Neil Young On The Beach Reissued On CD

Isn't it true that Geffen sued Neil Young in the '80s, circa Everybody's Rockin' and Landing on Water, for not sounding enough like Neil Young and therefore breaching his contract? I heard this somewhere and thought it was pretty funny. "Look, Mr. Young, we want another Harvest and we want it now! Put down the Vocoder!"

"on the beach" is of course fantastic, ive had it for some time on a cdr bootleg ripped from someone's vinyl which was a little grainy and played slightly too fast probably due to the turntable it was ripped off being just that little bit too fast as well. but i still loved the songs even then, everyone of them means something special to me and i often listed it as my favorite neil young album even though i only had that crappy cdr. of course the remaster is a big improvement in terms of quality (a great remastering job, looks like theres been a lot of effort put in, it sounds alive!), and i love it. if you havent heard it before, now is the perfect time.

and now onto the 3 lesser known and sometimes critically dismissed records that i hadn't heard before, ive tried to do mini reviews:
"american stars and bars" - i like this a lot, a lot of country rockers, all of them pretty good i think ("old country waltz" is a lovely opener i think). and the second half of the record is even better than that, "star of bethlehem", "will to love", the already well known "like a hurricane", and "homegrown" all classic i think.
thus all in all a good album, and the second half is classic.

"hawks and doves" - i like the first and mostly acoustic half of this record, "little wing", "the old homestead", and "captain kennedy" are all pretty lovely. the second half, mostly country rockers (which feel a bit second rate compared to the ones on american stars and bars) hasnt made much impression on me yet, i think theres supposed to be some sort of political context to the songs "union man" and "hawks and doves" but its difficult to make out how serious neil is. i need to listen to these songs again, but to me the second half seems a bit meh.

"re ac tor" - certainly not neil and crazy horse's best, but i enjoyed it still, i actually rather liked "t-bone", its a good metaphor for my life "Got mashed potato, aint got no t-bone"... most of it sounds like neil and crazy horse just whacked it out in a few hours in a garage, and sure theres a certain tossed off element to it, but often gloriously so, the band plays it very loose, and they just jam out the songs. sure a lot of them aint lyrically expansive (although "shots" is quite deep and is an absolute gem of a song, probably best on the album) but for a lot of songs it works, on "opera star" and "surfer joe and moe the sleeze" the lyrics are simple but say everything they need to say. "rapid transit" is a little disappointing, i think its trying to make a point about the "new wave" movement, but the music is too stuttering for it to fit crazy horse's playing and it just doesnt really work. but all in all, i liked this album, its not classic but i think its rather underrated. mind you, if you arent interested in neil and crazy horse doin good long jams, then you probably wont get as much out of it. but i do.

and the lyrics on the last two tracks still bug me even though i love the arrangements

this thread does not have enough discussion of RAGGED GLORY, for my liking. What a great album THAT is!

title track really gets me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKgj1FNToWY

I need a crowd of people... but I cant face them day to day

Thought this revive would be about: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/hear-boz-scaggs-cover-neil-youngs-on-the-beach-666042/

incredible album. the first time i heard this i had found a copy on a cassette tape in a thrift store. it had On the Beach on one side and Re-Ac-Tor on the other. i ended up going on tour soon after that and it ended up being the perfect road tunes. just sheer beauty from top to bottom. "Ambulance Blues" is so heartbreaking. An ambulance can only go so fast holy fuck that's a spooky line.

title track is all-time

Is "Ambulance Blues" the Greatest Thing Neil Young Ever Did?

An ambulance can only go so fast

neil has an endless number of lyrics that are sort of banal but also somehow incredibly moving and deep and full of meaning to me

oh yeah absolutely. lots of examples on this album, but the best is obviously from tired eyes: "he tried to do his best, but he could not"

boz scaggs cover is surprisingly good

i love the arrangements on here, all the different instrumental textures that perfectly match the songs. you have your country rock throughout but you also have your stripped down back porch banjo of "For the Turnstiles", the watery tremelo Wurlitzer of "See the Sky About to Rain", that cosmic fiddle in the distance of that final track. Neil invoking some potent atmospheres.

Neil Young – vocals; guitar on "Walk On", "Revolution Blues", "Vampire Blues", "On the Beach", "Motion Pictures" and "Ambulance Blues"; harmonica on "See the Sky About to Rain", "Motion Pictures" and "Ambulance Blues"; Wurlitzer electric piano on "See the Sky About to Rain"; banjo guitar on "For the Turnstiles"; electric tambourine on "Ambulance Blues"

lol electric tambourine?

http://tvmiller.com/images/etambourine_3.jpg

funny what a big deal this coming out on CD was back in the day! tracking down the LP in the early 90s was a formative experience — a friend of my brother's had played it for us, and it seemed unbelievable that something so great could be so (generally) unavailable. definitely made me realize there was a whole world of music that you weren't going to find at the mall.

i found a cd bootleg of this backed with american stars and bars on my 20th birthday, the same day i bought a copy of shakey which has just come out

that was a fuckin’ great day

i listened to that bootleg so much that even now that i have access to pristine remastered on the beach i still expect to hear the bootleg’s needledrop and occasional vinyl pop and crackle during certain parts

dang, that's a nice combo. Stars N Bars rules too.

An ambulance can only go so fast

neil has an endless number of lyrics that are sort of banal but also somehow incredibly moving and deep and full of meaning to me

― The Desus & Mero Chain (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, July 10, 2018 10:11 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Want to say that line in particular, after listening to “Ambulance Blues” for all these years, hit me like a ton of bricks about a year ago.

funny what a big deal this coming out on CD was back in the day! tracking down the LP in the early 90s was a formative experience — a friend of my brother's had played it for us, and it seemed unbelievable that something so great could be so (generally) unavailable. definitely made me realize there was a whole world of music that you weren't going to find at the mall.

― tylerw, Tuesday, July 10, 2018 7:38 AM (forty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

god i remember this phenomenal little record store near where i grew up, i stocked up on so many classic LPs in perfect shape. everything was like $4.00, including my copies of all the key Neil Young LPs. I went there and in one fell swoop picked up the ditch trilogy, After the Gold Rush, Harvest, and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere for maybe $25 plus tax. On the Beach was the real eye-opener. I think its unavailability meant it was overlooked or even dismissed by the mainstream critical community at the time, as was Time Fades Away. I remember so many pieces about TTN but nothing about those. But I remember spinning OTB and thinking what a great LP it was, like a sardonic sun-soaked "Rockford Files with a slightly bummer ending" type work it was, vs the noirish complete bleakness of TTN.

oh yeah absolutely. lots of examples on this album, but the best is obviously from tired eyes: "he tried to do his best, but he could not"

― supreme court justice samuel lance-ito (voodoo chili), Tuesday, July 10, 2018 9:13 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a great example too

I usually find it pretty bullshitty when musicians say "oh i don't know where my lyrics/music come from, i'm just channeling it from somewhere" but with Neil sometimes I really do believe he doesn't know exactly what his songs are about

I think always explains why Neil can pull such mind-blowing boners when writing lyrics too (like say 90% of the last ten yrs) cuz yeah I think he really is tapping into his subconscious and I can imagine when yr writing you might think "man that line is really banal & clunky but, hey it worked in the 70s!"