SONIC ODYSSEY
Stellar fans of On The Beach discuss their favourite tracks, with contributions from Margo Price, Kurt Vile, Ethan Miller, J Mascis and more
SIDE 1 1 “WALK ON”
Album opener gives no hint of what’s to come. A jaunty, funky affair, with some satisfyingly supple rhythm playing from Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina…
MATT VALENTINE, MV&EE/WET TUNA: “I grew up listening to On The Beach, it was bigger than M*A*S*H in my house. One summer when I was workin’ and on ladders all the time, there was a New York station that would play album sides. They jammed Rust Never Sleeps often when it came out and I immediately bought the ‘Out Of The Blue’ 45. My parents said, ‘Y’know, that’s the same artist as On The Beach.’ I took On The Beach to my room and listened on headphones all night long. I bet it all on that record.
“‘Walk On’ is not what most folks think of when they rap about the On The Beach experience. For me, it is a sweet choice to open side A. I think of it as spectrasound. Open your mind, expand the range. It resides on an altered plane – almost 4th dimensional – especially in comparison to the rest of the record, but it gives it an arc.
“The syncopated riff goes so deep, such a unique energy swagger, it’s definitely one of his more ‘involved’ arrangements. The Horse give ‘Walk On’ another phase within these stages.
“My family took long day trips to Jones Beach. Leave at dawn, pack a picnic… come home way after dusk. Neil came a lot. The beach got packed on nice days, but desolate – ultra tumbleweeds – when the sun set. That’s the On The Beach vibe. It’s a sonic odyssey, a bit stony and a big bite of mood. It’s what I think of when I think of ‘Neil’.”
2 “SEE THE SKY ABOUT TO RAIN”
Written for Harvest and retaining a country vibe with Ben Keith’s steel guitar, three years on the mood is markedly more fragile and frayed
MEG BAIRD: “The whole album has the ability to go into really dark places in a beautiful way that’s not trying to be dark. The anchoring song is ‘On The Beach’, with that composite chord right before the chorus that is just massive and gnarled and yet also really beautiful, and offers a sense of relief. That’s the sound-picture and then the whole album orbits around it – the legends behind it, and all the painful experiences. ‘See The Sky About To Rain’’s lyrics are about loneliness and look out on the big, charged landscapes that Neil captures so well. Combining Harvest’s mindset with On The Beach’s production creates this tension and duality between two really compelling layers. The head and heart are in different places, between On The Beach’s LA and the ranch. Neil playing the Wurlitzer masks the original’s redwood parlour at the end of the universe, where you feel the struggle of why there’s even a piano out there in the first place. That’s still there in the Live At The Cellar Door version, where it’s just piano and voice in a small room, and it’s implicit here. You can hear the Victorian parlour grand in the Wurlitzer! Levon Helm’s drumming somehow makes it more sad, the bluesiness of it comes through in a different way, like they’re trying to play through it rather than emote carefully in a vulnerable, domestic environment. They’re facing it, as the only way out!”
3 “REVOLUTION BLUES”
Where everything turns rancorous and feral, with Young bringing down apocalyptic vengeance on the residents of Laurel Canyon…
ETHAN MILLER, HOWLIN RAIN: “On ‘Revolution Blues’, Neil takes a mask from the gallery wall and puts it on: Manson. Eerily, an incredibly comfortable fit and a highly convincing one that he plays completely straight with seething delivery. The irony runs thick in the lyrics, but the delivery is strictly venom, served up cold and brutal.
“Though the groove is pure classic Crazy Horse choogle, Levon Helm and Rick Danko bring a rough-chiselled jailhouse funk that is at once cartoonish in moments yet somehow doubles the menace of the words and truly visualises the enthusiastic creep of the Family teenagers out in the rose bushes, peeping in your living-room window, full of profane schemes. Abstract images and insinuations flash through the song like a strobe: the burning desire for fame, the grotesque attention it creates once acquired, the dream of true human connection and the pain and spite of not being able to achieve it, the rich stars in their limos and the apocalypse riders with carbines. Here Neil takes the ‘I need a crowd of people/but I can’t take them day to day’ sentiment to a psychotic conclusion.
“In an album full of resonant, reflective disappointments, big come-downs and general dopamine deficiency, ‘Revolution Blues’ is the ditch where the Ditch Trilogy finally crashes into the mud at its most extreme point, as if to say: all these dreams, all this flower power, all this music, all this revolution still leads here, to the basic human instinct of rage, spite and murder. There is no human evolution.”
4 “FOR THE TURNSTILES”
Country-folk hybrid featuring Young’s banjo guitar and a harmony vocal from Ben Keith...
ALAN SPARHAWK, LOW: “Neil’s worn-out patchedjeans sound reaches peak condensation on this elusive, seemingly thrown-together track featuring Neil on banjo and vocals with album secretweapon Ben Keith on dobro and backing vocal. It’s a song that could have been a stomping full-band track but despite the minimal traditional bluegrass instrumentation, it still lands like a scorched and screaming amplifier.
“The magic of Neil’s recordings often lie in the subtle precision that anchors every performance, despite the overall loose and reaching, fuzzy vibe and delivery. This recording sounds like a shaky impromptu front-porch singalong but the rhythm is relentless and the straining voice hits it every time. Every. Time. Why is he singing this high? It’s clearly at the outer reaches of his range. He’s doing this all over the album (see ‘On The Beach’). Most of these songs are using the most basic guitar chords: A minor, E minor, C, G and D – I wonder sometimes if he knew how empowering it would be for generations of beginner guitar players to lock into these songs so easily. He could’ve changed the key to make it easier to sing, but there’s something deeply moving about a voice that reaches beyond itself and miraculously obtains the height it has set out to attain. ‘Almost’ is admirable, but nailing it, in the face of certain failure is transcendence. So much is made of the ‘imperfect’ and ‘human’ features of some of the
world’s most beloved music, and Neil is referenced as an example quite often, but I defy you to find anything he did that didn’t reach the heights it promised, or that doesn’t move forward with the intention of a storm. It sounds loose, but it’s aggressive and nearly inhumanly precise. Metal burning, pounding and locking, alliterating a pointless past, present and future. It’s undeniably soulful – colossal imagery, decimated and silenced with the stroke of ‘it doesn’t matter’. It doesn’t.”
5 “VAMPIRE BLUES”
Side One closes with this wry eco-blues, sultry with scratchy slide-guitar, that hints at darker problems: “I’m a black bat, baby, banging on your windowpane…”
MARGO PRICE: “I love the environmental message of ‘Vampire Blues’. Neil’s able to speak about these oil conglomerates destroying the planet in so few words, giving them this label of being a vampire taking everything. It’s a blues song, and you can just feel the gravity and devastation. ‘Good times are coming – but they sure are coming slow!’ OK, there’s the bullethole – that’s the gut-punch right there! Neil leaves space between instruments to have that gravity, and they’re playing in greasy cut-time, on the backbeat of the pocket, barely hanging on by a thread. There is this little percussion beat – ‘I’m a vampire, baby – tch-tch…’ – where they mic’d a credit card running along a man’s unshaven face! Singing that line in the first person, Neil’s also taking his responsibility for the damage that we all are doing to the Earth, because he drives cars. He’s talking about oilmen, but he’s also talking about himself – crawling out of some pretty dark times, and maybe the hours he was keeping during those sessions, where they would wait until the sun went down, get out the tequila, roll the honey slides and go ’til morning. So Neil was a vampire!”
SIDE 2 1 “ON THE BEACH”
Side 2 opens with the first of three songs that candidly capture Young’s fractious, disillusioned state of mind. “All my pictures are falling from the wall where I placed them yesterday…” KURT VILE: “You get really lost in ‘On The Beach’, his hypnotic electric guitar. After he says, ‘I went to the radio interview/but I ended up alone
at the microphone’ – all these desolate, great lines – he plays this guitar solo, and he bends one string up really high. Then he plays that same note on the second string, and I always say that one note literally changed my life.
“I was back in my mid-twenties and it was just to know that I could be doing this with my life. Specifically, the fact that he’s got you stuck in his groove, ’cos you’re vibing to what he’s making in real-time. It’s composed in a way where it gives you a release in that moment where he climbs up the scale, then it’s a perfect last note of the solo.
“That album was always coveted by in-theknow musicians or record heads or journalists, so it’s cool that it’s spread out even more. Most
“In ‘Revolution Blues’, the delivery is strictly venom, served cold…”
ETHAN MILLER
“Neil’s flown very close to the sun, closer than I’ll ever be able to’”
KURT VILE
people you ask, it’s their favourite Neil record. I got to know Gary Burden a little bit – he did my B’lieve I’m Goin Down album cover. So it subliminally and not-so-subliminally influenced me. In my song ‘Bassackwards’ I say, ‘I was on the beach, but I was thinking about the bay’. There’s the title right there, and later on I’m like, ‘I was on the radio talking with a friend of mine’. I didn’t say I’m taking this from [‘On The Beach’], but months later, I realised maybe that’s where I got it from.
“‘The world is turnin’/i hope it don’t turn away’ – it’s devastating and beautiful. Neil’s flown very close to the sun, closer than I’ll ever be able to, so you can imagine that his comedown is a farther drop, when he hits a low. It was a tough time for him, so maybe he fell a little harder. But we all fall, we all drop hard at times. We’re all human beings. And also: ‘Now I’m livin’ out here on the beach’. You can only imagine it’s paradise, ‘But those seagulls are still out of reach’, you know? ‘Get out of town/think I’ll get out of town…’ Fucking restless, restless.”
2 “MOTION PICTURES”
Rusty Kershaw dubbed this “a below sea-level downer”. Young sounds fragile, like he’d crack right open if you touched him, while Kershaw and Ben Keith’s hushed playing sustains the frazzled yet mellow mood….
J MASCIS: “Side 2’s the record to me. The music sounds so good, something about it’s hopeful. It’s like everything is terrible, but here we are, so what else are you gonna do? Like Neil sings on ‘Motion Pictures’: ‘I’d rather start all over again/i wouldn’t buy, sell or trade anything I have to be like one of them’. That’s pretty punk! ‘Motion Pictures’ is what the record needs after the intensity of ‘On The Beach’: it isn’t so heavy, it’s just pleasantly sad. It’s like this band I saw the other night who just kept relentlessly making noise and I needed some relief. That’s how ‘Motion Pictures’ works on On The Beach. It’s still pounding you down into depression, but just ’cos it’s less down, it feels like up! It feels hungover, Neil’s voice sounds tired, and the band are too burnt-out to be so depressed. I hear mostly the cool slide-guitar, you can definitely tell it’s not Neil playing, then his harmonica blows through, you think it’s going to be over, and then Neil starts the song up again! Then we’re into ‘Ambulance Blues’, and it’s coming back down a little more…”
3 “AMBULANCE BLUES”
The album’s final song is a fragmented, time-travelling epic. It ends with the creaking of a microphone stand as Young pushes it away…
PATTERSON HOOD, DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS: “There was always a lot of Neil Young playing around the house when I was a kid. I remember loving Harvest and After The Gold Rush, but I was really confused about On The Beach. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to listen to it. I enjoyed a lot of grown-up stuff when I was nine, but I wasn’t grown up enough to understand that album. Years later I went back and fell in love with it, especially side two. But there’s nothing about side two that’s going to appeal to a nine-year-old kid…
“Now I count ‘Ambulance Blues’ as my second favourite Neil Young, just behind ‘Cortez The Killer’. They’re both different sides of the same coin. To me they’re telling the same story, just in different ways. They’re both about Nixon to some extent – Cortez is Nixon – and ‘Ambulance Blues’ is about him living among the ruins of this crumbling American system. The performance is intense, especially Rusty Kershaw’s fiddle. You can tell it’s live in the studio. It’s also very personal. It’s Neil emptying out his brain into the mic. I love that verse where he talking about that club that they tore down, where he used to play shows in the old folky days. It veers off from there.
“It’s one of Neil’s longer rambles, but I love his rambles. I love that kind of writing. It always makes me think of Dylan’s ‘Highlands’, which is another long ramble. I don’t know if there’s any connection between them, but Dylan does mention Neil Young in that song.”