I'd Love to Turn You On #215 - Neil Young – On The Beach

Neil Young’s 1974 album On The Beach marked the middle of what has become known as his “ditch trilogy,” whereby he deliberately drove his career (on a major high after the one-two punches of CSNY and his own top 10 album Harvest) off the road to success and into a ditch of excess. Although recorded after the even bleaker Tonight’s The Night (his most controversial and emotionally raw album), and the somewhat baffling live album Time Fades Away (which contained all new material played in a ragged, almost haphazard style), On The Beach was released before, thus preparing the public for the darkness to come. While the production was comparatively crude, and Neil’s voice sometimes reduced to a pained howl, I have always found On The Beach to be one of Neil’s most honest and personally affecting albums. In many ways, the startling image on the cover tells much of the story. We see Neil, dressed in a thrift store leisure suit, his back to the camera, facing the ocean of Zuma Beach, while in the foreground are the accoutrement of a burned-out, artificial and pointless society: a potted palm, gaudy patio furniture, a crumpled newspaper with the headline Senator Buckley Wants Nixon To Resign, the back fins of a vintage Cadillac stick out of the sand like some weirdo, hipster version of the Statue Of Liberty from Planet Of The Apes and a couple of Coors tall-boys stand by like dead soldiers. Surreal in the extreme, the image also seems to sum up an age of Watergate, Vietnam, disillusion and the shattered hippie dream with tremendous clarity. It remains my favorite album cover.

As for the music - its stature grows in my mind’s ear with each passing year. On The Beach contains some of Neil Young’s most reflective and intelligent songs, set in rough-hewn settings that are alternately fragile to the point of breaking or roar with the anguish of a lost soul screaming in the wilderness. Let’s look at it song by song.

Side One

"Walk On" - The closest thing resembling a pop song on the album, this irresistible gem has a perfectly crushing guitar hook, exquisite slide guitar by Ben Keith and a rock-solid rhythm section provided by Crazy Horse alums Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot. The lyrics are an anthem for the disaffected hippies facing the cold realities of a new decade.

"See The Sky About To Rain" - A lovely ballad dominated by Neil’s cracked falsetto, memorable Wurlitzer playing, and, again, Ben Keith’s sympathetic steel. An ominous sentiment of lost dreams almost anyone can understand. Neil has an uncanny ability to poetically conflate natural phenomena with manmade turmoil. He never did it better than this one.

"Revolution Blues" - The most strident song on the album, this tale of an apocalyptic L.A. filled with psycho murderers (“10 million dune buggies coming down the mountain.” “I’m a barrel of laughs with my carbine on”) and a doomed, vacuous celebrity culture (“well I heard that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars/well I hate them worse than lepers and I’ll kill them in their cars”). There’s obviously some insider-baseball irony here as he had recently married his second Hollywood starlet. The rancor feels real and fresh here though. Musically, the song is a barnburner with David Crosby and Young going on the warpath guitar-wise, while Rick Danko’s fretless bass slides the song along like mercury.

"For The Turnstiles" - A harrowing plea for sanity and understanding in a world that makes no sense. A spare recording of just Neil’s banjo and Ben Keith’s lonesome dobro and the two of them yelping like scalded dogs.

"Vampire Blues" - One of the fuller productions on the album, it features a classic, nerve-shattering guitar solo by Neil and some woozy organ work by Ben Keith, who, you may have noticed by now is the secret weapon on this album. Neil decries the petroleum industry as vampires “suckin’ blood from the earth.” The song is both moving and incredibly prescient. Oh yeah, and it rocks hard.

Side Two

"On The Beach" - One of the most hypnotic songs he ever committed to wax, Neil weighs the relative pros and cons of fame and fortune, discovering that’s it all pretty much nowheresville (“I went to the radio interview, but I ended up alone here at the microphone.”)  In the meantime the song staggers along like a lonely drunk in a dark alleyway. Neil lets loose with a couple of last-shred-of-sanity guitar solos and guess who adds the crucial backing with a simple hand drum part? Ben Keith of course.

"Motion Pictures (For Carrie)" - No question what this one is about. His relationship with actress Carrie Snodgrass had hit the skids, and he was broken. A beautifully touching ballad informed with equal parts heartbreak and scorn (“all those headlines they just bore me now”). Gently acoustic with a lovely harmonica solo and some great slide guitar by Rusty Kershaw.

"Ambulance Blues" - “Back in the old folkie days/The air was magic when we played” Neil comes to grips with the passage of time in this epic tale of days and friends lost. “Old Mother Goose, she’s on the skids” he moans as he contemplates lost innocence and the reality of now. “I guess I’ll call it sickness gone/It’s hard to say the meaning of this song/An ambulance can only go so fast/It’s easy to get buried in the past/When you try to make a good thing last.” Not that many artists have looked at their own lives and legacies with such an honest and jaundiced eye. But he’s not just tough on himself: “So all you critics sit alone/ You’re no better than me for what you’ve shown/ With your stomach pump and your hook and ladder dreams/ We could get together for some scenes.” It’s hard to imagine an artist who actually likes critics, but Neil spares no quarter in eviscerating them. In one song, he closes the curtain on the magic trick of 60’s idealism. A profoundly disturbing yet highly enlightening song.

On The Beach ends on that bleak and honest assessment of Neil Young’s own self-worth and place in the popular music cosmology. While not exactly uplifting in subject matter, the album succeeds wildly in terms of being an accurate snapshot of a great artist at a pivotal point in his career. This is not the only time he has done this, in fact it could be argued that more than any other modern artist, Neil Young has honestly bared his soul to his public for better or worse. He doesn’t shy away from the reality of his feelings, and, remarkably, the music he produces reflects that reality with clarity and beauty, lifting it from the merely confessional to the profoundly artistic.

- Paul Epstein

Fables of the Reconstruction: CSNY Solo

I listened to the solo albums David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young released in 1970 and 1971 back to back in order of release, and then tried to listen to the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album, but I couldn’t make it all the way through. It was too happy, too confident in the power of love. The four solo records had taken me through waves of emotion stirred up in the wake of love, and I just didn’t have the stomach for a bunch of sunny songs sung by younger men who still believed that love could last forever and save the world.
            Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush came out first, at the end of August 1970, and it sets the tone for the three that would follow with the third track on side one, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.” Legend has it he wrote the song for Nash after Nash’s breakup with Joni Mitchell. But it comes across as a rebuttal to the declarations that “love is coming to us all” and “everybody, I love you” on CSNY’s Deja Vu, released in March of the same year. It’s a caveat: Love’s as likely to crush you as save you. And it’s an advancement of the whole CSNY artistic project, the move away from the top-heavy tangle of psychedelic to the infinite simplicity of the song -- as though Young is telling his idealistic buddies that there’s nothing deeper and truer than a good old heartbreak song.

            Crosby, Stills and Nash seem to have taken his advice with their solo projects, and probably not by choice. These were sorrowful times for all three of them, with Stills and Nash suffering recent breakups and Crosby losing his love in a car crash. Judging by these records, they each had their own way of dealing with lost love. Stills’s self-titled album, which came out in mid-November 1970, paints a portrait of a man fond of the lust remedy for heartache, and not only because of the opening track, the free-love anthem “Love the One You’re With.” His record is consistently sexier than his friends’, with BIG production, dirty blues solos, deep-funk bass lines, a bit of wah-wah pedal and even an appearance by Jimi Hendrix. Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name came out a few months later and shows a man in the throes of the anger stage of grief, especially on “Cowboy Movie,” a long, low, growling ballad about a band of outlaws betrayed by a woman, and “What Are Their Names,” where the lyrics are about peace but the dark, driving music carries a threat of violence. But below the anger is pain, which comes through on the vocals, the harmonies of “Music Is Love,” “Tamalpais High (At About 3),” “Orleans,” and, above all, on "I'd Swear There Was Somebody Here,” the album’s closing number that Crosby sung in an echo chamber while very high and he felt his dead girlfriend’s presence. It’s like primal scream therapy, only beautiful. There’s a similar intensity of pain Nash’s voice on Songs for Beginners, which came out in May 1971, but the record leans relentlessly toward the positive and encouraging. In interviews, Nash has said he wanted to offer a record that would help people, and he’s certainly done that here. If I ever suffer real heartbreak again, this is the album I’ll play over and over, especially side one, with its quadruple punch of heartfelt pep talks in “Better Days,” “Wounded Bird” (“In the end it’s with you you have to live”), “I Used to Be a King,” and the triumphant closer with a full choir: “Be Yourself.” “I Used to Be a King” electrifies my emotions every time I hear it, my nerves tingling as the chorus rolls around and Graham declares, “Someone is going to take my heart, no one is going to break my heart again!”
            After going through all that, the first Crosby, Stills and Nash record sounded quaint at best. And it’s a great album, always in heavy rotation on my stereo. But it’s the kind of record that feels truest on a Saturday morning with good coffee and nothing on the horizon but hours and hours of fun. There’s pain in the record, sure; Stills has said “Sweet Judy Blue Eyes” was about the inevitability of his breakup with Judy Collins. But anguish seems to be kept at arm’s distance, as though the guys writing and singing the songs don’t really believe or know how badly life and love can make you hurt sometimes. And it seems to me there’s some kind of definition of art that runs through the differences between the first two CSN/CSNY records and their solo projects that followed. The latter four feel truer, more profound and enduring -- more reliable testaments of what it really means to be a human being.