Description
Right after Neil Young and his then-backing band the Santa Monica Flyers wrapped up the extemporaneous sessions that would eventually be shaped into the 1975 album Tonight’s The Night, they were invited to help christen the stage at the Roxy nightclub. The set that Young and co. performed on that first night of the club’s reign, captured in all its glory on tape and now released as Roxy – Tonight’s The Night Live, features the entirety of the songs they had laid down in those sessions. They are, as you might expect, meatier and with more snap than the recorded versions, yet still lean and taut. There are no extended solos or long, drawn out moments of vamping. The band treats the show like a good club gig: playing their hearts out and encouraging the very vocal audience to join them in the fun. The banter’s remarkably jocular, but the songs are dark as a moonless night, with corpses from a coke deal gone bad (“Tired Eyes”) and those from Young’s more immediate circle (“Tonight’s the Night”) figuratively piling up on stage. Vocals are frayed and spine-tingling: the tortured high notes at cross-purposes to the plea of “Mellow My Mind,” the wobbly harmonies of “Albuquerque,” the sky-high CSNY-isms of “New Mama.”
