So the year turns to 2024. And while screeds are written on the past year or what the year to come will bring, I’ve taken the contrarian view, jumped into the time machine and set the controls for the heart of my youth. That is to 1974, the year a circle of vinyl played at 33 revolutions per minute entered my world, and didn’t leave. I speak of On the Beach by Neil Young.
Music is a marker in a person’s life; yes, to claim a cliche, it can be the soundtrack. On the Beach opened my eyes and ears. Now I see it also as a signpost.
The cover of Neil Young’s 1974 album On the Beach.
I came to Neil Young through Heart of Gold and The Needle and the Damage Done from Harvest, the album that catapulted him into solo stardom, but as the music world and fans were to discover, Young was his own man, and when success came calling, he took off into the ditch. What followed was the “ditch trilogy” of On the Beach, Tonight’s the Night (recorded before On the Beach but released after it) and Time Fades Away. I loved them all.
On the Beach had an edge to it, which was ironic since a lot of it was recorded on a diet of marijuana and honey. The opening lines of the opening track, Walk On, set the scene: “I hear some people been talking me down/ bring up my name, pass it round.”
This is a songwriter not looking for a heart of gold, not looking for a maid. The view of the world from the ditch is an altogether different perspective. Three of the album’s eight songs have blues in the title, Revolution Blues, Vampire Blues, Ambulance Blues. “I got the revolution blues, I see bloody fountains/ And ten million dune buggies comin’ down the mountains/ 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”.
You can say that and sing it? It’s not all love and sweethearts forever?
This was no Harvest. There are no pictures on the album cover of Young and his buddies playing and singing in a barn with hay bales. The cover of On the Beach has a longhaired Young, back to camera, looking out from the beach to the ocean, and not far from him the tail fin of a 1959 Cadillac sticks out from the sand. A newspaper in the sand has the headline calling for Richard Nixon to resign.
The liner notes are written by Rusty Kershaw who played on the album. They take cinema verite and quirkiness to a new level. Kershaw wrote (quoted here verbatim): “I can’t read or write very well, so I don’t quite understand why anyone would want me to write liner notes.
“Except for what I saw and heard. The first time I saw Neil his spirit was down the next time I saw Neil I tryed to Boost his sprits with my music and I did and it work. In return Neil played, Sang and wrote, the Best of any music in a While. Not to speak of the fun we had. We laughed so hard we all had Bruzed ribs.
“On Revolution Blues, I turned inot a Python, than an aligator, I was crawling like one, makeing noise like one, Plus I was eating up the carpet and the mike stands and such. and in the meanwhiile I started to crawl up towards Neil; Which is pretty Spooky.”
Young was seeing the world through the clearest of eyes. He had written one of rock’s greatest, and angriest, protest songs in Ohio, forged in the molten outrage just days after the National Guard shot dead four students at Kent State University. But with On the Beach, there was a unity, a cohesion of purpose. It was in a sense reportage put to music. He may be singing of going to the radio interview and ending “up alone at the microphone”, but there was a kid in Newcastle listening and it struck a chord, and it still rings true.
Just a few years on, Young was out of the ditch and recording one of the most laid-back albums in his catalogue, Comes a Time. He was even smiling on the cover playing his acoustic guitar, for all the world at peace with the world. As longtime Young admirers know, the only constant with the Young muse is in its trajectories into different fields and back again.
Thanks, Neil, for the journey.
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When music stays with you: Neil Young’s On the Beach struck a chord in 1974, and still rings true
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31.12.2023
So the year turns to 2024. And while screeds are written on the past year or what the year to come will bring, I’ve taken the contrarian view, jumped into the time machine and set the controls for the heart of my youth. That is to 1974, the year a circle of vinyl played at 33 revolutions per minute entered my world, and didn’t leave. I speak of On the Beach by Neil Young.
Music is a marker in a person’s life; yes, to claim a cliche, it can be the soundtrack. On the Beach opened my eyes and ears. Now I see it also as a signpost.
The cover of Neil Young’s 1974 album On the Beach.
I came to Neil Young through Heart of Gold and The Needle and the Damage Done from Harvest, the album that catapulted him into solo stardom, but as the music world and fans were to discover, Young was his own man, and when success came calling, he took off into the ditch. What followed was the “ditch trilogy” of On the Beach, Tonight’s the Night (recorded before On the Beach but released after it) and Time Fades Away. I loved them........
© The Age
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