  *A benefit for the Doctor—which Young attended—took place at the Topanga Community House in 1976, and once again Topanga’s spirit would be demonstrated when a little old lady walked in and, hearing what the benefit was for, expressed her outrage over the Doctor’s fate. “Of course he’s innocent!” she declared. “No, ma’am, actually he’s guilty,” piped up one musician in the crowd.