Neil Young - On The Beach

Start with this: I am a complete sucker for Neil Young’s guitar work. Depending on what iteration of him you’re listening to, his guitar style migrates from folk- and country-tinged songs to stretched-out electric guitar workouts to distortion-laden noise-making. I eat up pretty much all of it, but I’m especially partial to his electric stuff, in particular the early-to-mid 70s Crazy Horse guitar jams. The best of them morph a melody, building a sense of momentum while pounding that melody into the ground in an absolutely relentless fashion. There’s a groove to the guitar work, and it’s often melodic. But it’s also rough; guitars bleat and wail, with piercing high notes held to glorious effect. For me, the combination can be euphoric, and Neil Young is one a few musicians that can hit that sweet spot.

In that sense, On the Beach is a somewhat strange album for me to choose.* Crazy Horse is nowhere to be seen, and there are no long electric guitar jams. The album followed the death of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten, who died of a heroin overdose the night Young kicked him out of the band (for the second time) because he couldn’t stay sober enough to perform. Young felt guilt over his death, and after recording Tonight’s the Night – a drunken, sloppy album that his record company initially rejected – he returned with On the Beach.

What it does do better than any other Neil Young album, for me, is blend all of the various stylistic touch-points that he pulls into his music. Over Neil’s catalog, he’ll grab a sound – country or dissonant rock or folk or blues or electronic music or Americana –and construct an album that bores into that sound. On the Beach is ostensibly a blues album, but more than any other release of his, it takes all of those genres and blends them, like how an egg white treats flavors in a cocktail, creating complexity by mixing the flavors while subduing the sharpness. Production is sparse, there’s more space in the music, the guitarwork is interesting but without most of the sharpness. The mellow delivery lets the music bloom.**

There are nice elements on the front half of the record. "Walk On" and "See the Sky About to Rain" could fit on a number of earlier Neil Young albums, and I really dig the subtle guitar work that closes out "Vampire Blues." But it’s the back half that makes the album for me. The guitar work in “On the Beach” sounds emotive in the best sort of bluesy way, and the quiet acoustic guitar work on the last two tracks is some of my favorite work he’s done. “Ambulance Blues” has been called Young’s “Desolation Row” and the meandering delivery and stellar guitar make the comparison understandable.  But Neil doesn’t have the lyrical chops of Dylan, and while his singing is emotive in a similar fashion to Dylan, his sneer is of different type.*** 

* Titus and Neil are not the tightest of pairings, but it works. Neil Young is a hippy, but he’s got enough ornery punk fuck-it-all attitude to fit the bill. Titus Andronicus stretch the shit out of their punk anthems. Whiskey goes well with both. And there’s this.

** Correlation is not causation, but this mellowness may be a byproduct of the creative process used while recording the album, which involved consumption of “a homemade concoction dubbed ‘Honey Slides’, a goop of sauteed marijuana and honey that ‘felt like heroin’.”

*** I haven’t mentioned the album’s lyrics? Telling. Typical Neil Young lyrics: a smattering of lines that cause a smile, either for good reasons and bad; enough imagery to work even when the snippets never get stitched together. There’s nothing quotable enough to fit in this song, but you do get this bit of wisdom: “Though my problems are meaningless / That don’t make them go away.”

-a.s.