Neil Young/ On the Beach

Day 2. Fast forward, eighth grade. The kid ended up ok. Great grades. Honors English. Nickname:Shorty. Shortest kid in class. Obviously. Mr. Friendliness in yearbook. Fortnightly, learned to ask girls to dance. Asked a girl out. Got dumped for my best friend week before dance. Christmas present Paul McCartney Ram and Neil Young After the Goldrush lps. Fell in love with the music of Neil Young.

On any given day I will give you a different answer when it comes to the best Neil Young record.
I learned to play guitar from the chord charts in the Zuma songbook. Zuma is Crazy Horse/Neil at its best. Tonight's the Night is a tour of Neil's soul. Everybody Knows This is Nowhere has the solos. On some days, I will argue for Hawks and Doves as my favorite. No, Time Fades Away! But today I unequivocally declare On the Beach the best Neil Young record. No doubts.

I wanted to be a hippie. Thing is, junior high kids are too young to be hippies. I loved the way they danced, I loved the Beatles with beards, my baby sitter was a hippie girl. Peace. Love. Understanding. Not war. Neil Young drove down from Canada to live the hippie dream, and he found it. Reveled in it. Gave it fringe. By the time I was old enough, the dream was dead. The early seventies were a bummer, man. Festivals became scrambles for money.  The drugs of choice changed from pot, acid, and mushrooms to speed and heroin. Neil's contemporaries were biting the dust. College armories burning, kids dying at war and at home. The planet was choking with pollution. Lakes were dead.

Rolling Stone described On the Beach as "one of the most despairing albums of the decade," and if you don't let the album inside your head, you might come to that conclusion. It's not. I have never listened to this record without feeling better about myself and the world around me after the last note fades. Purportedly, Neil and the band were consuming honey slides at Sunset Sound, a simple combination of cheap pot and honey. Not a recipe for despair. The record is a salve for the psyche.

The record begins with Walk On.  "Sooner or later it all gets real."
Beautiful Wurlie on See the Sky About to Rain; Danko, Levon, and Crosby romping through Revolution Blues.

Sidebar: Eleventh Dream Day's first show in Chicago, as a three piece with Shu Shubat, Janet and me, was at Armadillo Day Festival on the main stage at Northwestern. There is a recording of it somewhere, although the WNUR feed had a weird patch and all you hear is my guitar and vocals with almost no drums or bass. We played Revolution Blues. A very young Urge Overkill was playing a set near the rocks at the lake. Albini set off strings of firecrackers. They rocked.

For the Turnstiles. "though your confidence may be shattered, it doesn't matter." My favorite line, "all the bush-league batters are left to die out on the diamond" would someday meet its match in "it's better to burn out than to fade away."It wasn't the sixties anymore. Time to move on.

Vampire Blues--Neil is a beast with the one-note solo, and this song has one of the best. This is one of Neil's first appeals for the planet. Oil companies sucking blood from the earth.

Side two (which Neil wanted as side one, but gave into the advice of David Briggs) is the group of three songs with some of Neil's best lyrics ever. On the Beach slays the soul. "The world is turning' hope it don't turn away" The line that has long resonated with me--"I need a crowd of people, but I can't face them day-to-day" It's complicated. Neil ends up alone at the microphone. That's okay too.
Motion Pictures seems like a down too, but consider, "I'm deep inside myself, but I'll get out somehow." And I always do, listening. "I'll stand before you and I'll bring a smile to your eyes."
And then the closer, Ambulance Blues, the best. A bit of the past, a bit of bitterness. "Burnouts stub their toes on garbage pails." The line that combines nursery rhyme nostalgia with Cassavettes: "Mother Goose, she's on the skids Shoe ain't happy, neither are the kids. She needs someone that she can scream at, and I'm such a heel for making her feel that way." And the line that leaves my wallowing behind:
"You're all just pissin in the wind. You don't know it but you are." Yes, Neil, I am. "And there ain't nothin' like a friend, who can tell you you're just pissing in the wind." Thank you Neil. Always a friend.