A bleary view of a drug murder in a Los Angeles canyon. Out of pitch but still in tune. Neil Young Decade liner notes 1977

The next song was written about ... this song was written about the last song you just heard [Roll Another Number]. That's right. I'm just trying to keep you informed ... like an almanac. These songs are all going to out on a record. I'm not trying to do a commercial or anything. Be about three, four months from now. January or whenever that is. Neil Young Palace Theatre, Manchester, England November 3, 1973

Here's another drug oriented song for you now. A song about the Navaho Trail in the United States. It's all covered by junkyards now and that's the Navaho Trail. All kinds of old cars and everything, piled up on top of one another. This is a song I wrote about - as soon as I get this thing in position I'll stop talking [adjusting his harmonica holder] - I wrote it about nine months ago. Neil Young City Hall, Newcastle, England November 9, 1973

BS: What about the chilling Tired Eyes, with its straightforward description of a dope-dealing vendetta that ends in bloodshed? Has he seen that sort of thing? NY: "Yeah … puts the vibe right there … that's what I was saying, at SIR, when we were playing, and these two cats [Berry and Danny Whitten, the leader of Crazy Horse, who'd worked very closely with Young] who had been a close part of our unit, our force, our energy, were both gone to junk, both of them OD'd. And now we're playing in a place where we're getting together to make up for what is gone and try to make ourselves stronger and continue. Because we thought we had it with Danny Whitten. At least I did. I thought that a combination of people that could be as effective as groups like the Rolling Stones had been … just for rhythm, which I'm really into. I haven't had that rhythm for a while and that's why I haven't been playing my guitar: because without that behind me I won't play. I mean, you can't get free enough. So I've had to play the rhythm myself ever since Danny died. Now I have someone who can play rhythm guitar, a good friend of mine." Neil Young NME/Bud Scoppa June 1975

NK: ...and most chilling of all, the matter-of-fact recounting of a mass murder during a drug deal over an electric grave-yard waltz otherwise known 'Tired Eyes'. Everyone thought he'd taken the incident from some random newspaper report. In fact, the guy who'd done the killing was yet another of Young's strange, impossible running buddies: NY: That actually happened to a friend of mine, My friend was the guy who shot the other guys [laughs]. He's doing OK now. The's already been to jail and come back. He wasn't gone for that long, either. It was just one of those deals that turned bad, He didn't have any choice really. The lyric is just a straight narrative account of what happened. Neil Young The Dark Stuff - Neil Young and The Haphazard Highway That Lead To Unconditional Love by Nick Kent 1993

What we were doing was playing those guys on the way. We all got that high – not that high, but we got as close as we could, without doing it. I mean, I’m not a junkie and I won’t even try it out to check out what it’s like, But we’d get really high’ – drink a lot of tequila, get right out on the edge, where we knew we were so screwed up that we could easily just fall on our faces, and not be able to handle it as musicians. But we were wide open also at that time – just wide open. Because you know how you feel when you got it. So we’d just wait until the middle of the night and get like that and just do it. We did four or five songs on the first side all in a row one night, without any break. We did ‘Tonight’s the Night’, ‘World on a String’, ‘Mellow My Mind’, ‘Speakin’ Out’, and ‘Tired Eyes’ without any break between ’em, we just changed the order. We’d wait till the vibe hit us. Neil Young Creem/Bud Scoppa November 1975