Neil Young mourns lost friends in the lo-fi masterpiece Tonight’s the Night. Springsteen stretches out in his most musically ambitious song suite, The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, released November 11. Dylan reunites with the Band to record Planet Waves.
In June, Young rejoined Crosby, Stills, and Nash to record their next album, but Stills’s coke- and booze-fueled megalomania prompted him to unceremoniously split the following month.
“If we are not giving 100 percent he’s gone like that,” Nash observed.1
“Once the muse is gone, I’m out,” Young conceded. “And that’s hell. I try to be mature but…”2 In another interview he said, “I’ve left some charred paths behind me.”3
But more than Stills’s abrasive behavior, what Young loathed most was dragging the recording process out. In contrast, the following month he captured 40 percent of his next album in one drunken session on August 26.
“Tonight’s the Night was the closest to art that I’ve come,” Young said.4 AllMusic’s William Ruhlmann claims, “It has continued to be ranked as one of the greatest rock & roll albums ever made.”
Its genesis was grief. Six and a half months after he lost Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten to heroin, another friend overdosed on June 4: twenty-two-year-old roadie Bruce Berry. Berry’s older brother Jan was half of the surf rock duo Jan and Dean, and their brother Ken owned the site of the recording sessions, Hollywood’s Studio Instrument Rentals. “It is a wake of sorts,” Young wrote in his memoir.5
Crazy Horse rhythm section Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina returned to the fold. Pedal steel guitarist Ben Keith was the only holdover from the acrimonious tour Young undertook in the first half of the year. Musician Tim Drummond compared Keith’s style with “how when you’re in San Francisco and the fingertips of fog crawl in from the ocean and cover the city.”6
Joining Young on guitar was twenty-two-year-old Nils Lofgren, whom Young had mentored since he was seventeen. “I’d sneak backstage and ask advice anywhere and everywhere I could, more out of fear than courage. I was nervous because I knew nothing about the business. But Neil Young, at the Cellar Door in D.C., was kind enough to spend two days and nights with me, let me watch four shows.… He said, ‘Look me up when you get [to LA]’ and we did, and true to his word, he took us under his wing.”7 In the ’80s, Lofgren would join Springsteen’s E Street Band.
Every night the musicians arrived at the space, played pool, ate burgers, got high, and slammed Jose Cuervo, which, Young said, “Does something else to me than alcohol usually does,” before moving to the small stage in the basement rehearsal room after midnight.8
Molina recalled, “We’d just get to a point where you get a glow, just a glow. When you do blow and drink, that’s when you get that glow. No one said ‘Let’s go play,’ we all just knew it was time. We never talked about what anyone was playing, who’s playing what part or any of that kinda shit. It was so fucking emotional.”9
“It was a very freeform, just ‘trust your instincts and go’ kind of thing. It was just a great, rough record to make, and still one of the great live records in the studio ever because in addition to it being live, we were playing songs we barely knew,”10 Lofgren said. “Just as we were learning a new song and tying to sing at the same time, [Neil]’d be rollin’ tape, lookin’ for a final take. It freaked us all out. We were like, ‘Hey c’mon, man, let’s rehearse a little. Let’s learn the song.’ But Neil’s attitude was, ‘I know the song and that’s all that matters.’”11
The title track celebrates the sparkle in Berry’s eye and his shaky singing voice and laments his death “on the mainline.” “We played Bruce and Danny on their way all through the night. I’m not a junkie and I won’t even try it out to check out what it’s like,” Young told Rolling Stone, “but we all got high enough, right out there on the edge where we felt wide-open to the whole mood. It was spooky.”12
The second song spotlighting what Young called the dope epidemic was “Tired Eyes,” inspired by an event that happened the previous year near his home in Topanga Canyon: a coke dealer to the rock community got into a gunfight outside an orgy, resulting in multiple homicides.13 As Keith’s mournful steel guitar wavers, Young deadpans, “Well, it wasn’t supposed to go down that way”—a desolate counterpart to Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, epitomizing the counterculture’s slide from idealism to degradation.
Young’s biographer James McDonough wrote, “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.”14 (Incidentally, Massacre filmed the same summer that Young recorded Tonight’s, though the film was released the following year.)
Still, Tonight’s reputation for being unrelentingly bleak is unwarranted. There are no other dark songs on the record. “Albuquerque” sounds road-weary, “Roll Another Number (for the Road)” and “Speaking Out” sound woozy, but all are ultimately positive. “Lookout Joe” sings of “rolling to the bottom” but “havin’ a ball” en route. “Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown” is tragic in the sense that it’s an older track from the vaults with Whitten singing lead, but the euphoria he and Young share on the harmonies is palpable. A wake is about remembering “old times were good times,” as Young sang in “Lookout Joe.”
On “Roll Another Number,” Young sings he’s not going back to Woodstock—i.e., back to Crosby, Stills, and Nash, whom he played the legendary festival with, because now he’s “standing on the sound of some open-hearted people.” After all the stress with CSNY and his touring band before it, he’d found the right home at last. Now he was “able to get under any load.” Forty-five years later he was still playing with the same musicians, except for Keith, who had passed away. In that sense, the album was about grieving with like-minded souls, being healed by the camaraderie, and moving ahead together. “New Mama,” meanwhile, was a gorgeous hymn to his partner, Carrie Snodgress, and their baby, Zeke (with harmonies, ironically, not unlike CSNY).
The group premiered the new collection live on September 20 and 22 for the opening nights of the Roxy, a new club on the Sunset Strip next to the Rainbow, opened by partners including Young’s managers, Elliot Roberts and David Geffen. Eerily, the occasion marked another loss to opioids, Gram Parsons, who died from combining morphine and alcohol on September 19.
Still, the mood at the shows was upbeat. They covered the stage with fake palm trees, women’s shoes, and a statue heisted from an arts and crafts store, leaving a note, “We stole your wooden Indian. If you want your money, come to the Roxy.”15 Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs on ABC in the Battle of the Sexes from 8 to 10 p.m. Cher came in by herself, asked if she could sit down with Dylan, Robbie Robertson, and their wives, and instantly hit it off with Geffen.16
Young walked onstage, playing the part of the slimy MC featured on the album’s cover. “Welcome to Miami Beach. Everything is cheaper than it looks.”17 He announced that the first woman to go topless would receive a pair of shoes. Snodgress surprised him by running onstage without a shirt and hugged him from behind. “Oh my God,” he laughed, and launched into “Tonight’s the Night.”
Along with the album tracks, the band played “Walk On,” which built on a line from “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown.” As captured on the Roxy live album, it almost sounded like a remake of the Allman Brothers’ sunny “Blue Skies,” thanks to Keith’s slide guitar. The lyrics featured Young shrugging off people talking behind his back—perhaps his ex-tour band, perhaps CSN.
The new group played a few gigs in Canada the following month, then crossed the Atlantic to England. They brought the Eagles as their opening act, continuing Young’s support of up-and-coming country rockers. Young delighted in antagonizing the audience by thwarting their desire to hear the hits they paid good money to listen to. After making them sit through his new songs, he would at last offer relief with “Now I’d like to play something you’re familiar with,” then lurch back into another rendition of “Tonight’s the Night.”
The tour “was a lot more fun [than Time Fades Away] ’cause I was with my friends. I was havin’ a fantastic time,” Young said. “I think there was more drama in Tonight’s the Night because I knew what I was doing to the audience, but the audience didn’t know if I knew what I was doing.… I was fucking with the audience. From what I understand, the way rock & roll unfolded with Johnny Rotten and the punk movement—that kind of audience abuse—kinda started with that tour. I have no idea where the concept came from. Somebody else musta done it first, we all know that. Whether it was Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard, somebody shit on the audience first.”18
Still, Young was unhappy with the mix of the album, so the following February he recorded a whole new batch of songs (including “Walk On”) that he released as On the Beach, while Tonight’s the Night languished in the vault. Another year passed, and he was set to release Homegrown, a return to the mellow acoustic feel of Harvest. One night he hung out with the Band’s Rick Danko at the Chateau Marmont and played him both Homegrown and Tonight’s (in the bungalow John Belushi later died in from a “speedball” injection of heroin and cocaine). Danko encouraged him to “go with the raw one.”19 Homegrown chronicled Young’s crumbling relationship with Snodgress, and he now found it too painful to listen to, so he decided to put Tonight’s out as it was, even with off-key and out-of-tune moments.
Young explained to Lofgren, “Hey, I’ve made records where you analyze everything and you do it three thousand times and it’s perfect. I’m sick of it. I want to make a record that’s totally stark naked. Raw. I don’t wanna fix any of it.”20
When he told record executive Mo Ostin, Ostin warned him it might not go over well but put it out anyway. “Which makes him one of the greatest record men of all time, along with Ahmet Ertegun and Clive Davis,” Young wrote.21 It made it to No. 25 in the US but No. 12 in the UK charts in the summer of 1975—the same summer Johnny Rotten joined the Sex Pistols and spearheaded the punk back-to-basics movement.
The mother of Bruce Springsteen’s keyboardist David Sancious lived on 1105 E Street in Belmar, New Jersey, a block from Tenth Avenue, and the band practiced there. Before gigs, they always picked up Sancious last, because he was always late. They waited in organist Danny Federici’s van, killing time by boasting of their latest sexcapades, singing to the radio. Guitarist “Little Steven” Van Zandt would analyze the songs. Sax player Clarence Clemons would debate their merits. Bassist Garry Tallent would throw out trivia questions. Springsteen made up stories about passersby and cracked them up. Finally he said, “This band has spent so much time parked on this fucking street we should call it the E Street Band.”22
When they toured, if they played a city for more than one night, the first evening would be sparse, but by the end of the run the house would be packed. Springsteen played solo acoustic for an hour; then the band joined him to blow the roof off. Springsteen listened when Clive Davis advised him to make use of the entire stage, instead of just standing in one place.23 He put into action all the hours he spent studying the moves of James Brown and Mick Jagger.24 Unlike them, he could suddenly whirl around and shred on the guitar.
He was becoming the white version of Brown’s “hardest-working man in show business,” his concerts turning into marathons, as if he didn’t want to go home. “My issues weren’t as obvious as drugs. Mine were different, they were quieter—just as problematic, but quieter. With all artists, because of the undertow of history and self-loathing, there is a tremendous push toward self-obliteration that occurs onstage. It’s both things: there’s a tremendous finding of the self while also an abandonment of the self at the same time. You are free of yourself for those hours; all the voices in your head are gone. Just gone. There’s no room for them. There’s one voice, the voice you’re speaking in.”25
Then the first big hiccup since he signed his record deal arrived, though it initially seemed like a terrific opportunity. Chicago asked him to open for them for thirteen gigs in sports venues starting May 30, climaxing at Madison Square Garden on June 15. Chicago IV was zooming along to No. 1. The E Streeters enjoyed hanging with Chicago, but soon the video screens were turned off for their opening sets, their sound turned down. In Philly the crowd booed Springsteen and whipped toilet paper rolls at him. A basketball hit the piano. Springsteen didn’t get a sound check at Madison Square Garden and flopped. He later declared the period “the worst state of mind I’ve ever been in.” He told his manager angrily, “From now on, we’re a club act, and we’ll work our way up from there.”26
Not that he had given up ambitions of superstardom on his own terms. When the band regrouped two days later to record the next album,27 Springsteen sang of wanting “to try the big top” in the first track they captured, “Wild Billy’s Circus Story.” Tallent’s tuba sounded a bit worse for wear, as the human cannonball misses his fall and the fire-eater lies in a pool of sweat.
They got their groove back with “The E Street Shuffle,” speeding up the chords from Major Lance’s 1963 soul hit “The Monkey Time,”28 written by Curtis Mayfield, updating them with Sancious’s funky clavinet. Springsteen used the Van Morrison “Wild Night” template to paint a typical evening for the band at a club where “teenage tramps” hang on the corner in the “sweet summer night” and the “band of boy prophets” walk in “handsome and hot,” making the ladies’ “souls grow weak.” Mad Dog Lopez gets in a fight; Phantom Federici hides from the cops. The jam, and the whole album, was infused by the excitement of a rocker who had been forced to be an acoustic balladeer on his last album but was now given free rein to cut loose with his band and show all sides of his identity.
The same day, June 28, they cut the basic track for a “twisted swing tune,”29 “Kitty’s Back,” where Springsteen showed off the guitar fireworks he wowed audiences with. The song was inspired by a sign he saw while driving in the equipment van on tour, the neon marquee of a strip club trumpeting the return of one of their dancers.30 The blogosphere still argues whether Thin Lizzy copped the song’s vibe for “The Boys Are Back.”
That day they also laid down “New York City Serenade.”31 Tallent’s bass coos, and Sancious fuses Tchaikovsky classical with Charlie Mingus jazz on his piano (per biographer Peter Ames Carlin) as Springsteen pans across Manhattan from lucky couples making love in the backseat to lonely boys rejected because they got no money, left to sing the blues with the junkman. (Springsteen covered Patti LaBelle’s 1962 “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman” in his act at the time, a song “so sad that sometimes I have to leave the stage and cry backstage a little bit while I’m singing this song.”32) But in the end, singing in the city after midnight is all the medication they need. Springsteen travels from a whisper to a rhapsodic duet with Clemons’s sax, capturing the sound the Saturday Night Live house band would embrace in a year and half upon their inception.
Springsteen took his first stab at Norman Rockwell Americana with “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” the apotheosis of his Jersey Shore mythos, complete with fireworks and the archetypal name for a girl on the beach. He and his girlfriend Diane Lozito lived five minutes from the boardwalk. Springsteen faithfully painted the pier with its “cheap little seaside bars,” greasers, and real-life denizens like fortune-teller Madam Marie. Factory girls promise they’ll unsnap their jeans under the boardwalk (though in real life, drummer Lopez maintained, there were only rats down there). When Lozito heard the song, she blew her top, believing he was unfaithful.
“Incident on 57th Street” opens with Springsteen trying to hook up with the ladies on the scene but getting shot down because everyone knows he’s a cheater. Then Puerto Rican Jane (maybe Crazy Janey from “Spirit in the Night,” a.k.a. Lozito?) takes pity on him, and they sleep together until his friends call up to the window. He slips out down the fire escape to join them, heading either to a fight or a gig. He sings with such extravagant West Side Story–esque passion that Jane doesn’t really mind (supposedly) that he’s a hound dog.
The Springsteen fan site Bruce Base says he cut that song and probably “Rosalita” on his birthday, September 23. If true, cutting one of the most enduring anthems of the year was a hell of a way to commemorate turning twenty-four. The song kicks off with a sped-up snatch of the Byrds’ “My Back Pages,” their cover of Dylan’s original. Tallent and Lopez make their introductory thumps, Sancious leans in on the organ, Clemens’s sax suffuses the air, and the band is off on an ode to gathering up your friends to celebrate all night as Springsteen cuts cinematically between his cast of characters.
In his memoir he said “Rosalita” was partially inspired by the ex-girlfriend he lost his virginity to and her mother, who told him she was going to get a court order to keep him away. But Rose Lozito was the name of Diane’s grandmother.
After the summer night he and Lozito first hooked up, recounted in the first album’s “Spirit in the Night,” her boyfriend returned to law school; Springsteen asked her out for a proper dinner and soon asked her to move in with him. Lozito said he charmed her mother, but nevertheless her mother still wanted her to stick with the law student. Her father liked Springsteen, too, but he had been a musician, so he said no because he knew musicians slept around. In the song, Springsteen exhorts her to defy them and ecstatically breaks the news that he’s received a big advance from the record label (in real life for $65,000).
Springsteen was also yelling it to his own father, who had long disparaged his dream. Springsteen’s sister said after his record deal, “That was when [their father] began to say, ‘From now on, I’m never going to tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t do with their lives.’”33
Springsteen wrote in his memoir that songs like “Rosalita,” “Kitty’s Back,” and “Thundercrack” (held off the album) “were the soul children of the lengthy prog pieces I’d written for Steel Mill and were arranged to leave the band and the audience exhausted and gasping for breath. Just when you thought the song was over, you’d be surprised by another section, taking the music higher. It was, in spirit, what I’d taken from the finales of the great soul revues.”
“Rosalita” might have been the most jubilant single since “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” had it actually been released as a single, though it wasn’t for another six years. But it quickly became his show-closer and remained so for a decade thanks to its audience shout-alongs, like rowdy football games with Springsteen as ultimate cheerleader. In Springsteen on Broadway he recounted how his mother and aunts loved to dance, and how his mother’s buoyancy countered the melancholy he inherited from his father. Here the joie de vivre of the Zerilli sisters shines through.
He named the LP after a CinemaScope Western he caught on late-night TV, and it stands today as the most light-hearted in his canon—the moment before record-business woes, depression, and marriage issues started weighing him down.
But trouble was already brewing: his champion at Columbia, Clive Davis, was fired. The powers that be put their juice behind a new guy, Billy Joel, and ignored him—as Davis had ignored Aerosmith in favor of Springsteen just eleven months ago. There was even a campaign in some quarters to get Springsteen dropped. And that big advance? It was history, after the managers’ fees and taxes and band overhead. He had to write his mother for money at the end of the year.34
On the next album he howled in desperation at dreams slipping away in songs like “Backstreets.” By then, in the wake of October’s oil crisis, factories in the Northeast and Midwest were shutting down with increased frequency, as corporations moved south to nonunion states or to Asia to save on labor costs. Springsteen’s loss of optimism mirrored that of the country’s blue-collar workers. Their struggle became his most enduring theme as he evolved into his generation’s John Steinbeck, protesting through records instead of novels.
Springsteen and Young’s musical father, Dylan, flashed his twitchy, enigmatic, sweet almost-smile in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and released two albums within six months of each other, the soundtrack and Planet Waves. On their own, they were lightweight entries in his canon. But if you mixed the best tracks together you had a good year, with two of his biggest standards: one about death (“Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”) and one about birth (his lullaby to his oldest son, Jesse, “Forever Young” on Planet Waves, though the best version is the demo on Biograph).
After Columbia fired Clive Davis, David Geffen lured the singer to his own label, Asylum, with a master plan to reunite Dylan with the Band, release an album, go on a massive tour, and cash in. In retaliation, Columbia released Dylan, a collection of outtakes from the album considered the one bomb of his career, Self Portrait—sort of a double insult.
In November Dylan and the Band regrouped at the Village Recorders Studio in West LA, their first sessions since The Basement Tapes six years ago. Guitarist Robbie Robertson said, “We went in and made [Planet Waves] in three or four days, just hammered it out. It was like making a blues record for us.”35 Only a few of the songs needed second takes.
Dylan created his masterpieces in the mid-’60s in an equally short time. Back then the mutant prince detonated hypocrisies with surrealistic grandeur. Now he offered pleasant odes to his wife: “You Angel You,” “Something There Is About You,” “Never Say Goodbye,” “Tough Mama,” like a funkier, murkier Nashville Skyline. No dark haughty sneer, not even the gypsies and quasi-biblical locusts of New Morning. The painting Dylan made for the cover seemed to show him with an anchor on his head. “It’s never been my duty to remake the world at large,” he sang in “Wedding Song.”
Still, the return to greatness was only weeks away. His tour with the Band kicked off on January 3 and produced Before the Flood, “one of the best live albums of its time. Ever, maybe,” said AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine. Promoter Bill Graham claimed 12 million mail-order requests came in for tickets at a time when the US population was 214 million.36
As the temptations of the road led to the erosion of his marriage, chronicled in the anguished Blood on the Tracks, Planet Waves gained poignancy as a lost idyll. “I’m closin’ the book on the pages and the text and I don’t really care what happens next, I’m just going,” he sang in “Going Going Gone.” Maybe the song wasn’t a throwaway after all; maybe it was the theme to the Never Ending Tour that became his life.