To put it mildly, On the Beach It's not exactly a sunny album. Even Neil Young considered it one of his most depressed works and he said so, mind you, after having written and recorded the funereal Tonight's the Night. The latter also contained light songs like Speakin' Out or Albuquerque. There was nothing like it on On the Beachwhich just turned 50 and which not coincidentally contains three of its eight songs with the word “blues” in the title. If things were improving, they were doing so very slowly.
It is a beloved record by Young's die-hard fans, who adore it not only because it had already become a rarity within ten years. It has not been reissued since the early 1980s and therefore disappeared from circulation until the CD edition released in 2003. Today it is no less well-known than a After the Gold Rush and of one Zoombut its haunting beauty is intact. In other words, there is no other album like it in Neil Young's catalog. You love it because it is the rawest and most personal of his discography, because it captures the moment when he gave in to melancholy, drank from the source of pain, used it to push himself even further than he had previously done. He was incredibly depressed and very, very, very high. We wouldn't have wanted it any other way.
Self On the Beach that's right, it's also thanks to the so-called honey slidesthe infamously potent concoctions of weed and honey that fueled the sessions at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles. Maybe that's why the music feels like a high that's always on the verge of becoming a bad trip (that year Neil told an audience that the secret ingredient was “low-grade marijuana, worse than what you get on the street, you get it and have your lady cook it, if you have one”). The pinnacle of the high honey slide you reach it in Revolution Blues where Young plays a Charles Manson-type madman who runs around Los Angeles in a destructive frenzy. “Remember your guard dog? Well, I’m afraid he’s gone,” he sings with a menacing grin. At the end he becomes Tex Watson of the Manson Family: “I hear Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars, but I hate them worse than lepers and I’m going to kill them all in their cars.”
No its not Heart of Gold Vol. 2. But even in this nightmare scenario, Young manages to convey a sense of his desperation: “I’m still not happy, I feel like something is wrong.” In hindsight, he was absolutely right. The dark mood of the time was the result of several factors, especially the crisis of his relationship with actress Carrie Snodgress, the woman who a couple of years earlier, no more, had inspired him to write A Man Needs a Maid. “Rather gloomy, not very happy,” he says in the definitive biography of 2002 Shakeey. “I was in a phase of disillusionment with things that had gone differently than I had planned. I was starting to realize what a messed up life I had chosen to lead by joining Carrie.”
Not that everything was going well on the musical career side, on the contrary. The public wanted another Harvest (“I can't rewrite the same book every time,” Young would say in 1975), he instead had devoted himself to the project Journey Through the Past and live Time Fades Awayand neither of them had even remotely come close to the success of the 1972 album. The answer to the criticism he was receiving was contained in the first song of On the Beachthat is to say Walk Onwith that line about critics still spreading his name. Recorded with his right-hand man Ben Keith and the Crazy Horse rhythm section of Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot, the song was almost dementedly cheerful. Moral of the story: never make Neil Young angry.
It was only the first of a series of complaints. It was 1974, the summer of the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the Watergate scandal, other issues at the center of newspaper debate. “I never knew a man who tells so many lies,” he sings in Ambulance Blues about Nixon, the disgraced president who would resign two weeks later. The hippie dream had ended with Altamont and the Manson Family murders in 1969. The world was at its worst. Everyone was a little nihilistic, including Neil.
The cover, designed with Gary Burden, shows Neil on the beach in Santa Monica. The sun is out, and he’s wearing a cheap yellow-and-white polyester suit. In the foreground, next to the tailgate of a 1959 Cadillac buried in sand, are some tacky, flower-print lawn chairs. On the floor is a newspaper with the headline “Senator Buckley Calls for Nixon’s Resignation.” Young isn’t reading it. He’s standing with his back to the camera, his hands in his pockets, looking out at the ocean. It’s about to rain.
When you go to the beach and stare at the sea, he will say about ten years later Melody Maker«you imagine that each wave brings with it a different set of emotions. If you ignore them, they remain there. It is when you begin to close yourself off that you stop living and begin to age quickly».
The list of musicians who play in On the Beach It's impressive and ranges from Levon Helm and Rick Danko of The Band to David Crosby and Graham Nash, stuff that only someone like Neil Young could afford in the early 70s. But the real special guest at this beautiful party is the slide guitar ace Rusty Kershaw. He cooked the honey slides with his wife Julie, he played the violin, he is mainly responsible for the sound of On the Beach. He was the one who convinced the musicians to play close together in the studio, making sure they didn't rehearse before recording, thus creating an intimate and impromptu atmosphere. With his long beard and overalls, he was a joyfully dissolute guy. Neil Young was not in the mood to be the life of the party. Never fear, Kershaw was there to do it for him.
Few records have a B-side as crazy as that of On the Beachan emotional steamroller of just three songs. “Put the B-side on and you get lost,” Father John Misty once said. “You can get high and lose yourself in that little universe. And when the last bit ends, you start all over again.” The first of the three songs is the title track, a stormy look at Young’s thoughts as a celebrity and perpetual outsider. He needs to be surrounded by others, but can’t stand them. Keith’s little drums give it a ghostly lullaby feel.
And then there's the devastating Motion Pictures (For Carrie) in which Young works out the end of his relationship with Snodgress. It's the album's peak vulnerability. “I'm in deep inside myself, but I'll get out somehow,” he promises. It's such an intense and personal song that Young has only performed it live once, when he previewed the material for On the Beach at a surprise concert at the Bottom Line in New York in May 1974. For fans, it's the Holy Grail.
The peak is Ambulance Bluesa masterpiece of almost nine minutes considered one of his best pieces, second only to Powder Finger. He begins with a wistful recollection of his early career, when he played in Toronto coffeehouses like the Riverboat and lived in an apartment at 88 Isabella Street. He is so depressed that he thinks back to the lost apartment as if it were a tragic heroine: “Oh Isabella, proud Isabella…”.
Not even a decade had passed since those events, yet Young is already nostalgic, longing to return to a simpler time in his life. He sings with a deep, aged, distant voice, and it’s intentional. “Robert De Niro gained 100 pounds to do Raging Bull, and Neil did something similar for his music,” bassist Tim Drummond said. “He smoked two packs of cigarettes a day to have the raspy voice of someone who’d been up all night.”
Armed with a harmonica and a tune he later confessed to stealing from English folk maestro Bert Jansch, Young reflects on everything that has happened in the meantime, including the stalling of the Crosby, Stills and Nash venture (“You’re pissing in the wind”) and the deaths of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry. “An ambulance can’t go any faster than this,” he sings. “It’s easy to get buried in the past when you’re trying to make something good last.” He spins a surreal kidnapping story and takes jabs at ungrateful critics and the President. Then the needle stops swinging and On the Beach it ends. But it never ends because it's been ringing in our heads for 50 years.
From Rolling Stone US.
