Liner Notes
Included with the vinyl release of Tonight's the Night is a cryptic message written by Young: "I'm sorry. You don't know these people. This means nothing to you."
On the front of the insert is a letter to a character called "Waterface". No explanation is given to this person's identity, although in Shakey: Neil Young's Biography, Young says that "Waterface is the person writing the letter. When I read the letter, I'm Waterface. It's just a stupid thing—a suicide note without the suicide."
The back of the insert has some text superimposed over the credits to Young's On the Beach album, released a year earlier. This text is reportedly the lyrics to an unreleased song titled "Florida", referred to in Shakey as "A cockamamie spoken-word dream, set to the shrieking accompaniment of either Young or Keith drawing a wet finger around the rim of a glass."
When unfolded, a whole side of the insert features a lengthy article printed entirely in Dutch. It is a review of a Tonight's the Night live show by Dutch journalist Constant Meijers for the Dutch rock music magazine Muziekkrant OOR. In 1976 Young said he chose to print it "Because I didn't understand any of it myself, and when someone is so sickened and fucked up as I was then, everything's in Dutch anyway." Meijer later spent a week at Young's ranch in California: during this visit, Young explained that he chose the article after some Dutch girls who were visiting him translated the story and made him aware of the fact "that someone on the other end of the world exactly understood what he was trying to say."
The Reprise Records label on the vinyl copy was printed in black and white rather than the standard orange color, a process Young undertook again on the CD label art for 1994's Sleeps With Angels. Early editions of the sleeve were made on blotter paper.
Scratched into the run-out grooves on Side One is the message "Hello Waterface" while the run-out grooves on Side Two read "Goodbye Waterface". The picture of Roy Orbison is taken from a bootleg tape Young came across and, feeling bad that Orbison most likely did not know the bootleg existed, printed it in the insert for him to see.
In Shakey: Neil Young's Biography, Young maintains that along with the inserts there was a small package of glitter inside the sleeve that was meant to fall out ("Our Bowie statement."), spilling when the listener took the record out. However, neither McDonough nor Joel Bernstein (Young's archivist) have yet found a copy of Tonight's the Night featuring the glitter package.
Read more about this topic: Tonight's The Night (Neil Young album)
Famous quotes containing the word notes:
“Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you—like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist—or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)