Two events in the previous 10 months had shaken Young to his core, and they shaped how this album came to be and how it was heard. In August of ’73, when Young started the sessions that produced the bulk of Tonight’s the Night, he found himself in the heart of such a scene, and the center could not hold. Bodies that seemed indestructible in youth start to give out good times suddenly aren’t so good anymore. Your late twenties is when you might find that certain people who once seemed like “they like to party” are going much further, and the situation is getting dangerous. He was learning that bad things can start to happen when you reach your late twenties, especially when you’re drinking too much and doing too many drugs and are hanging around people who do the same. “Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch.” Tonight’s the Night, a noisy, harrowing scrape along the guardrail that sends sparks flying upward, was Young’s most moving dispatch from his chosen place.Īs summer turned to fall in 1973, 18 months after Harvest hit stores, Neil Young was 27 years old. “‘Heart of Gold’ put me in the middle of the road,” he famously wrote of Harvest’s big single in the liner notes to his 1977 collection Decade, perhaps thinking of his album in the bins next to those by massive sellers by Cat Stevens and Carole King. “The Needle and the Damage Done,” recorded live in concert and solo, set a template for a certain kind of song about drug abuse: It’s beautiful, elegiac, precise-a focused lament written with a great deal of craft, like Elliott Smith’s “ Needle in the Hay” or U2's " Running to Stand Still." While he always excelled at this style, Young’s approach to songwriting was about to shift drastically.
It was a song, in part, about guitarist, singer, and songwriter Danny Whitten, Young’s friend and a member of his frequent backing band, Crazy Horse, specifically Whitten’s addiction to heroin.
Harvest had its share of wistful and breezy songs, but a number on the second side called “The Needle and the Damage Done” was a sign of things to come.
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