[Tonight's the Night] is an album of resolute drugginess and obsession with death…. But mostly, it is about Neil Young and his nightride into devastation.

The atmosphere Young creates is that of a solitary figure riding through this album like a bad luck John Wesley Harding: a rootless, drug saturated hippie, cruising the west in search of the ultimate burnout….

This is not the work of a detached, millionaire pop star. Young has assimilated the collective unconscious of the knife wielding, gun toting, dope burning street people who populate western towns like Boulder or Santa Fe, the acid casualties of the counter-culture who'll call you brother but kill you for some spare change. Perhaps it's the life Neil's been living all along….

In On the Beach …, Neil Young came to grips with the Southern California of Charles Manson, the horror of the Dune Buggy Night. But the terror...