Happy 50th Anniversary to Neil Young’s fifth studio album On The Beach, originally released July 16, 1974.
The story goes like this: Harvest, Neil Young’s folk masterpiece, was the best-selling album of 1972. The subsequent success and enormous tour disillusioned Young, whose simultaneous hatred of the music industry, commercialism, and people telling him what to do led him to head away from the “middle of the road… [and into] the ditch,” per his liner notes to Decade (1977). The so-called “Ditch Trilogy,” consisting of Time Fades Away (1973), On The Beach (1974), and Tonight’s The Night (1975) show Young in various states of agitation and experimentation as he grapples with—and attempts to thwart—his success.
Young’s most fervent partisans often insist that these three vexed, experimental records are his finest work. But I wonder how much that adoration is fueled by interest in the man Neil Young himself and the story around the Ditch Trilogy. I’m not here to argue that On The Beach is bad or only supported by its narrative. But I wonder what it means fifty years later, with this era of Young’s life so far behind us. Put another way: What can you take away from On The Beach if you don’t care about Neil Young that much?
Well, it’s a complicated record. “Revolution Blues” sounds like a freight train, supported by its all-star rhythm section: Young’s former CSNY bandmate David Crosby on rhythm guitar, and Rick Danko and Levon Helm of The Band on bass and drums, respectively. But Young brings a dark edge to the proceedings, singing from the perspective of Charles Manson, unraveling a violent disgust of Hollywood elitism. It’s a murder ballad, like “Down By The River” and seems interested in the one relatable part of Manson’s story—disgust with Hollywood and elitism—rather than the gruesome and reprehensible parts of the murder. Young isn’t rehabilitating Manson, but he is giving life and voice to a particular dimension of his violence: eat the rich.
“Revolution Blues” is followed by “For The Turnstiles,” which brings Young close to a break; he’s singing in a normal part of his range but sounds vocally fragile. He’s singing about the tribulations of being a musician on the road—the challenges of winning over the audience every night, fighting promoters, living up to the example of those who have come before. The fraught questions of “Revolution Blues” come to life in a new way: Young feels trapped in a system that turns music into business and sees no way out; this is the deep sadness that feeds the anger we had just heard on the previous cut.
Listen to the Album:
As a result, On The Beach creates a feeling of being nowhere. While the record starts off with the jaunty “Walk On,” that song dives into “See The Sky About To Rain,” a song whose title evokes the question “well, then why even bother going outside?” The track itself is one of Young’s most dire; ploddingly slow, lyrically bleak, and instrumentally sparse, “See The Sky About To Rain” offers no direction for the discontented Young to take. Its follow-up is “Revolution Blues,” which we’ll all agree is not the wisest route forward. Throughout On The Beach, then, as momentum is built, it is either taken away or proves to be false.
This sets up a duality at the end of the record. Young opens and closes the title track with the lyric “The world is turnin’ / I hope it don’t turn away.” In his stuckness, that feeling of knowing a storm is coming, or that the world is unfair, or that the grind is pointless, he still sees something worth holding on to. I wouldn’t go so far as to call this optimism, but it does admit that there is something about this world that is worth uncovering.
And yet, album closer “Ambulance Blues” shows Young drifting through that world, punctuated by wandering through harmonica rifts, finding no handhold or reason to believe. Ambulances don’t go fast enough. Hippies yearn for a natural world that’s no longer there. The city is empty. There’s nothing left. It’s probably going to rain again soon. What’s worth looking at, that he hopes doesn’t turn away?
It's not clear. But just because it’s not there, doesn’t mean you stop looking. And, after mulling On The Beach over for the past few weeks for this article, this is the best I can do to answer my preliminary question. In fact, like most classic records, On The Beach gets more interesting when you get further away from the mystique. It is a better record if you’re not caught up in the drama and just listen to a guy who feels really stuck. It doesn’t matter that he sold millions of records first; we’ve all had that feeling of not knowing what’s next and being caught in the doldrums of our strange world. There are few better testaments to that ennui than this puzzling, vexed record.
Listen: