Neil Young – ‘On The Beach’
Few people in the history of popular music seemed to hate stardom quite like Neil Young. After nearly a decade removed from helping invent folk rock, Young had graduated from Buffalo Springfield through Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and all the way to his own high-profile solo career. He was a superstar in the music world, and from the looks of it, that was the absolute worst thing that could have happened to Young.
Two years after scoring a number one hit with ‘Heart of Gold’, Young was doing everything he could to get out of the mainstream. The 1973 live album Time Fades Away did a thorough job of erasing any of the smoothed-out and pristine elements of Harvest. On The Beach was just an extension of that, this time moved into the studio setting. In the liner notes to his 1977 compilation Decade, Young famously described On The Beach as him “headed for the ditch.”
The album’s opening track ‘Walk On’ sets the tone perfectly. Although it’s up-tempo and swings with an almost country lilt, Young also audibly kicks back at the hippie who felt betrayed once Young became a major pop star. There are two ways to hear the line “But then the money was not so good”, after all. Slide guitarist Ben Keith steps into the usual harmony vocal slot filled by Danny Whitten or his CSN bandmates, and between his singing and prominent slide playing, the song becomes a virtual duet between Young and Keith. But ‘Walk On’ also features another prominent theme of On The Beach: keeping your head up and moving forward.
Choosing a Wurlitzer piano as his main instrument, Young crafts a hazy and melancholy feeling for ‘See the Sky About to Rain’. Whereas most of Young’s kickbacks at his superstardom came in the form of hair rock and roll music, Young wasn’t afraid of his softer folk side. ‘See the Sky About to Rain’ has some surprisingly jaunty elements for a lament, especially once Young takes a solo on the Wurlitzer before the final verse. The Byrds’ Gene Clark had managed to hear Young preview the song and insisted that the reunited band take the song on for their 1973 self-titled LP.
The minor key romp of ‘Revolution Blues’ is as paranoid as Young ever got on record. Young almost challenges the listener to figure out what he’s talking about when he spits out “I hope you get the connection, ’cause I can’t take the rejection/ I won’t deceive you, I just don’t believe you.” He directly connects with the Charles Manson-led Tate-LaBianca murders that were less than a half-decade old. With rubbery guitars and a loose push-and-pull, Young and his band (which here features Levon Helm and Rick Danko of The Band and one-time/future bandmate David Crosby) shake out the jams on ‘Revolution Blues’ creating the perfect setting for Young’s razor-sharp guitar licks.
Returning to folk by way of Appalachian country, ‘For The Turnstiles’ is a golden nugget featuring Young mining the depths of early-era lo-fi music. With just a banjo guitar to accompany him, Young strains to the top of his register with one of his most oblique allusions on record. When Young and Keith croak simultaneously on the first “Though your confidence may be shattered,” it’s the clearest example of Young welcoming the raw and ragged sound qualities that would become elemental to his “Godfather of Grunge” reputation. How he’s able to do that with banjo is anyone’s guess, but he does it all the same.
Side one closes out with ‘Vampire Blues’, the second of three “Blues” songs on the album. Whereas ‘Revolution Blues’ was filled with anxiety, ‘Vampire Blues’ is stark and direct, with Young repeating himself repeatedly as he takes down the oil industry. Whereas most songs from On The Beach are poetic and open-ended, there’s no way to misinterpret what Young is going for on ‘Vampire Blues’. That makes it impactful but also relatively slight, especially compared with the more personal lyrics strewn throughout the album.
Young originally wanted the A and B sides of On The Beach to be flipped, which makes the spacey openness of ‘On The Beach’ all the more surprising. Cooler heads probably saw that the stripped-back languidness of ‘On The Beach’ wasn’t the best album opener, but it would have been a marvellous way to thrust listeners into the deep end. Young was never afraid of taking his time and stretching out songs to their very limit (see the ten-minute ‘Cowgirl in the Sand’ as a prime example), and side two of On The Beach all sit and stew for exactly as long as Young wants them to go. Graham Nash adds some buried Wurlitzer to the track, doubling down on the notion that Young wasn’t looking for beautiful harmonies on the album. Two of the best harmonisers in the world, Crosby and Nash, don’t even sing on the LP.
‘Motion Picture’ is the most lyrically direct track on the album. Young crafts an obvious ode to his recent separation from actress Carrie Snodgress by letting aching beauty creep into the album’s arrangement for the first and last time. Even here, Rusty Kershaw’s slide guitar fumbles around a bit to find the right notes, retaining the ragged edges that Young insisted on. ‘Motion Picture’ is the closest connection to the “old” Neil Young, with even his signature harmonica popping out of the woodwork.
With one final blues track, Young closes out On The Beach with an elegant wave to the past. ‘Ambulence Blues’ is openly nostalgic and yearning for simplicity, romanticising the old folkie days. Young also saves some sharp-tounged retorts for his critics, lambasts Richard Nixon in the song’s final verse, and brings On The Beach to a sad and stinging end that has no resolution.
If you knew Young as a nasally folk star or a mind-melting guitar hero, On The Beach could sound like deliberate self-sabotage. The material on the album is just as a strong as any of Young’s previous work, but his deliberate lack of desire to write pop melodies or refine harmonies is provocative, to say the least. But that was sort of the point: Young could have easily crafted another Harvest or just rejoined CSNY, which he would do a year later, bringing the so-called “Ditch Trilogy” to an end (Tonight’s the Night was recorded before On the Beach but wasn’t released until 1975).
Instead, On The Beach is a search to see who would stick with Young without the polish. Those who did would find a wealth of quality music and quite a bit of wild experimentation over the next few decades, but it became vitally important for Young to get out of the limelight. He wasn’t about to stop making music, so instead of easy-to-hum folk songs, Young pushed his own artistic abilities outside of his, and his audiences’, comfort zone. On The Beach isn’t anywhere close to, say, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. But it is a line of demarcation for fans who are fully bought into the Neil Young experience and those who just want him to play ‘Old Man’ forever.
