50 Years of Neil Young’s ‘On the Beach’

By Nick Zanca

In Wantlist

On The Beach

Neil Young

1974

Rock

LP, Black Vinyl, Terre Haute Pressing

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Fifty years ago in California, Neil Young was weary with the world and lost at sea. Despite having struck gold with his album Harvest two years prior, the 28-year-old songwriter found himself swept by the winds of change: he lost his close friend and Crazy Horse compatriot Danny Whitten to an overdose at the end of 1972, and his romantic relationship to actress Carrie Snogdress, fueled by substance abuse, was starting to disintegrate. He was fixated on the aftershocks of the Vietnam War and the reverberations of the Tate-Labianca murders perpetrated by the Manson family. The symptoms surrounding his success clearly hung heavy, and whatever music was to follow would surely wear disillusionment on its sleeve.

These biographical details apart, it’s no wonder that the Canadian transplant told Rolling Stone that On The Beach was the “one of the most depressing records I’ve ever made” not even a year after its release. Before pressing play, there’s plenty of supporting evidence found in the record’s packaging to back that claim: three of its eight tracks have the word “blues” in its title, and the cover — photographed on the Santa Monica Beach by Laurel Canyon’s favorite art director Gary Burden—depicts a 1959 Cadillac buried in sand as a shoeless Young stares off into the Pacific. Already, the melancholy and introspection is palpable.

Be that as it may, the sound of the record still lives true to the promise of its title: for all its storied disenchantment, we hear Young and his wrecking crew, comprised of the likes of the Band’s rhythm section and Grand Ole Opry legend Rusty Kernshaw, the record’s de factor producer, deliver performances so mellow and loose to the point that they practically sound escapist. This was no accident: throughout the tracking sessions, held at Sunset Sound in Hollywood, his band famously lived on a diet of “honey slides,” a concoction made from sauteed marijuana and honey that Young himself would describe as being “heavier than heroin.” One can only assume that recording under the influence of this substance was part and parcel of what made On The Beach’s arrangements so repetitive and hypnotic.

The album is not entirely limited to that doped-out doom and gloom. As an Side A opener, “Walk On” sounds comparatively upbeat and propulsive to the tracks that follow, but is still marked by a similar attitude of cynicism and an urge to move forward from the traumas that emerged from the end of the ‘60s. “Some get stoned / some get strange,” Young and his band proclaim in the song’s close-harmony hook. “Sooner or later, it all gets real.” Next to follow is the Wurlitzer-driven “See The Sky About To Rain,” a meditation on the nature of fate that was already a staple of live sets and was recorded by the Byrds for their self-titled reunion album the year prior. 

Former bandmate David Crosby was reluctantly roped into playing on the macabre “Revolution Blues,” an aggressive track which channels the evil spirits of Charles Manson, a former fixture of the Topanga Canyon music scene who Young supposedly jammed with after meeting through Beach Boy Dennis Willson and months before the murders that would make him infamous. “I heard that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars / But I hate them worse than lepers and I’ll kill them in their cars,” he sings. While embodying a chilling character study, the standout song still somehow manages to mirror the songwriter’s own personal struggles coming to terms with his newfound fame.

“Once you’ve seen him, you can never forget him, I’ll tell you that,” Young said in an 1987 interview with Bill Flanagan. “I don’t know what you would call it, but I wouldn’t want to call it anything in an interview. I would just like to forget about it.” It seems that he wanted to forget about the song too: he went on to retire “Revolution Blues” from his setlists after a Crazy Horse gig in 1987. 

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Harvest

Neil Young

2009

Country Rock

Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, Remastered, Repress

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Later, Neil pulls out a banjo for “For The Turnstiles,” a polemic against the material conditions that touring musicians face, that features seasoned Nashville musician Ben Keith on the dobro. He also rails against the greed of the oil industry on the mid-tempo romp “Vampire Blues.”

The listener starts to hear the honey slides take effect when the needle drops on Side B, starting with the slow-burning title track, perhaps the album’s most stunning display of existential exhaustion. In classic Youngian parlance, our narrator goes long on his ambivalent relationship with his own audience and the detachment that comes with celebrity. “I need a crowd of people / but I can’t face them day to day,” he repeats over a deliciously subtle Wurlitzer performance from Graham Nash. “Though my problems are meaningless / that don’t make them go away.” 

Written in a hotel room with the television blaring, the stripped-down and aptly-named “Motion Pictures (For Carrie)” explores the end of his relationship with the Oscar-nominated actress. “Neil picked up a pen and just wrote the words right then,” Rusty Kernshaw, who supplies the song’s slide guitar part, recalled in Shakey, Jimmy Mcdonough’s 2003 biography of Young. “(He) put that motherfucker down while it was still smeared all over us.”

The album’s timeless closer “Ambulance Blues” waxes poetic on several subjects — chief among them Nixon’s presidency, bad press, an old apartment on Toronto’s Isabella Street, and the ongoing inactivity of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. The album’s most memorable couplet, “There ain’t nothing like a friend / Who can tell you you’re just pissing in the wind,” is supposedly a direct quote from the artist’s manager Elliot Roberts. 

On The Beach was somewhat of an elephant in the room for its maker. He didn’t tour the album upon its release, and for years, it was somewhat of a rarity in Young’s catalog, falling out of print on vinyl in the early ‘80s before finally being reissued on CD by Rhino two decades later in 2003. Though the commercial performance of On The Beach paled in comparison to Harvest, it has earned its rightful legacy among Neil connoisseurs as his purest and most plaintive expression of his inner grievances and guarded optimism. It is the music of intuitive introspection. 

Nick Zanca is a record producer, composer, and writer currently based in Queens, New York. He is known for his work in electronic music as Mister Lies, has collaborated with artists such as Wendy Eisenberg and Lucy Liyou, and was most recently an editor at Reverb.

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