Neil Young isn’t out to win any popularity contests. Just as he reached the top of the heap three years ago with the huge-selling Harvest, Young divested himself of the look and the sound of superstardom and began to rework his music and image almost from scratch. It wasn’t out of any fear that he turned away from the crowd and its expectations: Young’s projects since Harvest— a film, three albums, and several concert tours—have (whatever their aesthetic worth) been intensely, uncompromisingly personal. So he hasn’t stopped putting himself on the line—on the contrary, his post-Harvest work seems to be part of a continuing quest for some difficult truths.

Now Young has an album he cares so much about that he’s willing—at least temporarily—to return to the f world of media conventions to get the £ word out cibout it. Face set with a look-= of determined congeniality, glass ofl orange juice in hand, this man (who generally cares so little about the concept of promotion that he didn’t bother to include any songs from the then-new On the Beach in CSN&Y’s ’74 tour repertoire) braced himself to meet the press, a few at a time, in manager Elliot Roberts’ Sunset Strip office a fortnight before the release of his Tonight's the Night. His hair grown long and ratty since his CSN&Y appearances, still wearing th6 two-toned gangster-style shoes that had made a match with the dark secondhand suit he’d worn to the previous night’s album preview party, Young didn’t so much look cdnsciously anti-style as vacantly non-style.

But he was game about this pop business. “The record business,” Young sighed, in response not just to a ques\ tion but to the invisible forces that caused him to be sitting in this smoky room on a perfectly nice day. “I don’t even think I’m in it any more, I really don’t. I’ve never done anything like this before—interviews and the party and everything. But I never had a record you could party to and interview before.”

“You feel particularly good about this record?” I asked. When he affirmed that he did, I said that Tonight’s the Night seemed to be the inevitable culmination of the path Young blazed with Time Facies Away, his jumpy, nearly out-of-control livte album, and the intensely introspective On the Beach. I asked him why he’d begun making these raw, personal albums just at his moment of peak popularity.

"I’m not a junkie and I won't even try it out."

“It’s odd”—he seemed .genuinely perplexed for a moment—“I don’t know why. It was a subconscious move I think Tonight’s the Night is the most grand example pf that resistance. It was actually done a couple of years ago. It was recorded in August of ’73 at S.I.R. [L.A.’s Studio Instrument Rentals] where we had the party last night. On the Beach was totally done after...”

“But you’re still right,” Elliot Roberts said to me reassuringly.

“Yeah,” Young continued, “everything on Tonight’s the Night was recorded and mixed before On the B&ach was started, but it was never finished or put into its complete order till later.

“Everybody said that Harvest was a trip. To me, I’d happened to be in the right place at the right time, in the place to do a really mellow record that was really open ’cause that’s where my life was at at the time. At a time when I was going to be reaching a lot of people, so that combination did that and a lot of records sold. But that was only me for a couple of months. If I’d stayed there, I don’t know where I’d be right now—if I’d just stayed real mellow. I’m just not that way any more. I think Harvest was probably the finest record that I’ve made. But that’s really a restricting adjective for me. It’s really fine...

“In concert, what I play all depends on how/1 feel. I can’t do songs like ‘Southern Man,’ I’d rather play the LynyrdSljynyrd song. That’d be great. The thing is, I go on a different trip and I get a different band together, or I group with some old friends, then they don’t know how to play the stuff that I did with some other group and I have to show them all those things. That | takes a lot of time and I’d rather be working on the new stuff. So a lot of it’s | just laziness, I don’t even know some of I the old songs with the bands, you | know? I’m not going to even try to do £ Tonight’s the Night. If I go out in the fall II probably will take this band I’m working with now. We could get into doing these songs any time, but I’d have something new in my head by then that I would be even more into. We’ll do some of them.

“I’m working right now recording. That’s what I’m mainly interested in, because I have a lot of new songs that I haven’t finished recording.”

The conversation swung back to the new album.

“Tonight’s the Night didn’t come out right after it was recorded because it wasn’t finished. It just wasn’t in the right space, it wasn’t in the right order, and the concept wasn’t right. I had to get the color right, so it was not so down that it would make people restless. I had to keep jolting ev^ry once in awhile to get people to wake up so they could be lulled again.ty’s a very fluid album. The higher you are, the better it is. And it really lives up to that, a lot of records don’t. If you put on Tonight’s the Night first thing in the morning, I mean, the title and the time of day just stands for...you should listen to it late at night.”

"The higher you are, the better the album Is. Listen to it late at night, put on the Doobie Brothers in the morning."

“I tried that,” I ventured, “and I couldn’t go to sleep afterwards. It scared the hell out of me.”

Young wasyes—pleased. “That’s great. That’s the best thing you could tell me.” The title song, one of the album’s most jagged and discomfiting, tells the story of Bruce Berry, a friend of Young’s who—the lyric states— “died out on the mainline.” Who was he, I wondered.

“Bruc^ Berry was a roadie—he used to take care of Steve’s and my guitars and amps.”

“That line about his dying c?mes out and just hits you,” someone else in the room noted.

“I got tired of...I think what was in my mind when I made the record was I just didn’t feel like I was a lonely figure with a guitar or whatever the trip is that people see me as sometimes. I didn’t feel that laid-back-^1 just didn’t feel that way. So I thought I’d just forget about all that and.. .wipe it out. Be as aggressive and as abrasive in the wiping of that as I could so as to leave an effect— a long-term effect, that things change really radically sometimes—it’s good to point that out.”

Roberts pointed out that a number of the songs on Young’s recent albums have come directly from actual experience. “They’re threads of life. Although Neil’s portraying a character, the character he’s portraying saw all those things go dowrl.”

What about the chilling “Tired Eyes,” with its straightforward description of a dope-dealing vendetta that ends in bloodshed? Has he seen that sort of thing? !

“YeahX.puts the vibe right there— that’s what I was sayin’, at S.I.R. we were playing, and these two cats [Berry and Danny Whitten, the leader of Crazy Horse, who’d worked very plosely with Young] who had been a close part of our unit—of our force and our energy—were both gone to junk... both of them O.D.’d, ana we’re playing in a place where we’re getting together to make up for what is gone and try to make ourselves stronger and continue. Because ,we thought we had it with Danny Whitten—at least I did. I thought that I had a combination of peoplfe that could be as effective as groups like the Rolling Stones had been ...just for rhythm, which I’m really into. I haven’t had that rhythm for a while and that’s why I haven’t been playing my guitar; because without that behind me I won’t play. I mean you can’t get free enough. So I’ve had to play the rhythm myself ever since Danny died. Now I have someone who can play rhythm guitar, a good friend of mine.

TURN TO, PAGE 88.

YOUNG

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 32.

Who’s that, Nils Lofgren?

“No, Nils is a lead player, basically. And when I use Nils., .like on Tonight’s the Night I used him for piano, and I played piano on a couple of songs and he played guitar. In the songs where he plays guitar he’s actually playing as Bruce Berry, the way Bruce Berry played guitar. The thing is, I’m talking about him and you can hear him. So Nils just fits fn—he plays that hot rock & roll style guitar. He was really into it, I mean, he’s got a big thing for Hendrix.

“It’s just that there was a lot of spirit flyin’ around when we were doin’ it. It was like a tribute to those people, you know? Only the ones we chose no one had really heard of that much. But they meant a lot to us. That’s why it gets spooky, ’cause we were spooked. If you felt that I’m glad, because it was there.” Here Young leans back on the sofa he’s sitting on and laughs softly. “The first horror record, a horror record.” ‘

“There’s always a chance that nobody will dig it because it’s too abrasive. But it’s a very happy record if you’re loose. If you’re not loose, it’s not happy ’cause you realize how tight you are when you listen to it. You really feel how different you are from being loose. It makes you feel something, it draws a line somewhere. I’ve seen it draw a line everywhere I’ve played it. Some people fait to one side, others fall to the other side. It’s a surprise. People who thought that they’d never dislike anything I ever did, fall on the new side of the line. Other people who couldn’t hear me, who said, ‘that cat is too sad— he sings funny,’ those people listen another way now. It just changes that relationship. That’s not why I did it but that’s what happened.

“I can remember the first time I heard it I said, ‘That’s the most out-of-tune thing I’ve ever heard. We’re going to have to cancel all four of those songs.’ Then the same night, after we were relaxed and mellow, and we put it on, some other people in the room started going nuts, saying this was it, why hadn’t I released it, and that I’d have to wbrry about what to put out after this. So it’s fascinating to me. It was all just an experiment.

“What kwe were doing was playing those guys on the way. We all got that high—not that high, but we got as close as we could, without doing it. I mean, I’m not a junkie and I won’t even try it out to check out what it’s like. But we’d get really high—drink a lot of tequila, get right out on the edge, where we knew we were so screwed up that we could easily just fall on our faces, and noti be able to handle it as musicians. But we were wide open also at that time—just wide open. Because you know how you feel whien you got it. So we’d just wait until the middle of the night and get like that and just do it. We did four or five songs on the first side all in a row one night, without any break. We did ‘Tonight’s the Night,’ ‘World on a String,’ ‘Mellow My Mind,’ ‘Speakin’ Out,’ and ‘Tired Eyes,’ without any break between ’em, we just changed the order. We’d wait till the vibe hit us.

“Then Elliot put it in a different sequence, because he was doing this ‘Tonight’s the Night’ Broadway show... there was a script written and everything. We’d listen to the record of these songs, and that’s how we got it finished. He picked out the other songs—‘Lookout Joe,’ ‘Come on Baby, Let’s Go Downtown,’ and ‘Borrowed Tune’— and we put them, in with the original nine Tonight’s the Night songs.”

Tonight’s the Night contains all the dark, tense, melancholy we’ve corr\e to expect from Young’s music, but there’s one important difference; Whereas most of his serious songs have evoked their shadowy moods through indirection-recurring metaphors of flying and dancing, for example, and the mysterious Indian of “Broken Arrow” —these songs work through explicit narrative detail. Young has become a storyteller, an actor.

“I was able to step outside myself to do this record, to become a performer of the songs rather than the writer. That’s the main difference—every song was performed. I wrote the songs describing the situations and then I became an extension of those situations and I performed them. It’s like being an actor and writing the script for myself as opposed to a personal expression. There’s obviously a lot of personal expression in there but it comes in a different form, which makes it seem much more explicit and much more direct.

“All these people, they’re all in there. That’s why there’s so much talking on the record. It’s all the things that I hear people saying.

“I’ve been listening to this album for about two years and I’m not tired of it. I mean it’s a good friend of mine. In some respects I feel like it has more life than anything I’ve ever done. It’s not the kind of life that jumps up and down and makes everybody smile. It’s jqst another kind of life than that. There’s a feeling in it that’s really strong. Some people Will pick up on it.

“I don’t think Tonight’s the Night is a friendly album. It’s real, that’s all. Either you’ll want to hear it or you won’t. A lot of records don’t ever make you think that much. Then after that it will take you somewhere if you want to listen to it. I mean, I’m really proud of it. It’s there for me. You’ve got to listen to it at night when it was done. Put on the Doobie Brothers in the morning. They can handle it at 11 a.m. But not this album. It’s custom-made for nighttime.

“ ‘Lookout Joe’ and ‘Borrowed Tune’ were written during my Time Fades Away tour. I never hit ‘Lookout Joe’ the way I wanted to. It was recorded at my ranch during the rehearsals for the Time Fades Away tour just after Danny Whitten O.D.’d. He’d been working on the song with us and after he died we stopped for awhile. When we started playing again, that was the first thing we cut and I Wrote ‘Don’t Be Denied’ that day. So ‘Lookout Joe’ is one of the oldest songs on the album.”

By this time, Young was thoroughly caught up in what he was talking about. His shyness was gone, and the dark reticence I’d heard so much about was nowhere to be found, except for a defensive-sounding answer to a question about why he’d stormed off-stage in the middle of a Carnegie Hall solo concert—“It was intermission,” he’d said brusquely, “I just took it a little early.” Otherwise, he was congenial enough to answer even the most stock questions with a concern that approached expansiveness. He seemed ready for at least a slightly more personal question. Wondering about his seeming ability to resist getting caught up in his own heroic legend, I commented:

“It seems as if you’ve gone against your superstardom musically.' You’ve done a parallel move during the same period in terms of the way you come off visually and image-wise. Where’s the teen-idol?”

Young laughed. “We gotta tear down all that—it’s gone now,” he said, his voice a sneer. “Now we can do whatever. It’s open again, there’s no illusions that someone can say what I’m going to do before I get there. That’s how I have to feel. Whether it’s true or not, I don’t want to feel like people expect me to be a certain way. If that’s Jhe way it is, then I qujt, I can’t do it. I have to be able to fdel like I can do whatever I want to do and it’s not gonna disappoint...ah, is not gonna disappoint me to do it.”

Was that the problem with CSN&Y?

“I thought there wasn’t any problem at all. Last time we went out, and every time we’ve gone out, it’s been great.”

Haven’t you guys had problems putting an album together?

“We just didn’t make an album. And it’s not even that it didn’t happen—we just didn’t do it. If we don’t do something, people put together all these trips about you, you know, ‘Stills and * Young are fighting so they can’t do this.’ ” Young is edgy: “That’s all a bunch of bullshit.” j

You don’t want tp be a supergroup?

“We already are a supergroup, so whether we want to be one or not, it’s all after the fact. In the end, it’s just another name, you know, in a list. And that’s cool...”

A minute later, his feathers unruffling, Young commented on the swollen shape of/big-money rock & roll:

“I dpn’t know what this next tour will be like! I’ll be doing a lot of the stuff that I’m recording now. It’s another rock & roll album. A lot of long instrumental guitar things—progressive.!. progresso supremo? It’s about the Incas and the Azteqs. It takes on another personality. It’s like being in another civilization. It’s' a lost sort of a form, sort of a soul-form that switches from history scene to history scene trying to find itself, man, in this maze. I’ve got it all written and all the songs learned. Tomorrow we start cutting them. We’re ready to go. We’re gonna just do it in the morning. Early, in the morning when the sun’s out. Sunny days...just...play.”