What first drew me into Neil Young’s On the Beach, released in July 1974, was the LP’s compellingly strange cover photo, designed by Young and the great Gary Burden and photographed by the equally celebrated Robert “Bob” Seidemann. In the foreground, a pastel-colored beach table sits with two matching chairs, and the finned tail of a beige 1959 Cadillac is just poking out of the sand, the whole of the car presumably buried. In the background, there’s a perfectly symmetrical shoreline at what these days I’d call a Wes Anderson angle to the camera. In between, next to a beach chair and a pair of shoes, Young stands barefoot, in “bad polyester” white trousers and a pale yellow blazer, his back to the camera, dark hair hanging loose, blowing gently in the wind. Also blowing around is a newspaper under the table; its timely headline reads, “SEN. BUCKLEY CALLS FOR NIXON TO RESIGN”.
It’s not your everyday beach scene, and given the album’s title and Neil Young’s age (he was rapidly approaching 30), it’s hard not to hear in its words a reference back to Nevil Shute’s 1957 bestselling novel, also called On the Beach, about a world slowly dying after a nuclear war, the fallout drifting inexorably to Australia where there’s nothing to do but wait. Stanley Kramer‘s film adaptation of Shute’s novel was released two years later when Young was an impressionable 14. That’s the 1970s mood of On the Beach: brooding, angry, and hopelessly awaiting the end while looking for something that would somehow endure beyond it.
“Of course, that was the name of a movie, and I stole it for my record, but that doesn’t matter”, Neil Young told his biographer Jimmy McDonough for his 2002 book, Shakey. We know never to believe an artist when they say something doesn’t matter. It’s impossible to listen to the album’s title song, which opens Side Two and was originally meant to open the album, without hearing the end of the world. “The world is turnin’ / I hope it don’t turn away”, “On the Beach“, begins, circling back seven minutes later to close on a variation of the same lines. In between, the lyrics turn from alienation in a crowd to a radio interview with no one there to a bus ride “out of town”.
Stanley Kramer’s film was doomed resignation to an inevitable death; the song is a stoned concatenation of deep personal depression with a world slowed down almost to a stop. It’s not spinning out of control, but turning its back, leaving the singer with nothing much but a slowed-down bass groove, a scattered hand drum, muffled keys, and the most searingly elegiac guitar solo Young has ever put to record, so slow that each note feels plucked, painfully, from the abyss. I can’t imagine the song starting the album; I can’t imagine it anywhere but at the slow core of this album’s descent into despair, only to slowly pull itself out via “Motion Pictures (For Carrie)“, a proleptic farewell ode to his then-wife Carrie Snodgress, and “Ambulance Blues“, the even longer and slower concluding track.
Few artists have ever matched the prolific ten-year run of musical brilliance paired with commercial success of the nine studio and two live albums that Neil Young released on Reprise between his breakthrough second record Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969) and Live Rust (1979), to say nothing of the two albums (Homegrown and Chrome Dreams) and myriad tracks that he recorded during this period but left unreleased as such until this century (2020 and 2023, respectively). Of his singer-songwriter peers, only Young’s old friend and compatriots Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison, during nearly the same span of years, can match that extended streak, along with the slightly older Bob Dylan’s incandescent run through the ’60s and the slightly younger Springsteen’s later one from 1973 on. I’m surely biased since my parents played Dylan through my first years, and those other artists molded my teenage years, but it’s hard to imagine another epoch in pop music comparable to Neil Young’s.
While Mitchell, Morrison, and Dylan made some odd moves during this period, there is nothing that stacks up against what Young referred to as the “swerve into the ditch” from “the middle of the road” of his Nashville-produced #1 hit Harvest (1972). Nor the switches between shredding garage band Crazy Horse and acoustic-based folk-rock outings (although Dylan rocked out with the Band—still going by “The Hawks” in 1966–their music was truly raucous only relative to Dylan’s previously solo acoustic identity). None of Neil Young’s albums in that stretch are perfect in the way many of those trios are, nor is there a consensus as to their best or favorite. As he put it in his 2012 memoir, Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippy Dream, “I was really interested in communicating what I felt at the time, more interested in that than succeeding commercially.”
Some critics and fans loved the rough brilliance of those communications; far more loved the sweeter sound, more cohesive structure, and more pop veneer of After the Gold Rush (1970) and Harvest. These days, that minority consensus is probably now the majority, and every one of those albums is regarded more or less as a classic. Gold Rush and Harvest have great songs, but they communicate less—they’re paradoxically less cohesive in their smoother production—than the others. Still, the best one in many critics’ and fans’ eyes today—Tonight’s the Night’s drunken record of a despairing wake, recorded in 1973 but held back until 1975—is not among the ones I listen to the most often. Those would be the sublime guitar workout Everybody Knows, the overlooked folk-rock classic Comes a Time (1978), and the punk-infused glory of Rust Never Sleeps (1979). Even in that heady company, On the Beach is lodged somewhere special, not in the heart, though, and not in the brain. More like the spleen. It was a perfect album for depressed, alienated teenagers in the soft-rock days before punk arrived.
On the Beach is a splenetic masterpiece, an apocalyptic screed from a decadent California as it tumbled into the sea. Like the other fruits of Neil Young’s swerve into the ditch, On the Beach is a willfully imperfect album, 40 minutes of blues and bile, with just enough pop melodies, blues rhythms, guitar solos, and guest spots scattered throughout to make it almost enjoyable, so long as you don’t pay too much attention to the lyrics. Listen closely, and you’ll be pulled under pretty quickly into the mind of an artist at something approaching the nadir of his life, not to mention of his adopted city, state, and nation—the lion’s share of On the Beach was recorded during the peak of the U.S. Senate Watergate Committee hearings, a few months before Nixon’s resignation.
Neil Young’s recording history following Harvest and “Heart of Gold”, his first and only #1 album and #1 single, respectively,is as convoluted as his life evidently was. Preparing for a stadium tour supporting the album in late 1972, Young fired Crazy Horse guitarist and close friend Danny Whitten for being unable to kick his drug habit. Soon after, Whitten died of an overdose; Young felt responsible. The tour was recorded for the 1973 live album, Time Fades Away, comprising only new compositions performed mostly in a raw, country-rock style with Harvest-sessions band the Stray Gators. Roadie Bruce Berry died of an overdose in June that year.
Following an abortive recording session with Crosby, Stills & Nash that included an early version of Comes a Time standout “Human Highway”, Young assembled a new band out of the surviving members of Crazy Horse—drummer Ralph Molina and bass player Billy Talbot—and added pianist Nils Lofgren and pedal steel player Ben Keith. They recorded the grief-, drug-, and alcohol-drenched Tonight’s the Night live in the studio, late at night over August and September. Warner Brothers shelved the album until 1975 (there are varying reports about the degree to which Young agreed with the decision), but the band toured with the material before Young returned to the studio for additions sessions that produced “Walk On” and “For the Turnstiles” as he toyed with alternate versions of Tonight’s the Night.
The turn from Tonight’s the Night to On the Beach took Neil Young to Sunset Sound, the L.A. studio where he recorded parts of the classic Buffalo Springfield Again album in 1967 and with Crazy Horse in 1969, before they made Everybody Knows, unreleased until just this summer, as Early Daze. At Sunset Sound, Young cut the rest of the eight songs of On the Beach, with a core band of Ben Keith on pedal steel, dobro, and keyboards, and Tim Drummond on bass. Rick Danko and Levon Helm of The Band sat in on a couple of songs (“See the Sky about to Rain” and “Revolution Blues”), David Crosby played guitar on “Revolution Blues”, Graham Nash contributed electric piano to “On the Beach“, and Louisiana session musician Rusty Kershaw played slide on “Motion Pictures (For Carrie)” and fiddle on “Ambulance Blues“, while also acting as “de facto producer”. According to McDonough, Kershaw provided the band with two essential inspirations: recording without rehearsing and “honey slides” – marijuana cooked down with honey into a potent paste that set the mood throughout the sessions. “In about twenty minutes”, remembers Keith, “you start forgettin’ where you are.”
The album completed, Neil Young joined a massive, cocaine-fueled and acrimonious stadium tour with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, performing four songs from the new album and a number of unreleased ones, as was his practice; Crosby, Stills, & Nash, according to Young, had no new material at all. (This didn’t keep the four musicians from assembling in early 1976 for the sessions that turned into the Stills-Young Band’s Long May You Run after the contributions of Crosby & Nash when they decamped to record Whistling Down the Wire instead. Supergroups never change.) He then returned to the studio to record intended Harvest follow-up Homegrown, which he would not release until 2020, although he parceled many of the songs out on the next few albums. Instead, at the urging of Danko, he would finally let go of Tonight’s the Night, before returning again to the studio with the surviving members of Crazy Horse and new guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro to record Zuma (1975).
What has become known as the “Ditch trilogy” (Time Fades Away, Tonight’s the Night, On the Beach) performed poorly at the time, at least relative to Harvest. Reviews were mixed, at times seduced but mostly perplexed by the swerve into musical rawness, lyrical darkness, and crude production. I find it difficult to recover the latter sentiment listening to these albums today. So much of popular music has gone in the same direction in the decades since that Young’s choice now feels natural, even predictable. Back then, it was considered commercial suicide.
The first producer quit the sessions for On the Beach in disgust when Neil Young told him he wanted to release the rough masters as is. Young would continue in this mode through Zuma and American Stars & Bars (1977), appealing only to converts to his vision or to the most dogged Harvest fans, until the relatively pristine studio sound of Comes a Time returned him to the top 10 in late 1978, a feat he would duplicate in a different mode half a year later with Rust Never Sleeps. On the Beach sits right in the middle of this run, the wasted eye of a mid-’70s hurricane, to borrow a metaphor from the best song on Stars & Bars (originally recorded for Chrome Dreams).
Like an outsized number of Van Morrison’s albums, On the Beach has a song complaining about the recording industry (“For the Turnstiles”), another one about professional envy (“Walk On”), and a bunch of blues (“Revolution Blues”, “Vampire Blues“, “Ambulance Blues”), although only one of them sounds much like a conventional blues number. Also like Morrison, the music is fantastic. However, unlike many of Morrison’s vitriolic workouts, the lyrics are better than the sentiment probably merits.
“For the Turnstiles” is a brooding duet between Neil Young’s banjo and Ben Keith’s dobro, its industry critique couched in Dylanesque surrealism (“All the sailors with their seasick mamas / Hear the sirens on the shore, / Singin’ songs for pimps with tailors / Who charge ten dollars at the door”) alternating with classic Youngian nostrums (“You can really learn a lot that way / It can change you in the middle of the day”). “Walk On” opens the album on a pop-rock high, channeling life in the Canyon and looking back on how fame affects different people differently. It’s not surprising these two tracks were recorded two months earlier than the rest of the album, rather than part of the late March and early April sessions that Drummond remembered as “Hollywood Babylon at its fullest.”
The other three songs on Side One all partake of the apocalyptic vibe. “See the Sky about to Rain”, which Young had been performing for several years as a piano dirge, deploys the pathetic fallacy to attribute personal sorrow to weather phenomena punctuated by the classic image of the locomotive leaving the station. But that image also channels social concerns: the environmental disaster of acid rain, which first hit public consciousness in the early 1970s; bombs from the sky in a nuclear war scenario never far from anyone’s mind in the ’70s; and the black, radioactive rain that would follow those bombs. Young’s shimmering Wurlitzer electric piano intro shifts the song away from the country-rock territory that Keith’s slide guitar would otherwise occupy; the hybrid lands uneasily somewhere between a country past and a speculative future.
The abrasive, aggressive “Revolution Blues” is sung in the first person voice of Charles Manson, whom Neil Young had met through Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys back in 1968. According to Young, Manson was “Wrong, but stone brilliant” as a singer-songwriter hoping acquaintances like Wilson and Young would somehow score him a recording contract. “Glad he didn’t get around to me when he was punishing people for the fact he didn’t make it in the music biz,” Young later confessed to McDonough. “That’s what that was all about. Didn’t get to be a rock and roll star, so he started fuckin’ wipin’ people out. Dig that.”
Young’s and Crosby’s driving guitars draw on a version of this dark history to hang a string of images channeling Manson’s violence into a survivalist future (“We got twenty-five rifles just to keep the population down”) stocked with apocalyptic visions (“I see bloody fountains / And ten million dune buggies coming down the mountains”). It concludes, sung with conviction, with the Mansonesque kicker, “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.” What’s chilling is that the sentiment chimes with Young’s far milder rejection of Laurel Canyon culture in “Walk On”. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young played “Revolution Blues” on their summer 1974 tour; it sounds menacing enough to fully believe Young’s memory: “Crosby was scared to death of doin’ ‘Revolution Blues.’ He didn’t think it was safe to do it.”
Side One closer “Vampire Blues” is just as furious as “Revolution Blues”, but turns its anger outward, onto the oil companies, rather than inward, onto the demons of Laurel Canyon’s stars. Whereas Neil Young’s performance on “Revolution” tears through its lyrics, “Vampire” lopes along in a slow-burning blues. This one is voiced by an oil company personified as a vampire “sucking blood from the earth” and assuring his “baby” that “good times are coming”. I’m guessing that the uncharacteristically jarring, jagged guitar solos come from George Whitsell, guitarist of the Rockets, the band from which Young stole the three members of Crazy Horse. According to what Whitsell told McDonough, he got a call out of the blue around midnight, played with the band for fifteen minutes, and Young spliced that rehearsal into the LP version of “Vampire Blues”.
That first side is vintage Neil Young in its pacing and variety. The second side is transcendent. Opening with the apocalyptic “On the Beach”, it slides into the just-as-slow but mellowed-out “Motion Pictures”, the downhome bookend to Harvest’s heavily orchestrated “A Man Needs a Maid”. The latter song recounts Young’s first encounter with his first wife Carrie Snodgress on TV (“I was watchin’ a movie with a friend / I fell in love with the actress”), the former bids farewell to that same marriage via those same “Motion pictures on the TV screen”.
Moving on from the “home away from home” of that mediated relationship, before he even knew for certain it was ending, Young steps out into the mountains, greeting the morning glory, the dew, and the ducks. “I’m deep inside myself”, he confesses, “but I’ll get out somehow”. And we hear that egress, the fulfilled promise “to bring a smile to your eyes”. We hear it in Rusty Kershaw’s down-home slide guitar, in Young’s genial harmonica playing, and overwhelmingly in the conviction with which he sings yet another rejection of Laurel Canyon: “Well all those people, / they think / they got it made / But I wouldn’t buy, / sell, borrow, or trade / Anything I have / to be like one of them”.
“Ambulance Blues” closes the album on one of the longest acoustic tracks in this stretch of Neil Young’s career. Young’s epic acoustic songs are unlike Dylan’s, whichare more often oblique story-songs than identifiably autobiographical, or Morrison’s, always mystical and meditative. “Ambulance Blues” is enlivened by Kershaw’s fiddle, and its lyrics are more focused than the self-acknowledged “rambling” of the endless “Will to Love” on Stars & Bars (the price of entry on side B to get to “Like a Hurricane” in the days before mix tapes or streaming) and more autobiographical than the imagined “Last Trip to Tulsa” that windingly closes Young’s 1968 debut. The vocal is invested in the lyrics, which sing of Young’s “folky days” in Toronto, quote his manager Elliot Roberts on Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (“You’re all just pissin’ in the wind”), and end on Richard Nixon (“I never knew a man could tell so many lies”), taking a dig at Young’s critics along the way. Also along the way, he confesses that he has no idea how it all hangs together (“It’s hard to say the meaning of this song / An ambulance can only go so fast”).
The mood, both elegiac and accepting, is of a piece with what’s come before. “That’s when Neil got the downest he could get”, is how roadie Willie Hinds remembers the album. “It was very mellow, very down—not depressing”, clarifies Young.
That buried Cadillac on the cover is no empty gesture. Neil Young, by his own admission, “is a material guy” who “would buy a car or something to celebrate and have a material memory” when he would complete an album or a project. The “celebration” for completing On the Beach was a blue 1949 Cadillac convertible, which Young had discovered in Hollywood during the recording sessions and would christen “Hank” after the iconic country music artist Hank Williams. There’s a sacrifice embedded in that cover photo as there is in the album’s songs. There’s also the promise of renewal that’s baked into any end-of-the-world vision: if you somehow survive the conflagration, you get to start over with a clean slate. (And, in Young’s case presumably, a new Cadillac.)
Neil Young is no stranger to apocalyptic imagery, from the “burned-out basement” and spaceships “flying Mother Nature’s silver seed / to a new home in the sun” of “After the Gold Rush” to the “thrashers … more than two lanes wide” (“Thrasher”) and the narration from beyond the grave (“Powderfinger”) from Rust Never Sleeps. California in the 1970s was home to more apocalyptic visions, both culturally and geologically, than any region since New York City in the heart of the 1950s atomic age. As Walter Becker and Donald Fagen knew in “My Old School“, “California tumbles into the sea” was the ’70s version of “Hell freezes over”—both impossible and imminent, as apocalypse always seems to be.
In the 1968 song “L.A.“, included on 1973’s Time Fades Away, Young again equates the personal and the geological, the everyday and the apocalyptic: “But when the suppers are bland and the freeways are crammed / And the mountains erupt and the valley is sucked / Into cracks in the earth / Will I finally be heard by you?” On the Beach, the record of a rock star’s damaged life on the coast of southern California and of a solitary life lived at the edge of a dying world, beautifully and jaggedly captures the mood that arises when personal life is crumbling at the same time as the world around it. They’re one and the same, but then again, not quite.
The back cover of On the Beach continues the front’s crisp horizontal division of sky, surf, and sand, but it’s as empty as the cover is packed with symbolic stuff. The words “Neil Young” are blazoned across the top, in the same place and same psychedelic lettering as the album’s title on the front cover. Except for the song titles scrolled in two rows right along the bottom, atop the small print, the only other thing in the image is a lone, potted palm tree. Stolen from the entryway of S.I.R. (Studio Instrument Rentals) studios and planted onstage throughout the Tonight’s the Night tour at the end of 1973, this “sad, sickly specimen with about four fronds” was the band’s metonymy of a tacky Miami Beach where “everything is cheaper than it looks”. Like Young on the cover of On the Beach dressed in pastel polyester from “a sleazy men’s shop” in L.A., that palm tree looks back to Tonight’s the Night with humor and irony even as it thumbs its nose at that same sleaziness, turns its back on California, and looks ahead, to the end of the world.
Works Cited
McDonough, Jimmy. Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography. Anchor. 2002.
Young, Neil. Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippy Dream. Blue Rider. 2012.