“Revolution Blues” was quite a stance for a wealthy rock star to take. Proving once again that Young was miles away from his California brethren, he adopted a demented Manson persona in the song, ranting in the most famous couplet, “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.” David Crosby—who played rhythm guitar on the track—was rendered apoplectic, and on the next CSNY tour he begged off performing the song.
Although Rusty might’ve had some idea where the music was headed during On the Beach, the engineer certainly didn’t. Al Schmidt, a legendary boardman whose credits run from Jefferson Airplane to jazz singer Jimmy Scott, found the sessions a little too far-out. The recording room was darker than a bat exhibit at the zoo. Schmidt had to send somebody in to communicate with the musicians, who were usually smashed out of their minds. Rusty kept pushing the mike out of the way, rendering many recordings unusable. “He didn’t do this once, he did it all the time,” said Schmidt, who watched helplessly as the sessions grew more and more out of control. “I’d be sittin’ there, I couldn’t see, and I’d be goin’, ‘What the fuck is goin’ on?’”
The final straw for Schmidt came when he hurriedly assembled some rough mixes of the material for Young to play for guests. Young fell in love with the weird mixes, which Schmidt felt would end his career if heard by the public. “I begged Neil to allow me to remix it. I was gonna pay for it myself.” Schmidt couldn’t take any more. He departed before the sessions were over, and the murky roughs wound up on the record.
Schmidt was replaced by Mark Harmon, an engineer seasoned by the insanity of working with artists like the Band and Bobby Charles. He fell right in with Young’s band of crazies and, before he knew it, was tromping off with the musicians to the office of a local Dr. Feelgood, where everybody bent over to receive vitamin B12 shots allegedly designed to offset the effects of their wild ways. But, as Harmon remembers, “Between that and the honey slides, the honey slides won out.”
Yeah, that’s right—everybody was goin’ and gettin’ these shots, and they really gave you a rush. I don’t know what the fuck the shot was. You felt great. Everything was fine. But when you’d go outside it was, like, the brightest thing you’d ever seen. This guy was givin’ shots like the popcorn man, know what I mean? It could have been anything.
—Was On the Beach fun?
I don’t know if “fun” is the right word. It’s a pretty dark record. Not as dark as Tonight’s the Night, but it had an ambience to it.
“Vampire Blues”—you hear Drummond doin’ his credit card? Ch-chh-ch-chhh—it’s a credit card on his beard.
Sunset Marquis with Ben, Rusty. Pretty innaresting stuff. Rusty was there at the hotel cookin’ honey slides, burnin’ holes in the rug. Goin’ in the studio every day, playin’ a little bit. Must’ve recorded for a week or so. It was very mellow, very down—not depressing. Honey slides.
Good album. One side of it particularly—the side with “Ambulance Blues,” “Motion Pictures” and “On the Beach.” “Ambulance Blues”—it’s outthere. It’s a great take. I always feel bad I stole that melody from Bert Jansch. Fuck. You ever heard that song “The Needle of Death”? I loved that melody. I didn’t realize “Ambulance Blues” starts exactly the same. I knew that it sounded like something that he did, but when I went back and heard that record again I realized that I copped his thing … I felt really bad about that. Because here is a guy who … I’ll never play guitar as good as this guy. Never. He’s like Jimi Hendrix or something on the acoustic guitar.
Ever heard “Big Rock Candy Mountain” by Johnny Burnette? Ever hear a Bob Dylan song that has the same melody? One of those numbered dreams. Those things happen. My biggest remembrance of “Ambulance Blues”—heh heh—I was sittin’ in the kitchen with Carrie and this friend of hers. I never tried coke before, and she was turning me on to that about that time … I’m glad she didn’t turn me on to heroin.
So we were sittin’ around gettin’ high, smoked a joint, I said, “You guys wanna hear a song?” I played that song for ’em, all the way to the end. Then I looked at them. They didn’t understand it. It wasn’t their trip, anyway. AHAHAHAHAHA. So I said, “Try this one,” and I did “The Old Homestead.” I played that for ’em.
—Better response?
Nope.
The On the Beach cover—I was havin’ a good time. I did the whole thing, down to the newspaper. The whole deal.
That’s what I love about Warner Brothers—they hire an artist and they let their artists be artful. That’s the deal. Good company.
It’s a gray day at the ocean. Hideous patio furniture sits on the beach, a can of Coors and a Dixie cup on the table. In the sand, a fender off a ’59 Cadillac and the day’s paper, SENATOR BUCKLEY CALLS FOR NIXON TO RESIGN. Off to the side stands the Tonight’s the Night palm tree, looking battered and forlorn. Young stands at water’s edge in a yellow and white polyester ensemble, his back to us, staring off into the distance. The On the Beach cover is some kind of deranged masterpiece: Young waving goodbye to the sixties, watching them sink out on the horizon like the Titanic, the one lucky survivor left standing on the shore.
“It just happened,” said Gary Burden, who considers the cover the best thing he’s ever done. “Everything fit, from buying the newspaper. That’s the thing—when you’re with Neil, magic things happen.”
“The world is turnin’, I hope it don’t turn away,” sighs Young in the opening line of the title cut of On the Beach, and the rest of the record isn’t much happier. The collection of songs is an unusually strong one. As critic Kit Rachlis wrote of Young’s songwriting, “Sentences are strewn around like forgotten laundry, images are piled up like last week’s dishes. Lyrics end like the half-opened magazine on the bathroom floor.” Sometimes Young’s offhand approach leads to trouble, but the imagery in songs like “For the Turnstiles” and “Ambulance Blues” is sublime. “Turnstiles” in particular is diamond-sharp, worthy of Dylan. Doom and gloom are everywhere on the album, the singer sounding gutted and absolutely alone. Outside of a weak remake of “See the Sky About to Rain,” the performances are riveting.
“Probably one of the most depressing records I’ve ever made” is how Young described it to Cameron Crowe, and yet there is something subtly uplifting about On the Beach. Young might sound like he’s having trouble keeping his head above the water, but he can see beyond the whirlpool, even if the storm isn’t over yet.
On March 8, 1974, Young was back at the ranch, recording with Rusty Kershaw, playing the mournful opening notes to “Greensleeves” while bullshitting about the song. “I sang it at Chuck’s Steakhouse in Maui. You shoulda heard me, man. You woulda been proud.” “Far out, man,” Rusty says, “like, y’know, we’re past playin’ notes—it’s either emotions or not. Hank didn’t play any notes …” Then Young lunges into the song, obliterating Rusty’s mumbling. “Alas, my love, I do you wrong, by treating you so discourteously,” he sings in a voice sadder than a thrift-store painting. “Greensleeves was my heart of gold,” he moans, bleating out the word “Greensleeves” with an intensity that makes you wince. This magnificent performance, as yet unreleased, is equal to anything from On the Beach. Young didn’t conjure up the feeling out of thin air. He had just gone through hell to get it.
The relationship between Neil and Carrie was disintegrating. “It was gettin’ funny, just before it got weird,” said Snodgress of the On the Beach period. “Neil was never home. I was lonely, and Zeke didn’t have any companionship. Months and months of bein’ alone in that house.” And when Young was at the ranch, things didn’t feel right. Snodgress recalls Young had a “Jekyll-and-Hyde thing in the nights—we’d start out laughin’, smokin’, and all of a sudden … quiet. Restless. Anxious. If he didn’t eat before dark, he couldn’t eat.” She said Young was “impenetrable at times. I’d talk, ask him questions, and he would not hear. The music changed—what he played in the daytime and how he played at nigh
t. Night music was always very dark, very deep.” Snodgress remembers standing on the porch, hearing the haunted sounds of On the Beach wafting from the faraway studio. “It was a very sad time,” she said. Things completely fell apart when she took a trip to Hawaii.
Word got to Young that Carrie was out on a boat with a character we’ll call Captain Crunch. Snodgress claimed ignorance. “We were at sea, like, five days—there’s no phones, nothin’. And meanwhile, he’s tellin’ me all this stuff about how great I am and how he’s had all these fantasies ever since me and him met, and I’m going, ‘Fine, fine, with your fantasies, just get me on the goddamn shore.’”
Snodgress insisted the love affair was one-sided and said that Young “chose not to believe me. It’s been in the history books, y’know? That men can do what they want, but the wife has one indiscretion … but the sick thing about this was there was no indiscretion. So I kept paying this price again and again for something I would never dream of doing.” And yet Captain Crunch would keep reappearing in her life.
“Neil was so anxious and disturbed about this whole bullshit. Neil’d throw all these letters at me. I’d say, ‘I didn’t ask the guy to write.’ And I’d tear them up right in front of his face … two or three days later, he’d send a big envelope with photographs of me on the boat, and when you’re out at sea, bein’ naked is no big deal—I mean, Zeke’ll tell ya I walk around naked all the time.”
Snodgress felt there was a simple, easy solution, but Neil just wasn’t up for it. “He’s not the man who can open up wide enough to really say, ‘This motherfucker is killing us. I’m gonna put out a contract on his life.’”
Oh, I was so drunk. I flew over to Hawaii to see Carrie and she wasn’t there. I waited for a long time … and then somebody told me she was out on a boat trip with this guy…. So I kinda had a major … bummer … which resulted in drinking a lotta tequila—which actually solved a lotta the problems, heh heh. And then I went out and played my guitar in God knows where, for God knows who.
I was disillusioned. Because we had a family. And even though I’d been fuckin’ around, when I found out she’d been fuckin’ around, it kinda blew my mind—so—at that young age …
’Course, Crosby’s tellin’ me, he said, “There’s plenty of girls out there that would just love to be with you. They would treat you right. Y’know, there’s a lotta girls I know.” Crosby. My guiding light.
He really was, at that point. He talked to me a lot. A good friend.
—Have you experienced betrayal?
Betrayal. I thought I did. But it turned out I was just as bad as the other person, so it wasn’t really betrayal—I discovered what happens when you do something to yourself. When you do it to someone else, you do it to yourself. It’s not like being betrayed. You look back and go, “Well, fuck—that person didn’t do anything I didn’t do to them.” At first it seemed like it, because you ignored the fact that you’ve done this yourself. It was terrible—that’s what betrayal’s all about—but it didn’t hurt nearly as bad after a while, because I realized it was kind of, like, real—it was like what I did.
—So were you dishonest with yourself?
Not once I realized what was goin’ on … Well, at the time I think I denied—denied to myself what I had done and only thought of what she’d done.
Someone else betrays you, you feel it a lot more if you’ve betrayed them. It brings out all of the shit you thought you could hide.
Where it all comes out in your face.
When Young returned from Hawaii, he spilled his guts to Sandy Mazzeo, who recalls telling him, “Sometimes you just have to pardon your heart.” Young did a double take, asking his friend to repeat what he’d said. The phrase would inspire a classic ballad released the following year on Zuma.
The sick situation between Young and Snodgress would spur one of the great periods in Young’s art, beginning in May 1974 and lasting through January 1975. The songs poured out of him like blood from a wound. “Homefires,” “Bad News,” “Love Is a Rose” (a top-ten hit for Linda Ronstadt in 1975), “Barefoot Floors,” “Love/Art Blues,” “Through My Sails,” “Old Homestead,” “Hawaii.” A little later came “Star of Bethlehem,” “Separate Ways,” “Kansas.” (“Motion Pictures,” Young said, was written “before I knew—when I could sense.”)
For confessional songs, Young’s pen was never sharper, although most of the music remains unheard. He laments his self-obsession, as in “Love/Art Blues,” and in “Barefoot Floors”—surely one of the most exquisite ballads Young’s ever written—he’s resigned to his calling, despite the lure of love.
The episode in Hawaii would haunt Young. “L.A. Girls and Ocean Boys” was the most naked account of what happened—perhaps too naked, because Young would later submerge parts of the lyric in another song on Zuma, a nightmare called “Danger Bird”: ” ’Cause you’ve been with another man / There you are and here I am.” The anguished first line was buried in a violent blast from Old Black, but listen hard, it’s there. The relationship with Snodgress had taken its toll. “He was shattered,” said Mazzeo. “Shattered.”
Back at the ranch, Young had continued recording with Rusty Kershaw, but the sessions quickly screeched to a halt. Snodgress was coming back to work things out, and Young wanted the ranch cleared. “Hell, there was no way to get off the motherfucker,” said Kershaw. “Nobody would use any of Neil’s cars, and I said, ‘Well, fuck him. Git one o’ them motherfucking cars and take me to town now or I’m gonna burn this motherfucking barn down—and the cars with it.’” Kershaw was off-center enough that the threat was taken seriously.
“I got instructions to remove Rusty—get him off the ranch fast,” recalls Johnny Talbot, who loaded the Cajun into a Pinto Pony. “We had to squish him into the backseat. He’s a big dude, and with his instruments and wife, the whole car was packed like sardines. We got about five hundred yards and he said, ‘Stop this piece of shit. I ain’t goin’ to the airport in this. I’ll burn this place down.’ It wasn’t funny at the time. He’s a scary guy.”
Kershaw had been around only a couple of months, but he had left his mark on Young, although they wouldn’t make music together again for nearly twenty years. Young would keep the sad, strange On the Beach vibe going with the unlikeliest bunch of all: Crosby, Stills and Nash.
On May 16, 1974, Ken Viola attended a Ry Cooder/Leon Redbone gig at the Bottom Line in New York City. After the first set, the audience was asked to exit the club through the front door, which Bottom Line regular Viola thought was odd since they usually herded people out through the rear. “I said, ‘The hell with this, I’m goin’ out the back,’” recalls Viola, who waited for a security guard to turn his head, then slipped out, only to encounter the shock of his life.
“I popped the door open, and there’s Neil Young standin’ there with his guitar in hand,” said the dumbfounded fan, who asked him if he was going to play. Young said yes, and Viola went back in for Cooder’s second set, after which an announcement came over the PA inviting people to stay for a special guest. Young walked on for the only solo acoustic performance (aside from two benefit appearances playing alone and with the Eagles on March 16 in California) of the as yet unreleased On the Beach material. Outside of “Helpless,” Young would perform material unknown to the audience: four songs from On the Beach, plus five others, among them “Greensleeves.” Surprise attacks are what Young fans live for, and the show was widely bootlegged.
It was an electrifying set, with Young tearing through new songs while rapping about honey slides. He opened the performance by dropping a bomb: “Pushed It Over the End,” perhaps the most disturbing number of the new material.
In this lonely, lonely song, tellingly introduced at the Bottom Line as “Citizen Kane Junior Blues,” Young tells of “Good lookin’ Millie,” sort of a pistolpackin’ cross between Carrie Snodgress and Patty Hearst. Millie is contrasted with a victimized male in the chorus: “Although no one hears a sound / There’s another poor m
an fallin’ down.” As the guitar chords descend, Young repeats “fallin’ down” five times, sounding more lost on each echo. Then Young switches perspectives to accuse himself, wailing the title. After a jaunty guitar break, the song stops dead, entering into hallucinatory, slow-motion, first-person verses that are the most evocative and disturbing parts of the work: “On this noisy shore, standing at the edge of you / Could those dreams of yours be true?” When I ask fans how this particular number makes them feel, most mutter the same word: uncomfortable. Young was a haunted man.
With On the Beach completed, Neil Young did exactly what he swore he’d never do again—a huge arena tour, this time with CSNY. Why? Elliot Roberts, no doubt. After enduring a succession of wacko records that threatened to flush Neil’s career down the toilet, Roberts had to be concerned, and he was the only one capable of nudging the superstar foursome into action.
Backing musicians were assembled: Russ Kunkel on drums, Joe Lala on percussion. Stills wanted Kenny Passarelli on bass, but Young held out for Tim Drummond, * who pulled a typical stunt when it came to the money. He was playing pool with Stills and Kunkel on the ranch the night before a tour business meeting when Stills advised him to ask for much more than the $30,000 or $40,000 management was going to offer. Armed with this privileged information, Drummond waltzed into the meeting and demanded $100,000—tax-free.
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