Neil Young’s ‘On the Beach’ at 50: His Bummed-Out Masterpiece Reigns Supreme
Happy 50th anniversary to Neil Young’s On the Beach, an album that, to put it mildly, is not a very sunny one. Young himself called it one of the most depressing records he’s ever made — and that was after he wrote and recorded the famously funereal Tonight’s the Night. But that album could be joyful at times, like the groovy movie in “Speakin’ Out,” or the fried eggs and country ham in “Albuquerque.” You won’t find any breakfast delights on On the Beach, but you will find three songs with the word “blues” in the title. The good times are coming, but they’re sure coming slow.
Every hardcore Young fan worships On the Beach, and not just because it became a cult rarity within a decade of its release. It stopped being pressed on vinyl in the early Eighties, effectively vanishing from view, and it wasn’t released on CD until 2003. You can hear On the Beach anytime now, as easily as you can hear After the Gold Rush or Zuma, but it’s lost none of its uniquely haunting beauty. There’s simply nothing like it in his catalog. We love On the Beach because it’s the most raw and personal Shakey ever got, the moment he rooted himself in his melancholy, drank up the pain, and used it to push further than he ever had. He was incredibly bummed out — and very, very, very stoned. We wouldn’t have him any other way.
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You can thank the honey slides for that. The infamously potent concoction of fried weed and honey fueled the recording sessions at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, which is probably why the music feels like a frenzied high on the verge of becoming a very bad trip. (Neil told an audience that year that the secret ingredient was “poor-grade marijuana, worse than you get on the street. You take it and you get your old lady, if you got one, to cook it up on the stove.”) The peak of that honey-slide haze comes when he takes on a wild-eyed, Manson-esque persona in “Revolution Blues,” barreling around L.A. on a destructive spree. “Remember your guard dog?/Well, I’m afraid that he’s gone!” he sings, with a menacing grin you can hear through the speakers. He goes full Tex Watson in the final lines: “Well, I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars/But I hate them worse than lepers and I’ll kill them in their cars.”
“Heart of Gold Pt. 2,” it’s not. But even in this sweat-soaked nightmare, Young manages to toss in a glimmer of his real-life despair, admitting, “But I’m still not happy/I feel like there’s something wrong.” Looking back, he was absolutely correct about that. His bleak mindset at the time was the result of several factors, mainly his crumbling relationship with actress Carrie Snodgress, the woman who had inspired him to write “A Man Needs a Maid” just a couple of years earlier. “Pretty dark, not really that happy,” he said in the definitive 2002 biography Shakey. “I think it was a period of disillusionment about things turning out differently than I had anticipated. I think I was starting to realize what a fucked-up life I had chosen for myself with Carrie.”
His career wasn’t bringing him much joy, either. Refusing to satisfy audiences who wanted another Harvest (“I can’t write the same book every time,” he told Rolling Stone in 1975), he made the movie soundtrack Journey Through the Past and the live album Time Fades Away, the latter recorded on his massive, miserable Harvest tour. Neither one came close to matching the gigantic commercial success he’d seen in 1972.
Young wasted no time clapping back at the critics, kicking off On the Beach with the rollicking “Walk On.” The opening lines set the tone for the rest of the record. “I hear some people been talking me down/Bring up my name, pass it ’round.” The track, recorded with his right-hand man Ben Keith and the Crazy Horse rhythm section of Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot, sounds almost dementedly upbeat. The lesson: Do not piss off Neil Young.
But that was just the start of his complaints. Like many people in the summer of 1974, he was feeling burned out by the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the Watergate scandal, and other lurid headlines. “I never knew a man who could tell so many lies,” he says of Nixon on “Ambulance Blues.” The disgraced president resigned two weeks later. If the hippie dream had ended with Altamont and the Manson murders in 1969, now it felt like the world was just rubbing everyone’s face in it. Nihilism was the mood of the day, and it struck a chord with Neil.
On the iconic album cover that he designed with Gary Burden, Neil stands on an overcast Santa Monica Beach in a cheap white-and-yellow polyester suit. Tacky floral patio furniture sits in the foreground, next to the taillight of a 1959 Cadillac sunken into the sand. (Another old dream dead and buried.) “SENATOR BUCKLEY CALLS FOR NIXON TO RESIGN,” reads the headline of a local paper. But Young isn’t paying attention to any of it. He’s turned away from the camera, hands in his pockets, looking out at the ocean. The sky is about to rain.
“You go down to the beach and watch the same thing, just imagine every wave is a different set of emotions coming in,” he told Melody Maker in 1985. “Just keep coming. As long as you don’t ignore it, it’ll still be there. If you start shutting yourself off and not letting yourself live through the things that are coming through you, I think that’s when people start getting old really fast, that’s when they really age.”
On the Beach has a seriously impressive list of personnel, from the Band’s Levon Helm and Rick Danko to his CSNY bandmates David Crosby and Graham Nash. That’s what being Neil Young in the early Seventies got you. But the most notable guest at this doomer shindig might be Cajun slide-guitar ace Rusty Kershaw. Not only did he cook and distribute those honey slides with his wife, Julie, and play some swampy fiddle to boot, he’s also responsible for shaping the sound of On the Beach. Kershaw convinced the band to sit extremely close together in the studio, and made sure they didn’t rehearse prior to recording, creating an intimate, intuitive vibe. With a ginormous beard and overalls, he was a figure known for his joyful debauchery. Young wasn’t in the right headspace to be the life of the party. Kershaw did it for him.
Few records have a more staggering Side Two than On the Beach, an emotional bulldozer of just three songs. “The whole B side of this album, you can just put it on and get lost,” Father John Misty once told us. “You can get stoned and go inside this little universe. And when the song ends, go back to the beginning.” It starts with the title track, a stormy, stunning glimpse into Young’s mind as a celebrity and perpetual outsider. He needs to be surrounded by others, but he can’t bear to socialize with them. He’s thinking he’ll get out of town, get out of town. The hand drums, played here by Keith, make this one spooky dirge.
Young laments and processes his fallout with Snodgress in the devastating “Motion Pictures (For Carrie),” his most vulnerable moment on the record. “I’m deep inside myself, but I’ll get out somehow,” he promises. The song is so intense and personal that Young has only played it a single time, when he premiered On the Beach material at a surprise show at New York City’s Bottom Line in May 1974. Catching it live is the ultimate holy grail for fans.
The record culminates with “Ambulance Blues,” a nearly nine-minute masterpiece that is widely regarded as one of his very best songs, second only to “Powderfinger.” It starts with a wistful look back at his early career, playing in Toronto coffee houses like the Riverboat and living in an apartment at 88 Isabella Street. He’s so bummed out, he’s even mourning his old apartment building as if it were a tragic heroine: “Oh Isabella, proud Isabella/They tore you down and plowed you under.”
That era was not even a full decade in the past, but Young was painfully nostalgic for it, yearning to go back to a simpler time. His voice sounds deeper, weathered, and a bit distant — which was intentional. “Robert De Niro gained fifty pounds for Raging Bull, Neil did the same thing for his music,” bassist Tim Drummond said. “He was smoking two packs a day to get a late-night, frog-in-his-throat voice.”
Using his aching harmonica and a melody he later admitted he nicked from British folk master Bert Jansch, Young continues to reflect on everything that’s happened since those early days, including the dead-end state of CSN (“you’re all just pissing in the wind”) and the recent deaths of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry. “An ambulance can only go so fast,” he says. “It’s easy to get buried in the past/When you try to make a good thing last.” He tells a surreal story about a kidnapping plot and gets some parting shots in at those ungrateful critics and President Tin Soldiers. Then the needle swings back and On the Beach ends. Fifty years later, it’s still echoing in our heads.
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