# Best Neil Young Album



## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Ok, what's yours? Do you like his earlier period or later? Poll coming.


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

I like some of the 90s output - _Sleeps With Angels_, _Harvest Moon_, _Ragged Glory_...but from 1969-1979 Neil Young hardly put a foot wrong despite his notorious self-criticism. It was such a fine run of form that to this day I couldn't pick just the one album. Most of his 80s stuff should be rolled into a carpet and kicked to death, but the 80s was often that kind of decade anyway.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Since we're only allowed one, it has to be _Live Rust_ for me. Great songs, live! But _After the Gold Rush, Rust Never Sleeps_, and _Freedom_ are excellent albums. Ol' Neil, a phenomenon. The live Cortez the Killer from _Live Rust_ is a stone chiller. Along with songs like _Theme From an Imaginery Western_ (Mountain), _St. Charles_ (Jefferson Starship), _Those Were the Days_ (Cream), and _Kashmir_ (Zep), _Cortez_ is fruit of Rock's "discovery" of Romanticism--faraway places, long ago, with strange-sounding names....

But that's a whole 'nother topic.


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## Guest (Jul 22, 2018)

Strange Magic said:


> Since we're only allowed one, it has to be _Live Rust_ for me. Great songs, live!


Same vote here... I know this is completely OT but as long as you're hanging around - but every time I read one of your posts this album always pops into my mind for some reason -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blows_Against_the_Empire

I bought it when it was first released sometime in 1970 because I had read that CSN&Y were involved in the recording...
I was too young to really appreciate it at the time but thought differently later after having added a couple of years...


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## Merl (Jul 28, 2016)

Rust Never Sleeps for me. Cortez, Hurricane and Powderfinger are exceptional live.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

I've voted for On the beach. Especially because of Ambulance blues. But Tonight is the night is another big favorite.
And I think American Stars 'n Bars should be in the list above. Even just for Will to love. Of course there's Like a hurricane, but Will to love is right there with Ambulance blues for me (and Neil Young considers it the best song he has ever written).


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

I'm not a frequent listener, but I have Live Rust, Massey Hall 1971, and Everybody Knows... i like 'em all.


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## Belowpar (Jan 14, 2015)

Tonight’s the Night is a hard one to get into, but once you do it stays right with you. There’s an awful lot of c+++ talked about artistic honesty and etc etc. but you just can’t fake this…. His darkest moment and we can be with him. It’s the one I know of nothing remotely like.


Conversely it also gives us an example of his sense of humour. He took the band on tour to promote it before it was released and they played the whole album track by track. Young was wearing dark glasses and had hair that covered his face, no expression showing. Non plussed by the intensity of this unfamiliar material, the audience grew restless. 

A heckler yells “Neil play …something…anything we’ve heard before...”

Young pauses and without looking at the band, starts all over again 
“Tonight’s the night….”


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## EddieRUKiddingVarese (Jan 8, 2013)

For me its Greendale


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## E Cristobal Poveda (Jul 12, 2017)

Monsanto Years for me.


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## Room2201974 (Jan 23, 2018)

_Tonight's The Night_ is the greatest Neil Young album of all time. It's a drunken wake to the deaths of Bruce Berry and Danny Whitten. The band is ragged. Neil is off key! Yet it's brilliant! Whitten shows up for rehearsal of an upcoming tour and can't remember the songs he's so strung out on smack. Neil gives him $50 for airfare and tells him to go home, get straight, and join the band later on tour. Danny takes the $50, scores some smack, and dies of an overdose. Neil felt responsible and it plunged him into a dark depression.

Meanwhile, recording time had already been booked at a studio. So Neil and Crazy Horse show up every day for a couple of weeks. They start drinking and getting high in the late afternoon and by midnight they're pretty rank. That's when the recording engineer hits the record button and the result is _Tonight's The Night_.

It was 1975 folks. The Captain and Tentacles are lighting up the airwaves with the banal _Love Will Keep Us Together_. Glen Campbell is a rhinestone cowboy, and Elton John is singing a song about a sports team. All slick, multi - dubbed, say nothing banal products of middle 70's pop culture. And only Neil is sounding like the world as it really is!!!!!!!!

We had seen glimpses of this in Neil's songs before - the seedy underbelly of rock and roll - in songs like _Broken Arrow_ and _The Old Laughing Lady_. But _Tonight's The Night_ goes much farther.....it's the real deal.

Named best album for 1975 by Rolling Stone magazine.

If one wonders at the difference between _Harvest_ and _On The Beach_ it's because those two deaths would change Neil. They would change anyone.

Side note: Its February 2017 and I am literally on the edge of civilization in Oriental Mindoro, The Philippines. Rows of tin roofed shacks with dirt floors and crushing poverty all around.....and a song emanating from a hut is Whitten's _I Don't Want To Talk About It_. Such is the strength of the beautifully written torch ballade.


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## Guest (Jul 29, 2018)

One last post as I take some time off to recalibrate...

"*Tonight's the Night*"... I've posted this clip before somewhere - who knows where - but it is just so fierce that it should be seen by as many people as possible.

Watch for the 5:46 mark where Neil shouts "For Bruce now!" and then becomes almost completely unhinged as he brings the tune to a close...

And that's a vintage 1953 Les Paul nicknamed "Old Black" that he's thrashing to within an inch of its life. That's been his guitar of choice since his days with Buffalo Springfield.

"Old Black" has issued an appeal to Amnesty International seeking its protection and intervention... "Old Black" has also filed a petition in the Court of Queen's Bench in Winnipeg, Manitoba seeking "emancipated guitar" status... "Old Black" often thinks "I'm really getting too old for this... I wish Neil would play a Strat..."


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

^^^^Great clip! There's nothing like Live, even when singing of the Dead.


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## Captainnumber36 (Jan 19, 2017)

I've always liked his soundtrack to the movie dead man. But I'm not huge on his voice.


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## Belowpar (Jan 14, 2015)

Captainnumber36 said:


> I've always liked his soundtrack to the movie dead man. But I'm not huge on his voice.


Thats OK, his voice is not that huge anyway.


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## EddieRUKiddingVarese (Jan 8, 2013)

Belowpar said:


> Thats OK, his voice is not that huge anyway.


yeah, imagine a Young/ Dylan duet


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