1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 313. Neil Young – On The Beach (1974)

 

I don’t think there’s anybody I’d associate less with being on the beach than Neil Young. Perhaps Johnny Cash. But then, this isn’t really an “on the beach” kind of album. Musically it falls somewhere on the Neil Young Acoustic <---> Grunge spectrum between Harvest and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, as close to folk rock as Young tends to get. 
And as seems to be common on albums from the CSNY stable, Dave Crosby and Graham Nash crop up, as well the expected handful of members of a big Seventies band, in this case Rick Danko and Levon Helm of The Band. 

For me the best tracks were the three with a “blues” title – Revolution Blues, Vampire Blues, and Ambulance Blues, of which Vampire Blues is the only one remotely bluesy.  
Revolution Blues is the one featuring The Band members, Helm and Danko keep a tense, forward-driving rhythm to a tense track about Charles Manson (whom Young met). Perhaps because of the presence of The Band, but also in the nature of the lyrics, this one felt very Dylanesque to me. 

Vampire Blues, in lyrical quality, sums up a lot of the early-Seventies disillusion, as well as Young’s personal discomfort with the success of Harvest; “Good times are comin’, but they sure are comin’ slow”. It has a very distinctive solo at the end, sounds like hammering on the strings rather than picking. 

The last “blues”, Ambulance Blues, is a lengthy mellow meandering musing on the state of the world, and typifies the sound of Side Two of the album helped along by a concoction of honey and sauteed marijuana that the band dubbed “honey slides” - I presume you'd eat it like a concentrated hash brownie. It’s all quite spacy and psychedelic, but not in an especially weird way. If you wanted the musical equivalent of drifting off into another state of consciousness, however, this is pretty close. 

It’s all quite enjoyably depressing.