ESSENTIAL ALBUMS: Neil Young - On The Beach (1974)

By 1974, it was clear to those around Neil Young (and to a deeply apprehensive Elliot Roberts in particular) that the 28-year-old Canadian was prepared, in the name of artistic integrity, to do literally anything that occurred to him at any moment. Subvert and demolish his reputation. Screw up carefully planned schedules. Lurch from one chaotic tour to another. Was the chaos a drastic but necessary means of clinging onto his muse? Or was he simply lost, desperate and following the darkness?

These questions became more prevalent (and their answers more damning) when Reprise released On The Beach in July. There could now be no doubt that Neil Young was figuratively pointing a loaded shotgun at the Harvest generation. The famous line in “Ambulance Blues”, “you ’re alt just pissing in the wind”, dumped its contempt all over the listeners’ good faith. Like the Ratners boss who denounced his jewelry as ‘crap’. Young sneers at the suckers gullible enough to have mistaken his songs for pearls. It scarcely matters that he turns the comment back on himself in the next verse.

A common view of On The Beach was that it was an act of petulant self-indulgence. Young himself subsequently allowed the album to fall out of print, and it remained unavailable for 20 years until its CD release in 2003. Young was fighting something of a lone war when he recorded it; think how antiseptic the LA record-making machine was becoming by 1974, and then think of On The Beach with its fearless close-ups, its audio vérité nakedness. From his musicians and technicians, Young demanded a one-take, rough-mix spontaneity that highlighted every slurring, sloppy impurity in the performances. And the three songs on side two, thus candidly captured, offer mesmerizing and disturbing insights into the mind of a fractious, disillusioned individual who could barely clutch a guitar but who knew that his harrowing truths needed expression.

The three songs have bloodshot eyes and listless tempos, but they summon up the will to inch forward, or perhaps they’re just cantankerously disinclined to die. Young’s incessant repetition of sardonic phrases (“I need a crowd of people..”) gives “On The Beach” a hypnotic momentum that becomes a kind of black comedy. How many times can a man end up alone at a microphone? By the final stretch of “Ambulance Blues”, we’ve been walked in a circle from the ’70s to the ’60s and back, Young’s disjointed thoughts forming a chain of events - memories of the Toronto folk scene, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst - that begins to look like a pattern of premonitions. It all adds up to... what? A glimpse of a post-apocalyptic landscape, like the original Nevil Shute novel? That would be too convenient. But it’s a desolate hell all the same. Regard the view from Young’s bleary eyes in Nixon’s resignation year: a derailed revolution, a powder-keg America, a tomorrow barely worth getting up for.

“I’m deep inside myself” he sings on “Motion Pictures", "but I'll get out somehow”. He could have cheated and used his talent to flatter himself. Instead he used it to impeach himself.

Had any rock star ever faced the world with so little deceit?