The first thing you notice is the fin of a 1959 Cadillac sticking out of the sand next to the same kind of yellow floral patio set every family had during the Nixon years. A wave crests onto the Santa Monica Beach shoreline while a figure in a suit stands with his back to us. The chairs’ summery patterns, the sky’s gloom, the automobile receding into the earth—it all makes me think of the mudroom I used to take naps in at my great aunt’s house, how it always felt dank and damp and musty even when the sun trickled in. It was wood-paneled and adorned with shag carpeting; the windows had textured glass that looked like those old Pizza Hut cups. My cousin and I would sometimes retreat to the basem*nt to play pool while the adults yapped upstairs about family folklore that’d been regurgitated so much you’d never know what was true anymore.
My parents would only ever take me to my aunt’s house on her birthday. I didn’t know her all that well. She was my grandma’s sister, and her youngest daughter used to do a Donald Duck impression that scared the bejesus out of me. She stayed with us one Christmas and sh*t her pants. But all of us who lived within a stone’s throw would decamp to Niles, Ohio for her birthday. Distant relatives, who slept in Amish country, would make the trek out and put fruit in their pockets before going home. They smelled odd and never shut up about the Free Masons; there were sinister rumors about them I wouldn’t dare repeat here. Grandma would invite her dear friend Betty and kiss her on the lips upon her arrival through the mudroom. “Is Grandma a Libyan?” I innocently asked my mom once.
I never understood the name “mudroom.” To me, it was a place to go when there was no more space on the living room couches, not some fancy, specific place to leave your shoes. It never felt like an entryway to me. Everyone in that room had already arrived. Maybe I felt at home there because the carpeting was like the carpeting in my grandparents’ back room, where I kept my three-piece drum kit and would hold “band meetings” with my mates on an unplugged rotary phone. I don’t remember many of my dreams, but sometimes I dream about that mudroom. I can’t remember my great aunt’s voice anymore—she’s been dead now for as much of my life as she was alive—but I remember the way the carpet felt between my toes. It was yellow. I know it always looked untouched, because my aunt never had any pets and rarely any callers. She did date a geezer from Florida who died just weeks before turning 100, though they hadn’t seen each other in years by the time she passed. My mom got the call while we were walking from a TJ Maxx to a neighboring Whole Foods. She was so inconsolable I became convinced our dog got hit by a car. When we went to my aunt’s house, I peeked into her bedroom and caught a glimpse of her in bed, limp, lifeless and farther away than ever. I hid behind a couch cushion and watched paramedics wheel her dead body through the mudroom. The whole house smelled like Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Despite its foreboding coastal mood, the cover of On the Beach is as bucolic as it is melancholic. A newspaper sits on the ground and reads SENATOR BUCKLEY CALLS FOR NIXON TO RESIGN; there are a couple of Coors cans littered about, as well as a green paper cup that probably had coffee in it at some point. There’s an outtake from the shoot I like quite a bit, where Neil Young is sitting in one of those floral chairs—his white trouser-clad backside noticeably making the cushion slouch toward the sand just a smidge more—holding a Coors and waving at the camera. With sunglasses covering his tired eyes, he smiles ear to ear. All is good in Shakey’s world—or so he would have you believe.
But all is not so good on On the Beach, a canonically unhappy album (Neil’s got a few of those). The ‘59 Cadillac is caught somewhere far more sinister than with one wheel in the ditch and one on the track. In Apple Music’s byline-less description of the record, they claim it to be “an album of paradoxes; it spins beauty out of desolation and hope out of fear and paranoia.” Half of that is true, at least. But calling On the Beach “hopeful” is like listening to Tonight’s the Night and saying it sounds like a gala more than it does a wake. 47 years ago, Neil wrote that “Heart of Gold” put him “in the middle of the road.” “Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch,” he said. “A rougher ride, but I saw more interesting people there.” Sure enough, the ghosts coming in with the tides on On the Beach in 1974 made for much more intimate, yet all the more haunting, portraits of humanity and its damning, oft-inconsolable clutches. The men who were dying in the months following Harvest’s release in 1972—Bruce Berry and Danny Whitten—were buried but not yet fully mourned.
According to Neil, Berry was “a working man” who used to “load that [white Ford] Econoline van.” He was introduced to heroin by Whitten, who was the equilibrium on Everybody Knows This is Nowhere—as his six-string poked holes in the stratosphere alongside Neil’s. When Neil planned to have the Stray Gators back him up on the Harvest Tour in 1972/73, Whitten was tapped to play rhythm guitar alongside Jack Nitzsche, Ben Keith, Tim Drummond and Kenny Buttrey. But his growing drug addiction and poor performance during rehearsals led to Neil firing him and sending him back to Los Angeles from San Francisco with $50 in his pocket on November 18th. That night, Whitten died from an overdose of either quaaludes or a combination of alcohol and diazepam (reports vary, but it’s likely the latter, on account of Whitten’s arthritic ailments). “We were rehearsing with him and he just couldn’t cut it,” Neil said. “He couldn’t remember anything. He was too out of it. Too far gone.” When the coroner called Neil the night Whitten died, he felt responsible. With a big arena tour looming, rock’s next prophet became racked with guilt and insecurity.
Considering that Harvest took Neil to heights far taller than his tenures in Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young ever had, the spiral he went on in the Ditch Trilogy feels like some mythical, fall-from-grace tome of rock ‘n’ roll folklore. Harvest had topped the Billboard 200 for a few weeks and produced two Top 40 hits, including the aforementioned “Heart of Gold,” which soared to #1. When 1972 came to a close, no non-greatest hits album sold more units than Harvest—not The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, not A Song For You, not Elvis as Recorded at Madison Square Garden, not Machine Head.
Harvest is an album beloved by Neil’s greatest acolytes and his most novice admirers alike. Soon, after putting out a double LP soundtrack for his 16mm film Journey Through the Past, he unveiled Time Fades Away, On the Beach and Tonight’s the Night—a trio of records that barely sold a million copies combined, just one-sixth of Harvest’s successes. Neil changed backing bands like he changed his patchworked, ripped jeans, turning clubs inside out with the Stray Gators and the Santa Monica Flyers, traipsing through America and England and playing up their own misery through melodramatic stage antics. The world wanted another Harvest. Neil Young was never going to make another Harvest.
The best way to describe the sound of On the Beach is “coarse” or “crude.” Sometimes, the record sounds like it was made inside a trash compactor, as the metallic hues of Neil and his revolving door of strung-out bandmates crush and sputter like a piercing, mangled cache of wounded songwriting. The project begins angry, when Neil sends a big, juicy kiss-off to his naysayers: “I hear some people been talkin’ me down,” he bemoans. “Bring up my name, pass it ‘round. They don’t mention happy times. They do their thing, I’ll do mine.” Cutting through the sinister, muscular guitar riffs and Crazy Horse-flecked rhythm section of “Walk On,” Neil reckons with a past life of putting on solid gigs for chump-change. “We still did the best we could,” he contends, before the chorus kicks in and the band kicks out. Neil titled On the Beach after the Stanley Kramer-directed, Gregory Peck-starring movie of the same name. In the film, a third World War ravages the Northern Hemisphere with nuclear fallout. At the end of it, a Salvation Army banner hanging over an empty, lifeless city street reads: “THERE IS STILL TIME..BROTHER”.
On the Beach, weirdly enough, reminds me a lot of Judd Apatow’s Funny People and its take on how emotionally-wounded people communicate through the universal language of comedy. I think about Adam Sandler’s terminally ill George Simmons sitting at a comedy club piano with a single spotlight turned onto him. “Our relationship has always beens strained,” he sings to a laughing audience. “You always wanted too much from me, and I’m very mad at you. Leave me alone.” In Neil’s world, his universal language is music—and it’s that universal language that is slowly gnawing away at him. He sings about the “blues,” be it of the vampire, revolution or ambulance variety, and surrounds himself with players who can burn up the margins of his own malaise. “I need a crowd of people,” Neil sings on the On the Beach title track, “but I can’t face them day to day. Though my problems are meaningless, that don’t make them go away.” Like how George uses his illness to reconnect with family, peers and old flames, Neil uses his fifth studio album to mend fences with the mother of his son, his bandmates and himself.
Harvest wasn’t a bouquet of good energy, though. I think the sheer onslaught of bummer vibes on On the Beach and Tonight’s the Night color our perceptions of that record a little differently. The uptick in joy, if you can even call it that, on “Heart of Gold” does a lot of heavy-lifting in the company of the quietly violent “The Needle and the Damage Done.” But, when Neil adopts a Manson Family persona on “Revolution Blues” (thanks to a real-life encounter with Charles, thanks to Dennis Wilson), Harvest sounds more like a nursery rhyme than a complicated collection of thoughts about drug abuse, his growing relationship with actress Carrie Snodgress, generational mortality and critiques of the Deep South. But there is happiness too, in songs like “There’s a World.” “There’s a world you’re living in,” Neil sings, with a dash of hope. “No one else has your part.”
But On the Beach dares to suggest that, just maybe, none of us have parts to begin with—that we are all just here together and some of us are lucky while most of us aren’t. The lives of Berry and Whitten rest heavily on On the Beach, yes, and you can hear Neil reckon with their deaths all the way through Rust Never Sleeps, when he sings “how I lost my friends, I still don’t understand” on “Thrasher.” But Neil is often at his most profound when he’s not trying to be profound at all, in the instances where he allows himself moments of grace—where he lets his conclusions exist as a language wrapped around all of the unfinished memories he carries with him.
The headline of On the Beach is usually something like “folk star burdened by his own success.” But much of the record was made after Neil and the Santa Monica Flyers returned from their Tonight’s the Night Tour, which was met with mixed remarks—on account of their stage antics, Neil’s refusal to play his hits, the band’s constant improvising and ample, ample co*cktails of tequila and weed. In hindsight, the tour feels like something out of a f*cked up storybook. There’s that famous moment where someone in the crowd at the Rainbow Theatre in London yells “Rock ‘n’ roll!” at the band, to which Neil replies that he’d “love to go see some. Maybe later tonight.” And, as audiences grew restless and heckled the band to play “Old Man” or “Cinnamon Girl,” Neil would say “I’m gonna play something you’ve all heard before” and then rip into a 15-minute rendition of “Tonight’s the Night”—keeping his promise, as the track served as the band’s opening number.
The frustrations of On the Beach make the most sense when you consider Neil’s catalog in order. Knowing that an album as battered as Tonight’s the Night was written and recorded first makes the nihilism of “Vampire Blues” and “On the Beach” all the more acrimonious. Watergate was unraveling, the Patty Heart kidnapping was always in the news and American culture was still recovering from the Altamont Free Concert and the Tate-LaBianca Murders, which occurred within months of each other in 1969 (the year after Neil put out his first solo record). He’d just done a run of shows that nobody liked. Less than 20 days after On the Beach—an album that ends on a stirring critique of Nixon and his consequential lies—came out, the then-president resigned from office. So where did Neil go to cope? Well, to the water of course. Because we remember the water. We remember the smell of it and the chatter spilling out of the boardwalk shops. We remember the bull kelp washing ashore and our curious fingers picking at the sea glass clumping all over. And like our grief, the ocean remains a steadfast tempest pushing and pulling over and over in silence until we decide to return to it.
You can hear Neil grappling with an entire lifetime on an album like this, an album so entrenched in emptiness that nothing feels real or reachable. “I went to the radio interview, but I ended up alone at the microphone,” Neil sings on the title track, a double-entendre about his own alienation and the very real truth that his friends were disappearing too. Ocean Vuong once said that grief is “the last and final translation of love.” “This is the last act of loving someone. And you realize that it will never end.” And thus, On the Beach never finds its true resolve.
Instead, just as they had on Tonight’s the Night, Neil and his comrades carried the burdens of losing their peers and heroes—Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix—in such a short period of time into the On the Beach sessions. And while they chose to cope through the music and soothe their grief in song, On the Beach is the desperate, grave-hugging aftermath that comes once the funeral prayer is repeated back to the preacher.
Though “Ambulance Blues” is one of the best songs about Toronto, Ontario ever penned, most of On the Beach is fortified in SoCal terror. Even when Neil is getting the cream about high-octane vampires slinging 20 barrels of oil, or bush-league ballplayers left to die on the diamond while computers sell tickets, the world’s silhouette looks a lot like Los Angeles. Serial killers and movie stars walk arm-in-arm, the subways and the cafes are all empty. The darkness endures even in the light. “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” becomes “All those people, they think they got it made, but I wouldn’t buy, sell, borrow or trade anything I have to be like one of them.” Rather than fall into whatever vicious and choking cycle of stardom Harvest constructed for Neil, his intentions are made clear on On the Beach: “I’d rather start all over again.”
Recently, I’ve taken that lyric to heart. This summer, I told a woman from Los Angeles that I loved her for the first time and we rendezvoused in a Midwestern town that isn’t my own. After spending the weekend together, I left her at the airport and she returned to California alone, without me. And I retreated to my recliner chair heaven to dream of the next day where I no longer miss her because I am next to her. Maybe now Shakey’s voice beckoning “Don’t you wish that you could be here, too?” will no longer suit me, because I will be standing before her and I’ll bring a smile to her eyes. Dusk will fall on the driveway outside our bedroom, and I will check on the star that flickers like a parting smile each night. But for now, the lithosphere yanks my heart due West; the ducks call out my name even though the mountains are doing just fine. “I dream of sweet caress from you,” Neil opined on “Bad Fog of Loneliness,” a Harvest outtake revisited and later abandoned during the On the Beach sessions. The fantasy of making a go of it alone that sets Harvest aglow doesn’t interest me much these days.
Ever since I bought the Hollywood sign for $2.6 million in Monopoly: Here & Now for the first time 18 years ago, I have felt magnetically pulled toward the Pacific Ocean—much like Neil is on the cover of On the Beach. Despite my best attempts to fall in love with the New Yorks and the Chicagos of the world, I am affectionately compromised by the weightless menace and neon flirtations of a town imbued with the migratory patterns of nameless angels. The ecology of Los Angeles, its green hills and valleys rubbing up against seedy alleyways and hazy, smoke-burdened restaurants, feels elemental to me. Upon my first visit there years ago, my dearest childhood friend walked me up and down the Sunset Strip on a grayed-out weekday afternoon. Tourists spilled out into the streets, pointing their phone cameras upward at that faraway nine-letter sign I already owned.
Predictably, my heart became a syrupy, hypnagogic little jukebox in West Hollywood. I hummed Wrecking Crew songs in my head and kept my gaze locked onto the ground, as I played hopscotch with the stars’ stars. It all felt odd and familiar and romantic, as if I’d somehow carried a mental telepathy with a place I’d never been to. “The fact is that you feel like singing,” Leonard Cohen once said, “and this is the song that you know.” I cross the ocean for a heart of gold; there is an indent in the earth in California where my body fits perfectly, in the crook of a neck belonging to someone whose name comes to me in dreams. And on On the Beach, the faces of Berry and Whitten come to Neil when he is deep inside himself. “The world is turnin’,” he tells all of us. “I hope it don’t turn away.” In loss there is hope, so long as you know love.
The players (or “colleagues,” as some places call them) on On the Beach don’t have a catchy name attached to them. Instead, looking at the personnel list is like flipping through Neil’s rolodex of networking contacts: David Crosby plays rhythm guitar on “Revolution Blues”; Graham Nash sits down at the Wurlitzer on “On the Beach”; Levon Helm hits the kit on “See the Sky About to Rain.” During the recording sessions, guitarist, fiddler and Cajun caliph Rusty Kershaw and his wife Julie made a goop of “sautéed marijuana and honey” called “honey slides” and ordered Neil and his crew to take copious amounts of them. According to Jimmy McDonough’s biography Shakey, taking honey slides felt like doing heroin. Side two of On the Beach sounds the way it does because of all that f*cked up goop—like a busker sliding further and further into the cushions of a decrepit couch after filling up on reggie dope.
When Neil took to the studio at Broken Arrow Ranch in November 1973, he, Ben Keith, Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina recorded “Walk On” and “For the Turnstiles” over the course of two weeks. The timeline is a bit muddy and confusing, as he and members of Crazy Horse, the Santa Monica Flyers and the Stray Gators were making Tonight’s the Night and On the Beach concurrently. Of course, there were some outliers—like “Lookout Joe,” which was recorded in late 1972, and “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown,” a live track snatched from Crazy Horse’s Fillmore East gig in March 1970—but everything on the two albums came together between August 1973 and April 1974. And, while Tonight’s the Night was finished first—galvanized by a legendary, freewheeling day of recording at Studio Instrument Rentals (where Bruce Berry worked with his brother Ken) on August 26th—it was On the Beach that was delivered to us first after the former was shelved for two years.
Kershaw didn’t want the band rehearsing prior to hitting play on the tape. All of the players sat close to each other during the sessions, hence that intimate, warm, communal feel. “Neil said to me later, ‘How in the hell do you know how to play this thing the first time I play it?’” Kershaw recalled. “I said, ‘Neil, you carry a heavy vibe, and if I’m sittin’ close to you, I can feel what you feel before you play. I know where you’re gonna go.’” Even when Neil’s banjo claws into “For the Turnstiles” and Keith drapes the track with some bar-band backing harmonies, it all sounds welcoming even in its most despondent measures. And on “Vampire Blues,” the album blisters through the splinters of Neil and George Whitsell’s dual guitars like white-hot bone ripping through skin. Though On the Beach begins with that sad boogie we’ve all quoted once or twice (“Some get stoned, some get strange, but sooner or later it all gets real”), it coils into a 40-minute eulogy just as quickly. Neil, who was only 28 when he wrote the album, is mad at, unsatisfied with and alienated by his place in the world. I’m the same age now that he was when Harvest went to #1 on the Billboard 200. What will be waiting for me—for us—two years from now?
My great aunt died of natural causes when she was nearing her mid-nineties. Her youngest daughter moved into the house soon after and tore up all the carpet, even the kitchen linoleum. Years ago, I walked through every room and felt sorely out of place. My cousin didn’t do her Donald Duck impression when I came through the door, instead meeting me with an embrace that was missing something. The basem*nt pool table had been sold and a new bed replaced the one my aunt died in. The chicken smell was gone and a humungous plasma-screen television sat where those cousins slyly stuffed strawberries and grapes into their pockets. And, on what would have been my aunt’s 107th birthday last March, family members took to Facebook to leave remembrance posts on their walls—old photographs with captions of vague sweet-nothings whispered from this side of the grave. But all I could think about was that mudroom that’s now just an entryway and how, if I don’t let myself see it in the tacky yellow hues of Neil Young’s suit and the slumped patio furniture on the On the Beach cover, I might forget it like everyone else has.
As On the Beach comes to a close, Neil sits at his microphone and breathes into his harmonica like he’s pressing fingers into a nagging bruise. In-between riffs on a kidnapping plot, Crosby, Stills and Nash going aimless, critics pumping stomachs, Nixon telling lies and waitresses near the Navajo Trail pining for their missing boyfriends, Neil laments the knockdown of his rooming house haunt at 88 Isabela Street in Toronto. He yearns for the old days at the Riverboat, when he was singing and picking in the Jades and the Squires, when “the air was magic when we played.” His nostalgia gets beaten into remorse, as the shades of Berry and Whitten come screaming back into focus. “An ambulance can only go so fast,” Neil sings. “It’s easy to get buried in the past when you try to make a good thing last.” Ain’t it funny, how the old days don’t feel special until you can no longer get back to them?
On the Beach is the product of a million tomorrows turning into zero. Rather than, as Nils Lofgren once told me, go to a shrink for five hours a day, Neil Young and his band turned toward their music as refuge. “Somehow, the music and the madness saved and healed us through the grief and the rage,” Nils said. That was Tonight’s the Night, when a bunch of hot-sh*t musicians saw their world get turned inside-out but still believed they could rewind. On the Beach is more cynical, if only because a truth reveals itself by the end of “Ambulance Blues”: You’ve got no choice but to keep going. A question Neil asks in “See the Sky About to Rain” then becomes a thesis statement for the entire record. “Some are bound to live with less,” he surmises. “Who can tell your story?”
And that’s what drives all of us, these urges to just tell a story—maybe that of our own, maybe someone else’s, maybe ours and theirs at the same time. We’re feeling things and we’re holding on to all of it, enraptured by and entangled in life’s big, existential mess—for better or for worse. It’s why we remember the sky just before it rains; why we remember the 10 million dune buggies chugging down the serpentine mountain. It’s why we live on the beach and dream of getting close to the gulls. It’s why, when someone you know dies, you don’t think about the headlines or the critics or the small talk directed at you. You are back in Toronto with your band and your rhythm guitarist hasn’t yet bit the dust. He is playing all the notes and he sounds better than ever. You are back in a house that isn’t your own, looking at a dead body you barely knew when it was still alive. You can still hear the cue ball cracking against the solids and stripes. You can hear the laughter but you can’t touch it. The space is as empty as you’ve let it become.
The strums of “Ambulance Blues” fade out while Kershaw’s fiddle cuts through the monitors like barbed wire. 39 minutes and 40 seconds—a capsule of memories preserved by a man who was terrified of forgetting the people who made sure he’d never be forgotten himself. You never think the people you love are going to drop dead when they do, and it’s as macabre as it is radical to turn palm trees into psalms—to sing about a fallen brother or write about a buried relative and then burn it all in the effigy of your own art.
Maybe doing that helps the absence make more sense to us immediately after. Maybe we spend the rest of our time here letting the vacancies heal us, slowly. Maybe you watched your mom break down outside a department store when she got the news. Maybe you needed one last look at the strangeness of somebody else’s ending just to confirm it was real to begin with. Maybe the pen and the paper and the guitar and the microphone start to feel foreign when you wait too long to grieve. Maybe grieving is our doorway to starting over again. Maybe there are places for us to go once here becomes unfamiliar. Maybe there is a lover waiting on us near the ocean, aching for our return. I’d like to believe the ditch won’t be dug out forever. This is all just life on life’s terms. There is still time.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
