“Welcome to Miami Beach.” For this live album culled from a trio of dates at West Hollywood’s Roxy club, it makes little sense to hear Young offer that greeting, but don’t worry about it. Just listen and enjoy it as another trippy snapshot from his September ’73 mind. Young was tracking the studio album, Tonight’s the Night, that same September and essentially in the same fashion- live- at SIR, a recording and rehearsal space a few miles down the street from the Roxy. Cut in the haze of a lingering ‘60s hangover and mourning the deaths-by-overdose of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry, the studio version was held back from release until 1975, two years after Young and friends played these three nights on the Strip. So, what is here, really, is a magnificent companion recording of Tonight’s the Night, with the same band lineup (the Santa Monica Flyers; a hybrid of Crazy Horse and ace players Ben Keith and Nils Lofgren), and the same roughshod edges, inebriated tone, and slow-roll through tired eyes and country ham. Young’s banter, including calls for topless women and shout-outs to any police in attendance, separate this from its proper studio sibling, but otherwise it’s a steamed-up mirror image; denim-loose and lumbering, risky and rocking. Sometimes raw and hardened, sometimes quiet and plaintive, it’s music that made no apologies in 1973 as a sobering slug to the face of a post-Woodstock, Watergate world. 45 years later it’s still slugging, still leaving a mark.
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