In 1973, I drove my 1947 Buick Roadmaster, ‘Black Queen’ to LA from the North, accompanied by Ben Keith. Once in LA, Hollywood to be exact, we met up with Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina. Nils Lofgren joined us and we drove to SIR (studio Instrument Rentals on Santa Monica Boulevard). David Briggs, producer, and Johnny Talbot, equipment manager, met us there. They had blasted a hole in the wall and set up the Green Board (an old tube board I had purchased that had been used recording many historic sessions from the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds to Monterey Pop Festival, among many others) next to the Rehearsal Hall. Our 16-track analog tape machine was set up next to the board.
We had very recently lost Danny Whitten and our roadie Bruce Berry to heroin overdoses so we were missing them and feeling them in the music every night as we played. Tonight’s the Night was sort of a wake. There was no overdubbing on those nine original songs. They were recorded live, with no clean up.
Briggs was always at the green board as we played, unless he came into the room to tell us something. For almost a month we recorded like that, starting around 11PM and playing into the early morning hours. Sometimes we had a small audience. Once Mel Brooks and a few friends came by. We drank a lot of Tequila and I wrote Tonight’s the night’s songs somewhere around the beginning. We had nine songs and played them twice every night for a long time until we thought we had them. After the sessions, every morning we jumped into the Black Queen and headed back to The Sunset Marquis to sleep, rolling down Santa Monica Boulevard, coming down from the night’s recording. That’s how we got the name ‘Santa Monica Flyers’.
A year and a half or so later, we had recorded Homegrown and Rick Danko visited us with a few friends at the Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset in Hollywood, where I was staying. We played Homegrown to him. Rick said he liked the record and we were all feeling fine. It was a good night. We smoked and drank and hung out, enjoying ourselves.
I said “Hey Rick, want to hear another album?”
“Yes I do,” he answered, and I put on Tonight’s the Night, the original 9 songs from SIR. Rick was knocked out and so were we! It blew my mind how real the record was. Ben Keith and I loved it. We had not listened to it for a while since I played it for my friends at Warner Bros. They were concerned that it was so loose and we had just come off of a bomb with Time Fades Away, so we had shelved Tonight’s the Night at that time.
Now, after that Chateau Marmont playback, it was back on the front burner for me and at my ranch studio in the North I added Borrowed Tune (a song I had written at the beginning of the Time fades Away tour reflecting on whether a big stadium tour was right for me), Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown ( a song about heroin and the life of an addict) and Lookout Joe (written about a GI returning to the states from the Vietnam war.) The addition of these three songs made it more like a normal album and I released it like that.
Let’s go back to SIR, to the original sessions. We had finished recording and decided to celebrate with a gig at a new club opening on the sunset strip, ROXY. We went there and recorded for a few nights, opening ROXY. We really knew the Tonight’s the Night songs after playing them for a month, so we just played them again, the album, top to bottom, without the added songs, two sets a night for a few days. We had a great time.
‘ROXY tonight’s the night live’ is the live recording we made. There is a little super-eight footage of us driving to the gig in the ‘Black Queen’ one of those nights.
This album is in pre-production. As it gets closer to release, the album cover will become more clear on the timeline-1973.
NY
NYA Times-Contrarian