1975: Neil Young, Tonight’s The Night

By Matt Mitchell

Tinted Shades, Suicide, Biker Gangs, and Men on the Moon During a Drunken Irish Wake

TW: This essay discusses suicide, abuse, self-harm, alcoholism, and drug use.

I was 15 years old the only time I ever drew a picture of my history teacher looking like Burt Reynolds: naked, splayed out on a bearskin rug, his dick and balls covered only by a well-placed hand and artistic laziness, in a 1972 Cosmopolitan spread. I was 15 years old the first time my dad ever put all of his weight into me and pinned my body onto the floor of our living room. He said, not angrily, but in a tone of disappointment that smelled like Miller Lite, that I would end up like his brother if I never learned to wise up.

Shortly before Watergate, Dad’s brother, Junior, dropped out of high school and hitchhiked to a part of West Virginia where an ocean older than the Atlantic is trapped beneath the mountains. The Mitchells first migrated to Central Appalachia from France sometime before the Civil War in search of farmland, and then from Central Appalachia to Northeastern Ohio in search of steel plant and car factory jobs among a flourishing economy. My papaw, the eldest son of dirt poor parents, born in a Depression-era log cabin in Clemtown, became a truck driver while my mamaw, once a waitress at the only diner in Philippi, raised Junior and Dad out of a clapboard house in a 3,000-person town.

When Junior killed himself, it was a Friday, the Ides of March in 1985. He was 29. Papaw was on the road, delivering cargo to warehouses just off 8-Mile in Detroit. Dad and Mamaw were cooking in the kitchen when Junior brought a 12-gauge onto the indoor patio and unloaded rounds into the rest of the house. There were ricochets everywhere; Mamaw and Dad abandoned the property as soon as the first bullet ate up the air beneath their knees. When Papaw returned home early to a house covered in flashing lights and brimming with paramedics, he was sent inside to positively I.D. his son’s mangled body.

When Neil Young was on stage at LA’s Roxy Theatre in 1973 with his backing band, the Santa Monica Flyers, they were celebrating the completion of Tonight’s the Night. A year earlier, Young put out Harvest, the platinum, best-selling album of 1972, which yielded some of his most recognizable work, like “Old Man” and “Heart of Gold,” without his usual backing band, Crazy Horse, but with an all-star cast of background vocalists, like Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, and Crosby, Stills & Nash. Harvest was only Young’s fourth record, but it became an immediate and dynamic breakthrough that ran circles around his folk contemporaries. Critics weren’t immediately sold, though. John Mendelsohn wrote in Rolling Stone that Harvest was a “disappointing retread of early superior efforts by Young” and that “it’s as if he just added a steel guitar and new words to After the Gold Rush.” 

The success of Harvest should’ve made Young a soft rock hit machine, a sound only soccer moms could love. “Everyone was hoping I’d turn into John Denver,” Young once said, of the expectations leading up to whatever project would become Harvest’s successor. “That didn’t happen.” Still, Harvest warranted a massive tour, and Young put together a group of goons he dubbed The Stray Gators. He called on familiar faces – pedal steel guitarist Ben Keith, pianist and longtime producer Jack Nitzsche, and Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten – to join him at his San Francisco ranch for rehearsals. 

At practices, Whitten fell behind. Barely two years prior, he and the rest of Crazy Horse were dismissed from the After the Gold Rush studio sessions because of his drug use, a dependence on heroin he developed as a way of mitigating a long battle with rheumatoid arthritis. And only a year after that, Crazy Horse kicked him from the group entirely. In 1970, Young could afford to relegate his own backing band, because he’d not yet broken into the rock stratosphere as a solo artist. But by 1972, with lingering expectations raised by critical acclaim, a tour was going to make or break the Canadian songwriter’s trajectory for the next decade. And not long after inviting him back for the Harvest tour rehearsals, Young became privy to just how bad Whitten’s addiction had become. Their renewed creative partnership barely lasted a few weeks until he was given $50 and sent back to L.A. by Young. “It’s not happening, man. You’re not together enough,” he told Whitten, who, before splitting, responded, “I’ve got nowhere else to go, man. How am I gonna tell my friends?” That night, Whitten OD’d on a lethal combination of diazepam and alcohol. “I loved Danny. I felt responsible. And from there, I had to go right out on this huge tour of huge arenas. I was very nervous and… insecure,” Young later said. 

My therapist says, earnestly, that our twenties are just about surviving. Young was 30 when Tonight’s the Night came out, 28 when he recorded it. The album spoke to the dark shadow that Los Angeles cast on his circle, as American cinema turned the city experimental, drugged-out, and youthful. Most of the album was recorded on August 26th, 1973 in Hollywood, while Watergate and the last gasps of Vietnam dominated television coverage; Charles Manson’s death sentence had been commuted to life; Carrie Snodgress and Young had separated, and critics were marauding Young’s relationship to Whitten’s death. But more so than Whitten, Tonight’s the Night became an explicit eulogy for Bruce Berry, a roadie for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, who died of a heroin overdose in early 1973. His death arrived in the middle of a year spent on the road. Young’s declaration of love for Berry and Whitten wasn’t immediate, however, as Reprise Records shelved the album until 1975 in favor of the slightly less bummer of On the Beach. “Bruce Berry was a working man / He used to load the Econoline van / A sparkle was in his eye / But his life was in his hands,” Young sings on the title track. It was Whitten who introduced Berry to the drug a few years earlier, after CSNY was over and Whitten linked up with Crazy Horse. 

In the album’s liner notes, Young wrote that Tonight’s the Night was “made for Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry,” two guys who “lived and died for rock and roll.” Now I’m older than my dad was when Junior died, and I’ve long wondered what Junior died for. The story has always been that he was zonked on phenylcyclohexyl piperidine when he took his own life. There were also stories about him taking apart Harley engines and putting them together without manuals. Then there was a whole thing about him learning to play guitar by ear because he couldn’t read sheet music. On top of that, he was in a biker gang, had two failed marriages, owned a dog that was half-wolf, and is a ghost living in my parents’ old house. Every remembered vignette of his life was curated, every passed-down story idealized. The other side of the coin was a tidal shift, an urge to push the memory of his existence farther away. When some dudes tried breaking into the house in 1999, a siren on our old stove went off and Mom claimed it was Junior saving us; when she smelled cigarette smoke in the living room, she looked for internet tips on expunging spirits from a residence. “That’s enough sun, man, this is a sad song,” Young says to the lights guy before playing “Tired Eyes” at the Roxy in ‘73. At home, Mom and Dad keep the patio blinds shut and let the cold swell throughout the room. 

I’m sentimental about the folklore of ancestry, always wanting a romanticized version of where I come from. When I was a kid. Papaw would drive past his family’s old farmland, and I’d imagine the cousins who lived there, on a horizon that ran across the Appalachian mountains, as great huntsmen, not homebound bachelors with an underground meat cellar and no running water. At my Aunt Carolyn’s house in Grafton, I found an old polaroid of Junior in a photo album in her basement. It was blurry, but he was wearing bell-bottoms and a tight black T-shirt, holding a golden Gibson Les Paul. I asked if I could keep it, and she said yes. There was nothing special about it, I just wanted a piece of him. Mamaw and Papaw only ever had one picture of Junior up in their house. It was a small, out of focus, snapshot from his second wedding, when he married a woman named Annette, framed on the mantle of a sitting room they never used. Junior wore a white tuxedo, parted his feathered brown hair down the middle. You don’t think about it as a kid, but I’ve never seen a picture of Junior where his face was clear enough to remember. I don’t even know his birthday.

After Junior’s death, the Mitchell name soon became synonymous with repression. Papaw never spoke of him to anyone; I wasn’t allowed at their house on March 15th because Mamaw needed to be alone; the suicide hit my dad like a tumor pressed against the part of his brain in-charge of processing loss. But his depression never reared his head until he lost his job in 2012 and got lost at the bottom of a bottle. He’d always been a drinker, but never heavily, not until the unemployment checks kicked in. When I got in trouble at school or at home, sometimes the frustration he had in me would create a rift between him and my mom. He’d leave the house and drive around the town drunk until coming home and passing out in bed without saying a word.

While struggling to balance my own mental illness and queerness in high school, I hopelessly looked towards my parents for guidance. But somewhere along the line, sometime long before I was born, Dad gave up on vulnerability, on admitting that things weren’t okay, and Mom spoke of mental health as if faulty hardwiring were a virus. When she found me nearly passed out in my bedroom from an episode of cutting junior year, she cried and cried and cried, talking fast about taking me to the local hospital’s psychiatric ward, the same one where a distant cousin with schizophrenia was recently dumped after her husband’s death. As I sat on the mattress, half-naked, with blood dripping down my left thigh, Dad cleaned up the wounds, gracefully wiping my leg without making a sound. Stone-faced and quietly, he examined what I’d done, how I’d left an inscription of “change” in the fat to scar over,  after bringing home a school suspension after a breakup. I am maybe more thankful for his reaction instead of my mom’s – because I wasn’t interested in hearing someone contemplate banishing me to the same place a family member was haphazardly banished to. I still don’t know what I actually wanted, but that lack of vulnerability or acknowledgement or education about mental health made me believe I’d inherited the same taboo kind of brokenness that plagued Junior, as if those genetics eluded my parents but found me twice as hard, and it’s taken me almost 10 years to unlearn it. 

In his Pitchfork review, Mark Richardson said Tonight’s the Night “often sounds like a raucous party thrown by a bunch of lovable knuckleheads having the time of their life,” and I consider what it is that motivates us to cheapen a moment of grief with a fantasy of joy. Yes, there are recklessly hopeful moments on Tonight’s the Night, especially when Whitten’s voice is alive on “Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown,” but we all lean into our own manufactured excitement too much sometimes, especially when we are trying to articulate what it is we’re going through. I get infatuated with idealizing Young’s persona, too, wanting to speak of his mid-1970s as if it were a pure, staged coolness. But the truth is, he was just a guy trying to make sense of his friends’ deaths and happened to, maybe somewhat regretfully, show us that sense through music. “I’m sorry. You don’t know these people. This means nothing to you,” Young wrote on an insert included in Tonight’s the Night’s first pressing. Of course, I am the same way about Junior. Deep down, I think I’ve always just wanted him to be a grand figure taken too soon by a long battle with drugs, not some inherently ruined memory that’s not even mine. But he was my uncle and I’m tasked with shaping a love for him out of what few parts of his life I have access to.

When I was seven or eight, I went through a phase of wanting to be a rockstar. I made my own records using Mom’s blank CD-ROM disc cases; I recruited a couple of pals from school and we’d make drums out of sticks and rocks on the playground and call Motley Crüe songs ours, because Dad said he used to sing “Smokin’ in the Boys Room” with Junior in their parents’ shed after school. I called my “band” Power Chord of the Shock Rock until Mamaw told me Junior’s band’s name was Epitaph. Mom and Dad gifted me a red Fender Squire for Christmas that year, matching the same one Junior had when he was that age. Behind Mamaw and Papaw’s couch, Junior’s Gibson Les Paul sat in its case, and once a year they’d let me look at it when they did their spring cleaning. “When you’re old enough, that’s yours,” Mamaw said to me. In high school, to eventually help pay for college, I sold the guitar to Junior’s former bandmate for a couple of Gs. At that point, I’d not yet understood the corny beauty of being sentimental; I was not yet awoken by the joy of preserving someone’s history by keeping something they held, even in storage. 

At that Roxy performance in ‘73, Young showed up in a white sport coat, patched jeans, tinted sunglasses, and a posture more hunched than usual, still reeling from Whitten and Berry’s deaths. It was the club’s opening night and no one in the band had heard the record they were about to celebrate finishing, because they’d only finished it two days prior. They put a lit up palm tree on stage and duct-taped glitter platform boots to the piano. Willie Hinds, a roadie for the tour, wore a Hawaiian shirt, while everyone else performing looked like they hadn’t bathed in weeks. “Welcome to Miami Beach, ladies and gentlemen,” Young said to the crowd before unearthing “Tired Eyes” for the first time live. “Everything is cheaper than it looks.” Santa Monica Flyers bassist Billy Talbot called the show “a drunken Irish wake;” Young was a rolling vein hopped up on tequila and honeysliders. Fans in attendance pined for “Heart of Gold” and “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” but what they received was a cocktail of strung-out laments about grief, death, and mortality in the face of addiction, backed by a sorrowful ramshackle of an orchestra. 

On Boxing Day 2021, on the same patio where Junior passed away, my dad, cousin, and uncle fiddled with a broken .38 handgun, cocking back the hammer and pulling the trigger aimlessly around the room. I think about the irony at play then and the irony of when Junior’s biker gang was barred from his funeral 37 years ago, when they wrote “FUCK YOU, MR. AND MRS. MITCHELL” in the back of the guest book. Dad still carries a grudge against them, for their projection of frustration in the wake of a fallen brother. But the chemical mockup of humanity is complex. Five years ago, while Papaw was dying in his bed next door, Dad, crying ugily and angrily in our living room, cursed Junior for leaving him alone to care for both of their parents. I spend a lot of time thinking about what truly plagues him. Losing your brother to suicide, I imagine that’s a grief that never gets easier, only forgotten. But I think about what came long before that, what incident(s) might have distanced him from Junior and what abuses might still linger in the darkness of a deeply buried secret. What love is pulled from you in the face of unwanted tragedy? There are days where I wonder if it was ever a love between Dad and Junior to begin with, or if Dad’s attitude towards Junior is not one of anger, but of jealousy, for the ways in which his brother’s addiction had an out and his doesn’t. 

But I suppose that is just one plight of family, the never ending, long line of questions one has about those who came and went, and the hopeless roulette of who will be there to answer them for you. Sometimes I dream of that Gibson Les Paul and cigarette smoke, of bell-bottoms and band rehearsals, and am awoken by a cold breeze at the foot of the bed. Tonight’s the Night is as much a celebration of the deceased as it is an eternal document of their living, and I return to its text for guidance on how to properly preserve someone through honest, and sometimes painful, memory. Young used the record to expel whatever bodies haunted him; Dad became John Denver and blamed an unfurling grief on gunshots. But here I am, still left reckoning with where they landed. 

Matt Mitchell is a music critic, essayist, and poet living in Columbus, OH.