DALÍ! BALLARD! NIXON!
Exploring On The Beach’s cover art
MUCH of On The Beach’s mystique – alongside its muddy mix, air of despair and the fact it languished out of print for years – is established on its cover. Elliptical, enigmatic and deeply unsettling, it is a visual treasure map to the lyrical and musical themes within.
Santa Monica Beach, spring 1974, and no average day at the seaside for photographer Bob Seidemann. As celebrated sleeve designer Gary Burden told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 2015: “We had a wonderful day gathering and assembling all the things in the image. This was about America in the ’70s, when everything was cheaper than it looks.”
Burden, who died in 2018, worked with Young for decades –Neil was best man at his wedding. He designed for The Doors, the Eagles,
Joni and more, but was never in doubt which project meant the most. In an interview with fansite
Human Highway, Burden recalled: “[It’s] my favourite album cover that I have made, ever. This cover is loaded with information!
From the styles of clothing and objects, to the Coors can, to the headline of the newspaper of the day of the photoshoot.”
That’s an invitation to read meaning everywhere. The album title references that ever-present on boomer bookshelves, Nevil
Shute’s 1957 post-apocalyptic novel of the same name, whose cover image from the first edition of the book features its protagonists, in suits, stranded on the sand.
But Burden and Young went further, visually referencing another champion of catastrophe fiction, JG Ballard. His ’60s novels, with new graphic art from David Pelham, were republished in paperback in ’74. Look at the cover from The Drought, with its inverted car entombed in the earth. Pelham’s graphic work, of course, bears the stamp of Salvador Dalí’s “The Persistence Of Memory”: an artwork of twin themes – consumerism and doomy apocalypse – and set on a beach.
“Everything is cheaper than it looks…” Examine closely Neil’s yellow suit jacket, looking like it’s never been near the hanger that drapes from the beach umbrella. That floral print, tacky even for the dayglo ’70s, was reproduced on the inner sleeve of the first American pressings of the album. The rickety deckchairs are vacated, a hippie Mary Celeste. All these bright colours are making some very dark points on the gaudy emptiness of consumerism.
That newspaper, discarded on the sand, could be the most pointed reference of all, and reflects the multiple ’74 references on the album itself. “Sen Buckley Calls For Nixon To Resign” shouts the headline. A Republican senator, Buckley had backed Nixon in the ’72 election but now he was the first major conservative figure to turn against the president, a catalyst for Nixon’s downfall. As Young sang on “Ambulance Blues”, “I never knew a man could tell so many lies…”
You can keep looking, obsessively, graspingly. What does that buried tailfin mean? Maybe Rockets guitarist George Whitsell can shed some light on that… “When I moved to LA, I had that Cadillac depicted sticking out the sand. The exact same colour. There’s a photo of the Rockets where you can see the tail end of the car. I wonder if that had something to do with it – it might be a total coincidence but it might not be.”
Finally, look at the title’s lettering. Designed by celebrated Comix artist Rick Griffin, the man behind Grateful Dead iconography and the mind-frying cover of Aoxomoxoa, it’s a mystical momento mori. It’s hard to read against that blue sky. Coupled with the contrarian omission of Young’s name, this album would hardly have screamed ‘BUY ME’ in the racks. A difficult cover for a difficult record. That, you’d imagine, was very much the point.