Off the road

In 1974 Neil Young was an easy-on-the-ear West Coast soft-rocker. Then he made 'On the Beach', one of the darkest and most disturbing records in pop history. Charles Shaar Murray tells the story of its genesis and explains why it's been 'unavailable' for 22 years

It used to be said of performers like country legend Jimmie Rodgers and Delta bluesman Skip James that they had "that high lonesome sound". No one in rock music has ever called up that sound quite like Neil Young: his eerie windswept high tenor is still capable, even after almost four decades in the music business, of evoking every emotional shade between exquisite melancholia and scalded-cat yowling angst.

Young's music has likewise lurched between the laid-back, primarily acoustic singer-songwriterismo of his Seventies successes like After The Goldrush and Harvest (not to mention his on-again/off-again association with Crosby, Stills & Nash) to crunching, howling Edge City guitar rock with powerful affinities to grunge and punk, incorporating detours into rockabilly, country and even electronica along the way just to keep things from getting too predictable. "'Heart of Gold' [Harvest's hit single] put me in the middle of the road," he wrote in a much-quoted 1978 liner-note. "Travelling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride, but I saw some more interesting people there."

Just how close this most enduring of rock's maverick Awkward Squad (other charter members: Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Van Morrison, Tom Waits and Elvis Costello) came to "the ditch" can be gauged by the long-delayed CD release of one of his darkest and most dangerous albums. On The Beach, originally issued in 1974, was put out of its misery (and its creator's) when the original vinyl edition disappeared from the stores in 1981 - no one unprepared to invest a lot of time and money by hunting it down on the private collectors' market has been able to get their mitts on a copy of it for years. As one dyed-in-the-wool Young fan put it, "Hardly anyone under 40 has ever even heard it."

So why has On The Beach remained on the shelf for so long? The album's troubled history may go some way towards explaining. Young has had more than his share of record company battles over the years: his artistic integrity is jealously guarded and he will allow nothing to get between him and his muse. The reductio ad absurdam came in the Eighties when, after briefly departing from Warner-Reprise (who had issued his records since he first quit his Sixties band, Buffalo Springfield, in 1968) to sign to David Geffen's Geffen Records on a promise of total artistic freedom, he found himself on the receiving end of a lawsuit for making uncommercial records. He countersued and returned to Warner-Reprise, where he remains to this day.

However, On The Beach had a singularly dark genesis, the most ironical aspect of which is that it was recorded and released as a substitute for an even more troublesome record. Tonight's The Night was a collection of raw, anguished songs written and recorded in the aftermath of the drug deaths of two of Young's friends. Danny Whitten was the rhythm guitarist of Young's group Crazy Horse, and Bruce Berry had been Stephen Stills' guitar roadie. Young himself was no stranger to drugs - heroin and cocaine having long ago supplanted acid in LA's hip pharmacy - and the resulting material was considered way too scarifying for an audience still hankering for the return of Neil Young the sweet sad singer-songwriter. Neil Young the ravaged rocker, screaming out his pain through a wall of over-amped guitar murk, was put on hold. A new album was requested to replace Tonight's The Night in the release schedules. The result was cold comfort indeed for Warner-Reprise's accountants.

Judging by the cover of On The Beach, the westward drive has run out of road. Young appears in the background at the water's edge in a yellow shirt and white jeans, staring out over the ocean, his boots beside him. In the foreground, half-buried in the sand next to a hideous set of yellow floral beach furniture, is the tail fin of a Cadillac, looking as though it's just crashed in from outer space, or else simply been driven into the ground. It says that there just ain't no place else to go.

The Los Angeles Young explores in On The Beach is clearly the same psychic space as Jim Morrison's "city of night" (pace John Rechy) or Ice T's "home of the bodybag". The music is deceptively low-key, drawing heavily on the banjo-and-dobro rusticisms popular among Topanga Canyon rockers who played at being heartland hayseeds the way Marie Antoinette's courtiers played at being shepherds and milkmaids. Famous guests pop up on the studio log: David Crosby and Graham Nash contribute cameos, as do Rick Danko and Levon Helm from The Band, but it's a whole world away from the Mellow Mafia super-sessions which characterised upper-echelon LA rock during that period.

Interviewed some years later by Nick Kent, Young declared himself uncomfortable with On The Beach, describing it as "a pretty dark album." It was, he told Kent, "written and recorded just before my break-up with Carrie [actress Carrie Snodgress, his wife]." But there's rather more to the album than a straightforward account of a beleaguered relationship hitting the skids. On The Beach is a haunted ride into the dark heart of Los Angeles in the wake of the collapse of the counter-culture, when it seemed that all that was left behind when the light-show of hippie idealism went out was a bunch of rich druggies indulging themselves up in the canyons, and clusters of sinister lumpenhippie cultists, high on acid, mysticism and ill-digested political rhetoric, hungry for revenge and trawling for victims. "I really think there should be something happening like a liberation movement in Hollywood," ranted composer Jack Nitzsche, who'd done the orchestral arrangements for several of Young's solo albums. "A drastic one like the Symbionese Liberation Army - something's got to shake this city loose." And just as the mellow mafia and the cocaine cowboys thought they'd finally managed to forget about Charles Manson and the horrific Tate-Labianca murders of 1969, Neil Young brought those ugly memories flooding back.

Like many another LA rock 'n' roll high roller, most notably the Beach Boys' doomed drummer Dennis Wilson, Neil Young had known Charles Manson. Known? He'd heard Manson singing and playing his own compositions, and even recommended to his record company boss, Mo Ostin, that he sign Manson to a Warner Brothers record contract. "Listen, he was great," Young told Kent. "He was unreal. Really, really good - scary." Nevertheless, Young found something about Manson's high-strung intensity highly off-putting, concluding that "I'd better get out this guy's way before he explodes."

Young was fortunate: history shows us that others were much less lucky. The centrepiece of On The Beach is "Revolution Blues," in which Young doesn't so much confront the spectre of the Manson Family as channel his own inner Manson. To an ominous minor-key steady-roll, Young croons, "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." This vision of "bloody fountains and ten million dune buggies coming down the mountains" provoked a predictable response when, in the wake of On The Beach's release, Young joined up with his old partners in a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young reunion tour. His colleagues were not only unwilling to stay on stage and perform "Revolution Blues" with him, but - egged on by Crosby, who was dubious about what he called Young's "dark shit" - tried to persuade him to drop the song completely.

"I was goin, 'It's just a fuckin' song. What's the big deal? It's about the culture. It's about what's really happening'." The rest of the album, including two more mutated blues pieces, "Vampire Blues" and "Ambulance Blues", was scarcely cheerier - though nothing was quite as spine-chilling as "Revolution Blues". And the artist was in no mood for compromise. He steered clear of Crosby, Stills and Nash for quite some time after that 1974 tour, and his next album, Homegrown, was judged by the record company to be so depressing that even the long-shelved Tonight's The Night was deemed preferable as his next release.

All that stuff went down almost 30 years ago. On The Beach could now be relegated to historical-curio status, as an artefact of a bygone era or a long-lost catalogue item from one of rock's great auteurs, were it not for the emotional and observational authenticity which seeps off the record like cold smog. Others had anatomised the dark heart of LA before, but Young's version avoided both the Scylla of Jim Morrison's occasionally flabby melodrama and the Charybdis of Frank Zappa's snide cartoonery. What On The Beach offers is the Real Deal, the authentic nightmare. At a time when every Buffy The Vampire Slayer fan knows that Southern California is built right over the Hellmouth, it's worth remembering that it was an epileptic, depression-prone Canadian Neil Young who first turned around to the coke-addled, complacent denizens of the canyons and told them, "Forget it - this is Chinatown". And he never stopped doing it.

"I'm someone who's always tried systematically to destroy the very basis of my record-buying public," he told Nick Kent. "My whole career is based on systematic destruction - see, that's what keeps me alive. You destroy what you did before and you're free to carry on."

'On the Beach' (Reprise) is reissued tomorrow on CD. A replica vinyl edition is out on 4 August