12
Time Fades Away, On the Beach, and Tonight’s the Night—Neil Young’s Ditch Trilogy
On the liner notes of his 1977 triple-disc anthology release Decade, Neil Young famously writes about how the success of “Heart of Gold” and Harvest put him in the middle of the road, and how, after becoming bored with it all, he instead decided to head toward the ditch. In retrospect, it’s rather doubtful that Young’s then abrupt, and quite intentional, turn away from commercial success amounted to anything nearly that simple. But at the same time, and again in retrospect, it makes complete sense.
That famous quote has long since been repeated in virtually every major biography or serious critical analysis of Young’s body of work. As a result, the three albums released between 1973 and 1975 have come to be known as the Ditch Trilogy (also referred to, though slightly less often, as the “Doom Trilogy’).
Time Fades Away, On the Beach, and Tonight’s the Night—though widely dismissed (and certainly misunderstood) by some fans, and even by some within his own camp at the time—have since come to occupy a rather hallowed place among Neil Young’s most devoted followers.
In the case of Time Fades Away, the album has even become the rallying cry for a particularly rabid segment of that same fan base—some of whom have even petitioned for the album’s reissue on the very popular Neil Young fan site Thrasher’s Wheat. Despite their impassioned pleas, Time Fades Away (along with the soundtrack to Young’s first Shakey Pictures film project Journey Through the Past) remains the only album in his vast catalog that has yet to see a reissue on CD.
In 2010, Uncut magazine listed Time Fades Away as its #1 choice on a list of the “50 Greatest Lost Albums.” When put into the sort of hindsight that only comes after years and decades of watching Neil Young’s miraculous growth as an artist, it’s easy to see why the album has become such a preciously sought-after commodity. If there is such a thing as the precise recorded moment where Neil Young cemented his reputation as a maverick willing to follow the muse wherever it leads him—even if it means going over a cliff—Time Fades Away is it.
At the time of its original release in 1973, though, the album landed with a resounding commercial thud. Coming a year and change after the worldwide chart-topper that was Harvest, the album peaked at a comparatively dismal #22 on Billboard. The Journey Through the Past soundtrack, released a year earlier (and foolishly marketed by Warner Brothers—however briefly—as the “new” Neil Young album), did even worse, climbing no higher than #45 on the albums chart. It was truly the commercial stiff heard around the world.
Still, as abysmal as the sales of these albums was, it was amazing either of them even did that well—a fact probably owing more to Young’s critical reputation at the time than anything else.
As many of the record company promotion guys charged with the unenviable task of pushing his strange, abrasive new music could—and indeed did—attest at the time, Young seemed hell-bent on committing career suicide back then.
But by some accounts, the rather down mood of the Ditch Trilogy albums was also reflective of the artist’s depressed state at the time, coming on the heels of the deaths of Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry as they did. Even so, there is now no question that this period marked the beginning of an artistic watershed. To many, the Ditch Trilogy heralds the beginnings of what is arguably the most creatively fertile period of Neil Young’s career. Beginning in 1973, and continuing on through most of the seventies, the already prolific Young went on something of a record-making tear—shelving as many potentially great projects (such as the mythical “lost albums” Homegrown and Chrome Dreams) as were actually released.
Though Time Fades Away remains one of those mysteriously missing pieces of the overall puzzle that is Young’s catalog as it is seen today (particularly among his younger fans), it also has yet to gain the hallowed stature afforded the now more universally recognized critical masterpieces On the Beach and especially Tonight’s the Night.
(Just as a quick personal sidebar here, as much as I love Tonight’s the Night, I’d actually have to place On the Beach a bit higher on a personal favorites list.)
For his own part, Young himself seems to be in no hurry to rewrite history with a CD reissue of Time Fades Away either. Along with Journey Through the Past, that album stands alone as a rare missing link in his catalog that the artist himself appears quite content to have completely disowned. Of course, if there is anything to be learned in the case of an artist as prone to sudden, and sometimes seemingly illogical artistic whims as Neil Young (at least from a commercial perspective), it is that these sort of things can change—and often quite suddenly—at the drop of a dime.
The Businessmen Crowded Around, They Came to Hear the Golden Sound …
Regardless of his own feelings about it today, it remains a matter of historic record that Time Fades Away is the album where Neil Young began his long, dark, and some would say quite depressing journey down into “the ditch.”
Misunderstood and even reviled by some of his biggest fans at the time, today Time Fades Away remains among the most confusing releases of his career. Young himself has gone on record as saying it is the least favorite of his albums (which probably accounts for its still unreleased status on CD). Sales were pretty much abysmal when it was first released in 1973, and the reviews weren’t much better.
Yet, in what might be the ultimate case of absence making the heart grow fonder, the album has subsequently become the focus of an impassioned petition for its reissue by fans on Internet sites like Thrasher’s Wheat. Critics have likewise seemed to come around to Time Fades Away, with Uncut magazine recently naming it as their #1 entry on a list of the fifty greatest lost albums ever.
Time Fades Away was recorded live in concert during what was supposed to be the triumphant tour behind the massive Harvest album, but instead became something of a disaster. Young’s band for the tour, the Stray Gators, which included many of the same top-flight studio musicians used on Harvest, was largely in disarray. On the eve of the tour there were disputes among the musicians over things like salaries, and of course the nasty business of Danny Whitten’s firing and subsequent death was still hanging over everyone like a dark cloud. Without Whitten to support him on vocals, Young’s voice was also completely shot by the end of the tour, which led him to recruit David Crosby and Graham Nash as backup vocalists for some of the final dates.
Young himself was said to be miserable during the tour as well, between the terrible news about Whitten, the bickering amongst the band, and questions over how the mellow pop songs of Harvest could possibly translate to the rather ominous prospect of playing ninety sold-out shows in hockey arenas.
The performances on Time Fades Away reflect this chaos.
With Whitten’s death still fresh on his mind, Young had taken to performing a series of new songs on the road that represented an abrupt shift from the feel-good country pop of Harvest. With songs like “Last Dance,” “Don’t Be Denied,” and “Yonder Stands the Sinner” showing a darker lyrical side, the murkier rock sound of this new material likewise reflected the doom and gloom.
For those who doubt the claims of Neil Young being “the Godfather of Grunge” that would surface some two decades later, one only needs to point them toward Time Fades Away. Needless to say, audiences expecting to hear the hits like “Heart of Gold” or even “Cinnamon Girl” were not amused as Young shifted the focus of the shows toward the newer, more downbeat songs.
By the end of what became dubbed the Time Fades Away tour, these darker, never-before-heard songs accounted for as much as two-thirds of the show. When the bad vibes surrounding the tour failed to produce a new album during studio rehearsals, Young chose instead to release the live versions of the songs (since he had been recording all of the shows anyway).
If Crazy Horse has at times been compared to an American Rolling Stones, on Time Fades Away the boozy, sloppy sound of the Stray Gators could be likened to something more closely resembling Rod Stewart’s work with the Faces, his notoriously ragged-sounding seventies outfit with Ronnie Wood (and remember, the Stray Gators were seasoned Nashville pros when Young first signed them up for Harvest).
On Time Fades Away, the Stray Gators sound every bit as tanked up as Rod Stewart’s famous band of drunken rogues—but played at a much slower, more deliberately lazy and dirge-like tempo. If Roddy and Woody’s boozy wailing on songs like “Had Me a Real Good Time” represented the party, the pre-Seattle grunge of Time Fades Away sounds more like the day-after hangover.
Completely oblivious to the wants of a live audience who just wanted to hear the damn hits, Young’s performance on Time Fades Away can be seen more as a precursor to the direct and intentionally confrontational music that avant and punk-rockers like Lou Reed (on Metal Machine Music), Iggy Pop, and the Sex Pistols would later elevate to performance art, than as simple rock ’n’ roll (despite the fact that the songs on this album in fact represent some of the simplest, most primal-sounding rock ’n’ roll of Young’s career).
The ragged quality of the performances on Time Fades Away is matched equally by the low-fi sound of the live recording itself. Tape hiss can be heard throughout the recording, which actually adds to its raw feel in a weird sort of way. Original vinyl copies were even stamped with a warning of sorts: “This Recording Was Mastered 16-Track/Direct to Disc (acetate) by Computer.”
The album also produced at least one bona fide Neil Young classic in “Don’t Be Denied.” Written the day after Danny Whitten died, the song is really more of an autobiographical tune recalling Young’s early days in Winnipeg, and is in many ways a more rocking successor to the CSN&Y song “Helpless.”
“Last Dance” is another standout. Clocking in at nearly nine minutes, the song probably best demonstrates the sort of raucous, wheels-coming-off-the-wagon playing that so frustrated Young’s audiences on that tour. His primal screaming of “no, no, no” over and over toward the end also represents the sort of naked, standing-over-the-cliff demonstration of raw emotion that wouldn’t be a bit out of place on something like John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band album.
Like everyone else at the time it first came out in 1973, I didn’t “get” Time Fades Away at all. In hindsight, though, Young’s least favorite album has to be recognized as something of a great, lost classic—misunderstood at the time as it was.
Tonight’s the Night Part 1
Seven months after Danny Whitten’s overdose, the Neil Young camp was rocked by another equally tragic, drug-related loss.
Sheet music for “Walk On” from On the Beach, one of the three albums comprising what would come to be known as Neil Young’s mid-seventies “Ditch Trilogy.”
Courtesy of Tom Therme collection
Bruce Berry’s dead body was found on June 7, 1973. The former roadie for both Neil Young and CSN&Y had apparently been dead for several days after overdosing on a lethal cocktail of cocaine and heroin.
For those in CSN&Y’s inner circle, though, Berry’s drug problems were hardly a secret.
Although his official job title was listed as roadie, Berry was also the band’s unofficial dealer, supplying drugs to a number of people in the CSN&Y camp, including Stephen Stills.
Not long before he was found dead, Berry in fact had particularly pissed off Crosby, Nash, and Young when he showed up with drugs at a band meeting in Hawaii that was really intended more as an intervention for Stills, in the hopes of getting the band back together for a reunion album and tour. The incident in fact effectively scuttled any dreams of a proposed tour (at least for the time being), when Young stated he wanted nothing to do with any of it and walked out of the meeting.
Even so, the deaths of Whitten and Berry—along with a recent drug deal gone bad that resulted in the murder of a drug dealer during a party at Young’s old Topanga Canyon stomping grounds—had much of the inner circle understandably spooked, and probably none more so than Neil Young himself.
Not surprisingly, he responded in the most appropriate and perhaps only way he knew how. Putting yet another CSN&Y reunion project on hold (much to the chagrin of his bandmates), Young got in touch with his old pal David Briggs and said he wanted to make what he then described as “a rock-’n’-roll record.”
Young and Briggs hadn’t worked together since Harvest, as the result of a falling out over a disagreement with the product that was ultimately released. Briggs had wanted to release a live acoustic recording of the Harvest songs from 1971, rather than the studio version that ultimately came out. The recording was finally released three decades later as Live at Massey Hall, part of the massive Archives project.
In the end, the album that became Tonight’s the Night was much more than a simple rock-’n’-roll record. Today it is recognized, and rightfully so, as Neil Young’s first true masterpiece.
To record the album, Briggs and Young knocked out a wall with a sledgehammer at the Studio Instrument Rentals rehearsal space owned by Bruce Berry’s brother Ken. From there, they ran some cable through the hole in the wall and converted it into a makeshift studio.
Young’s idea was to let it all hang out and make a record as raw and unhinged-sounding as possible, warts and all. Recorded during round-the-clock sessions fueled by copious amounts of booze, the musicians—a combination of Crazy Horse players like Nils Lofgren, Jack Nitzsche, and Ralph Molina, Billy Talbot, and Stray Gators holdover Ben Keith—would spend the day getting more or less out of their minds on tequila and then running through the songs late into the night.
The result is a series of raggedly played songs that are more like glimpses into Neil Young’s darkly troubled soul. Stark, raw, and ultimately beautiful, his vision of what he has since described many times as “audio verité” is captured with a breathtaking sort of minimalist beauty on Tonight’s the Night.
Although the version of the album eventually released two years after it was recorded in 1975 was cleaned up considerably, the spirit of those original sessions—complete with botched cues and missed notes—remains largely intact. As a brutally honest artistic document of both its time and the altered states of consciousness of the players involved, Tonight’s the Night is arguably unmatched in the entire history of rock ’n’ roll. With songs that are about as far removed from the peace-and-love, California hippie sentiment of Harvest as it gets, Young had crafted his first genuine masterpiece.
But unlike other rock-’n’-roll masterpieces of the era made by people like the Beatles and Brian Wilson, for example, the beauty of Tonight’s the Night lies not in any sort of studio-manufactured magic, but rather in its brilliant and raw nakedness. If there ever really was such a thing as a “one take, and that’s a wrap” album, Tonight’s the Night was it, particularly in its original, still unreleased version.
The album that ultimately surfaced in 1975 maintains much, but not all of the raw spirit of those original tequila-fueled sessions. Even so, Young still couldn’t resist some last-minute tinkering.
No less than David Briggs himself has maintained that the original version of the album, untouched by overdubs and studio technology, most accurately captures the spirit of those all-night sessions fueled by a volatile combination of grief and Cuervo Gold. As a result, the original Tonight’s the Night album—unhinged, unreleased, and believed to still exist somewhere on a cassette tape—represents something like the holy grail of all the many great lost Neil Young recordings amongst diehard fans.
Tonight’s the Night begins and ends with the title track—a habit Young would continue to follow to great effect with future releases Rust Never Sleeps and Freedom.
Jack Nitzsche’s boozy-sounding piano intro sounds like the sort of thing you might hear around last call at the piano bar from hell. This soon gives way to Neil’s raggedly barking out the personal lyrics about how “Bruce Berry was a working man,” and how he would “sing a song in a shaky voice,” before finally cutting to the chase with the chilling line about how he “heard that he died out on the mainline.” With its dark, personal, and quite frankly depressing, tone, it was clear that with Tonight’s the Night Young was no longer content with merely dancing on the artistic edge, but rather had chosen to take his music to the edge of oblivion.
On the second version of the song that closes the album, Young pushes the emotional intensity even further. With a vocal that plays more like an anguished howl, he sounds like he is within seconds of becoming completely emotionally unglued. It is one of the more brutally honest examples of an artist completely baring his soul ever heard on a rock-’n’-roll record.
From there, songs like “Tired Eyes” (inspired by the murderous drug deal gone bad and resulting shootout in Topanga) continue his dark journey down into the drug-infested cesspool of post-hippie Los Angeles. Young doesn’t so much sing lyrics like “was he a heavy doper” and the like, as he does mutter them in what amounts to a foggy whisper. In some ways, the song plays more like a long conversation Young is having with himself about the event (“Well he shot four men in a cocaine deal, And he left them lyin’ in an open field”). If nothing else, he certainly keeps it real on this bleak and harrowing account of a real-life event that offers a rare look inside the darker, seedier underbelly of the Los Angeles hippie subculture. It’s one of the very best tracks from Tonight’s the Night.
Other songs, like “Roll Another Number,” could be interpreted as a hypocritical endorsement of the druggy lifestyle that so tragically came home to bite Neil Young on the ass during the recording of Tonight’s the Night. But once the album is heard in full, with the songs played in their proper sequence, there’s no mistaking the antidrug—or at least antiheroin—sentiment of the overall record. One of the more eerie aspects of the final version of the album released in 1975 is the inclusion of a 1970 Crazy Horse live performance from the Fillmore East where Danny Whitten posthumously sings “Come On Baby, Let’s Go Downtown” (a song that none too coincidentally is about scoring heroin).
The original version of Tonight’s the Night said to be floating around somewhere out there on bootleg tapes and the like was by all accounts even rawer sounding, and includes several boozy-sounding raps in between the songs themselves (producer David Briggs has confirmed as much in interviews after the fact). These same strange, rambling raps would become a centerpiece of Young’s shows as he took the songs from Tonight’s the Night out on tour for a test run. But if audiences had been left confused by the Time Fades Away shows, they were in for a particularly rude awakening this time around.
Promotional LP pressing of Time Fades Away, the live recording of new songs that kicked off Neil Young’s Ditch Trilogy. As of this writing, it remains unreleased on CD.
Courtesy of Tom Therme collection
Welcome to Miami Beach … Everything Is Cheaper Than It Looks
Although it would be two more years before Tonight’s the Night was even released—in a considerably altered, and, at least according to folks like David Briggs, watered-down version from the original booze-fueled sessions laid down at S.I.R.—Young still wasted no time in taking his new songs out on the road.
For those fans still hoping for either “mellow Neil” or the religiously shamanistic rock-’n’-roll experience of Neil Young with Crazy Horse, the Tonight’s the Night tour would offer no respite.
If anything, Neil Young was more out there and weird on this tour than ever before. The stage was a strange display of everything from a collection of gawdy platform boots to props like a wooden Indian and a palm tree (which had clearly seen better days) plucked from S.I.R. Young himself was sporting a disheveled look, complete with long, stringy hair, a scruffy-looking half growth of beard, over-the-top Elvis shades, and the sort of cheap jacket you might find on the dollar rack at the Goodwill. This rather nightmarish-looking Young inspired comparisons to Charles Manson, the “hippie cult” mass murderer still fresh in the minds of anyone who followed the news of the day back then.
More than anything else, though, the Tonight’s the Night shows were an extension of the boozy atmosphere of the sessions for the album itself. More often than not, the band—who changed their name to the Santa Monica Flyers for the tour—was tanked on a combination of tequila and lord knows what else, and none more so than Young himself. In the many years that have passed since, he has referred to the shows from the Tonight’s the Night tour as the closest thing to “performance art” he has ever done—and in retrospect that observation probably isn’t far off the mark.
At the time, though, concertgoers mostly experienced an artist who seemed to be nothing if not zonked clean out of his freaking mind. Rumors began spreading during the tour that Young had developed a severe drug problem (he hadn’t) or that he might even be dead (he wasn’t).
Meanwhile, from an insider’s perspective, everybody from band members like Ben Keith and Nils Lofgren to Young himself were having the time of their lives. Well, at least everyone except for perhaps Elliot Roberts, who was concerned enough about future commercial prospects for his flagship artist that post-show, back-of-the-bus pep talks became a nightly ritual during the tour.
Aside from his increasingly confrontational tone toward his audience—and in particular, their reluctance to indulge his artistic muse and just take in the new material without complaint—there were also things like the night Young bought a round of drinks for the entire house during a show at L.A.’s Roxy to consider. Later on that night, when he dared female audience members to come to the stage topless, his then girlfriend Carrie Snodgress took him up on it—which only served to further horrify an already nervous Elliot Roberts.
For opening acts on the tour ranging from the Eagles to Linda Ronstadt—both of whom were still riding the laid-back seventies L.A. singer-songwriter wave the Harvest album had helped establish—the shows had to seem equally strange. Critics, who by this time were already puzzled by recent artistically questionable decisions like the Time Fades Away tour and subsequent album, reacted to the shows with some of the worst reviews of Young’s career up until that time.
Still, in spite of all of this, for Young every stop on the Tonight’s the Night tour was just another night at the beach, or to be more specific, another night at Miami Beach.
For every show of the tour, he played the role of emcee, beginning each performance with the introduction “Welcome to Miami Beach, where everything is cheaper than it looks.”
From there, he would run through the new, unheard songs for the dumbstruck audiences. Like the still unreleased album, the concerts both began and ended with the song “Tonight’s the Night”—which also served as a launch point for boozy, borderline incoherent raps that almost always centered on the subject of Bruce Berry. Keep in mind that it is almost certain that 90 percent of the crowd had no idea who Bruce Berry even was.
By the time the song was played for a second time that evening, Young would often tease the crowd by saying “here’s one you’ve heard before,” which only served to further fuck with the expectations of concertgoers expecting to hear the hits like “Heart of Gold” or “Cinnamon Girl.” What they got instead was an even more raggedly intense reprise of “Tonight’s the Night” that could stretch to thirty minutes or longer. It was almost as if Young were purposefully trying to get the most negative reaction possible.
His raps about how Bruce Berry “put David Crosby’s guitar into his arm” (a reference to how the addiction-ravaged Berry had once stolen Crosby’s guitar and hawked it for junk) were undoubtedly lost on audiences who didn’t know who Bruce Berry was, and could probably have cared less (particularly with regard to songs they had never heard before to begin with).
Still, Young remained undaunted. Not only was he unwilling to spare audiences who paid their money to hear the hits this latest of his increasingly frequent artistic indulgences—if anything, he seemed hell-bent on force-feeding them whatever the muse demanded, regardless of any critical or commercial fallout that might follow.
Hello, Waterface, Goodbye Waterface
As brutal as the notices in such normally supportive publications as Rolling Stone had been, one of the most scathing reviews of the Tonight’s the Night shows came from Dutch critic Constant Meijers. Interestingly, when the Tonight’s the Night album was finally released nearly two years later, Young reproduced Meijers’s article, still written its original Dutch language, as part of the album artwork.
Another curiosity about the album art is a strange letter to someone named “Waterface” included on the sleeve.
In addition to more references to “Miami Beach,” the letter contains the particularly cryptic line “Tell Waterface to put it in his lung and not in his vein,” which is almost certainly a reference to the drug overdose deaths of Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry. Because of this, it has been speculated that the name “Waterface” could refer to Whitten, Berry, or even both of them.
During the seventies when vinyl was still the preferred format for long-form albums, messages from the artists etched into the inner groove of the vinyl (the blank space closest to the paper label) were also somewhat common. The unidentified “Waterface” appears on such an etching on Tonight’s the Night as well, where one side reads “Hello Waterface” and the other reads “Goodbye Waterface.”
The actual identity of “Waterface” has never been revealed and remains a mystery to this day.
Tonight’s the Night Part 2
It would be two more years before Tonight’s the Night would see the light of day. Even then, the album’s eventual release came about only by way of a sort of happy accident. In between the time of the original 1973 S.I.R. sessions and the release of Tonight’s the Night two years later, Neil Young completed two more albums and also reunited with Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young for the 1974 stadium juggernaut that became known as the Doom Tour.
Of the two albums Young made in between, Homegrown was the return to the commercially viable, million-dollar mellow folk-pop sounds of Harvest that everyone from the label executives at Warner Brothers to Elliot Roberts had been salivating for. Not surprisingly, for anyone who really knows this story, it was shelved at the last minute by Young himself and never released. Many of the songs from Homegrown eventually surfaced on albums like American Stars and Bars and Zuma. Young himself has been quoted in interviews as saying that he put the brakes on releasing Homegrown because he felt that the songs—many of which were inspired by his then disintegrating relationship with Carrie Snodgress—hit a little too close to home on a personal level.
The album has since gone on to somewhat mythical status as one of several great lost albums in the Neil Young canon, and is widely believed to be the true sequel to Harvest. Rumors persist that the full album will finally see official release as part of the second volume of the Archives boxed set series.
The other album Young recorded during this period (and that actually was released in 1974) was On the Beach, which is even bleaker than Tonight’s the Night and has gone on to be recognized as a high-water mark in the artist’s catalog (even if it was seen as simply the latest of his commercial failures at the time).
Meanwhile, Young continued to tinker off and on with Tonight’s the Night in the studio. At one point, the idea of making the album into a Broadway musical production was even floated, strangely enough, by Elliot Roberts. As odd as that may sound now, at one point Roberts even enlisted Mel Frohman (who was married to Roberts’s secretary) to work up a treatment for the purposed Broadway production about Bruce Berry set to Neil Young songs. The result was a musical based loosely on Berry’s life and featuring songs from Tonight’s the Night, which at one point was going to be called From Roadie to Riches but ultimately never saw the light of day.
Single release for “Come On Baby, Let’s Go Downtown,” sung by Danny Whitten on the Tonight’s the Night album. Whitten’s death haunted the sessions for what later became known as the dark masterpiece of the Ditch Trilogy.
Courtesy of Tom Therme collection
In the end, after all of Young’s endless tinkering with the original tapes, it was Rick Danko from the Band who can probably be credited with this bleak masterpiece finally seeing the light of day.
After Young played the reels for Homegrown for a group of people including Danko, as well as the Band’s Richard Manuel and Crazy Horse’s Ralph Molina in a room at L.A.’s Chateau Marmont hotel (also the site of John Belushi’s death), the tapes for Tonight’s the Night, which had apparently made it on the same reel, unexpectedly followed.
When Danko said “if you guys don’t release this album, you’re fucking crazy,” Young listened. And although it must have broken the hearts of more than a few Warner Brothers executives who were instead expecting the Harvest sequel, the rest is history.
The World Is Turnin’, I Hope It Don’t Turn Away
On the Beach may be the most depressing-sounding record that Neil Young, or anyone else for that matter, has ever recorded. It is also a largely underappreciated masterpiece.
There are probably any number of factors contributing to the decidedly downbeat mood of the album, not the least of which is the fact that it was recorded as Neil Young’s relationship with Carrie Snodgress was disintegrating (even though of the album’s eight songs, only “Motion Pictures” appears to be directly about her).
But in the end, what probably contributed most to the down feel of On the Beach (and when it comes to this record, calling it merely laid back would be a considerable understatement) was the sort of home-cooked recipe you more likely might find in a cookbook written by Timothy Leary or Ken Kesey for something called “honey slides.”
Where tequila had been the recreational intoxicant of choice during the making of Tonight’s the Night, the sessions for what became On the Beach were fueled by the lethal concoction that came to be known to everyone surrounding the project as honey slides. But this particular mind-altering confection was just one facet of the overall craziness that Cajun wildman Rusty Kershaw brought to the table during the sessions for On the Beach.
If there was such a thing as a wild card during the making of the album, then Kershaw, brother of the legendary fiddler Doug Kershaw, was truly it.
Brought into Young’s scene by Ben Keith, Kershaw came along with enough baggage to a fill a jumbo jet. Among his other antics, he ran up an exorbitant tab at the hotel during the On the Beach sessions on Young’s dime that included wheeling in crates of wine and later badly damaging the room with wine stains and burnt cigarette holes in the carpet.
And then there were those honey slides. Kershaw’s wife would cook up this potent combination of high-grade hashish and honey into little cakes that resembled cow pies, which the musicians would then eat. Even for a bunch of stoner veterans like Neil Young’s crew, the honey slides packed one hell of a knockout punch. The honey slides would put them in a state somewhere between catatonic and just being rendered plain, out and out comatose. It was the perfect backdrop for a record that ambles along at the slow, lazy pace of On the Beach.
In addition to the lunatic Kershaw, Young assembled a colorful cast of characters for the making of On the Beach that included many of the usual suspects like Ben Keith, Tim Drummond, and Ralph Molina, as well as David Crosby and Levon Helm and Rick Danko from the Band.
Despite Kershaw’s antics, the one thing that most impressed Young about him was the way he vibed off of his playing. Where Young was known for putting musicians through their paces by having them lay down tracks for songs they barely knew, Kershaw not only would record his parts for the album with little preparation, but actually thrive on this first-take environment.
For the sessions, many of Kershaw’s contributions playing fiddle and slide guitar—particularly on songs like the epic “Ambulance Blues”—were recorded with him not having heard the song beforehand at all. Kershaw also insisted on being situated as close as possible to Young in the studio, for the sole purpose of being able to “vibe off of him.”
Recorded mostly at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles (save for the tracks “For the Turnstiles” and “Walk On,” which were recorded at Broken Arrow), On the Beach contains some of the most down, desolate, and depressing music of Young’s entire recorded catalog—particularly on the three songs that make up the second side of the original vinyl album.
Yet, for all the doom and gloom of the album, there is also something strangely cathartic about it. It’s as though Young is facing down some of the darkest demons lurking in his closet—even if he is probably only doing so on a subconscious level—and confronting them head-on. Experienced on this level, On the Beach feels at times like something more resembling an exorcism.
I Went to the Radio Interview, but I Ended Up Alone at the Microphone
The title track establishes the downer mood right out of the gate. In a voice that sounds so completely isolated and world-weary, it almost sounds like a part of him is channeling the ghost of Hank Williams doing “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” Young sings the lines “the world is turnin’, I hope it don’t turn away.”
As the song continues to crawl along to one of the most downcast slow blues you are ever likely to hear, Young sounds so completely alone and withdrawn from the outside world you almost fear for his sanity. “I need a crowd of people, but I can’t face them day to day,” he sings in something closer to an anguished whisper in one line. “Though my problems are meaningless, that don’t make them go away,” he sings in another line with the sort of world-weariness dripping off of his voice that it sounds like he could go right over the edge at any moment.
Eventually, the song finds him at a radio interview where he “ended up alone at the microphone.” It’s the sort of strange and startling confession about celebrity that is even stranger coming from an artist like Neil Young—one who is not usually known for such revelations in his music.
If Tonight’s the Night ever seemed like a downer of an album, when compared to On the Beach it sounds almost like goodtime party rock.
Though he has since claimed he didn’t realize it at the time, the song “Motion Pictures” appears to be the first of many that Neil Young wrote during this period about his then crumbling relationship with Carrie Snodgress (the majority of these would be later recorded for the still unreleased Homegrown album). The closest thing to a tone of optimism you’ll find here is in the line “I’m deep inside myself, but I’ll get out somehow,” a lyric that eerily echoes the feeling of desolate isolation already expressed on the title track.
You’re All Just Pissing in the Wind
On the album’s centerpiece, the sprawling “Ambulance Blues,” Young alternates between wistful remembrances from “back in the old folky days” where “the air was magic when we played” and rejecting such nostalgic feelings altogether (“it’s easy to get buried in the past, when you try to make a good thing last’).
Later on, he lashes out at his detractors (“so all you critics sit alone, you’re no better than me, for what you’ve shown”) and an unidentified man “who could tell so many lies, he had a different story for every set of eyes.”
At the time, many thought this lyric might have been referring to then President Richard Nixon. On the Beach came out in 1974, the same year Nixon was forced to resign because of the Watergate scandal. The album jacket also famously makes reference to Watergate. In the front cover photo, Young is seen with his back turned to the camera, alone on a beach in white pants and a ridiculous bright yellow jacket, amidst a beach table and chairs with the fins of an older, fifties model car sticking up out of the sand. Lying underneath the table is a newspaper with the headline “Sen. Buckley Calls for Nixon to Resign.”
By the time “Ambulance Blues” is over, Young concludes that “there ain’t nothing like the friend, who can tell you you’re just pissing in the wind” in what may go down as one of his most sublime lyrics ever. There have been numerous claims over the years that the song is really about his famously fractious relationship with Crosby, Stills, and Nash (a subject Young would later address more directly in the song “Thrasher” from Rust Never Sleeps). But the references to Nixon and others seems to be more of a statement on the generally pessimistic national mood of its post-Watergate times than anything else, at least when viewed in retrospect.
Interestingly, Young has gone on record as stating that he subconsciously stole the melody for “Ambulance Blues” from Scottish folk guitarist Bert Jansch (who he has also subsequently praised more than once as being the acoustic guitar equivalent of a virtuoso like Jimi Hendrix).
We Got Twenty-Five Rifles Just to Keep the Population Down
Of the few upbeat songs from On the Beach, “Walk On” is probably the best known, but “Revolution Blues” is without a doubt the most infamous. Inspired by hippie cult messiah and mass murderer Charles Manson, the song rather audaciously sets the Manson murder spree to a rock-’n’-roll beat with lines like “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.”
David Crosby, who plays guitar on the track, was reportedly so horrified by the lyrics that he refused to play it with Young on CSN&Y’s 1974 reunion tour. In another line, Young snarls “I hope you get the connection, ’cause I can’t take the rejection.” In the years since the song was released, he has stated in published interviews that he knew Manson as an acquaintance, and that his murderous rage may have come in part after his songs were rejected by all the record labels in town from Warner Brothers on down.
“Charlie didn’t take rejection well,” he has been quoted as saying. Young may be the only artist of his time who would have the balls to record a song about a pariah like Manson, particularly during a time when the Tate-LaBianca murders, and the dark ripple effect they had on much of the Hollywood entertainment subculture, was so fresh in people’s minds.
The other standout track from On the Beach is “For the Turnstiles,” which sounds for all the world like it could have been made somewhere on a front porch in the Mississippi Delta with Neil Young and Ben Keith’s respective funky blues picking on the banjo and dobro.
The lyrics, which are said to be at least partially inspired by idle conversation with Carrie Snodgress as the song was being created, reference everything from seasick sailors and pimps with tailors, to great explorers and bush league batters—all wrapped around the central lines “You can really learn a lot that way.”
As a piece of inspired songwriting, “For the Turnstiles” ranks right up there with Young’s best. Some have also described it as his “Dylan song.”
Tonight’s the Night concert shirt.
Courtesy of Tom Therme collection
Citizen Kane Junior Blues
Although Young never embarked on a full solo tour to support On the Beach, many of the songs from the album were performed with Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young during the reunion Doom Tour of 1974.
However, he did make a surprise appearance at New York’s famous folk showcase club the Bottom Line on May 16, 1974. During this surprise appearance, he performed most of the still unreleased On the Beach album alone on an acoustic guitar before a stunned crowd that had come expecting to see only Ry Cooder and Leon Redbone (the scheduled headliners that night).
In addition to playing versions of still unheard songs from On the Beach like “Ambulance Blues,” “For the Turnstiles,” and “Motion Pictures” for the first time before a live audience, the crowd was also treated to other unreleased songs of the period like the hallucinatory, quasi-psychedelic “Pushed It Over the End” (which Young introduced as “Citizen Kane Junior Blues”) and a beautifully rendered cover of “Greensleeves.”
In between songs, an uncharacteristically relaxed and animated Young jokes with the audience about things like making the record with Kershaw, and of course, those “honey slides.” In response to a request for “Southern Man” from the audience, he also relates a humorous story about why he stopped performing the song following a show at the Oakland Coliseum.
Fortunately, the Bottom Line show was widely bootlegged. Since this performance stands as the only known recorded document of Young doing the On the Beach material live, it is also an essential listen (provided, of course, that you can find it). As Neil Young bootlegs go, it’s a definite keeper.