The Long Play with Al Neff" is a continuing Sunday evening Feature on The GOAT. This year, Every Sunday Evening, Album Rock WXYG, The GOAT will feature a full album at 8:00 PM from the halcyon musical days of 1974.
1974 was one of the top Years in Album Rock history. Another year of tough choices every week. So many great ones to choose from.
We hope you’ll tune in the evening of Sunday, July 28th for “On The Beach”, the fifth studio album by Canadian-American musician Neil Young, released by Reprise Records in July 1974. The album is the second of the so-called "Ditch Trilogy" of albums that Young recorded following the major success of 1972's Harvest, whereupon the scope of his success and acclaim became apparent; On the Beach was inspired by his feelings of retreat, alienation, and melancholy in response to this success.
Following the 1973 Time Fades Away tour, Neil Young wrote and recorded an Irish wake of a record called Tonight's the Night and went on the road drunkenly playing its songs to uncomprehending listeners and hostile reviewers. Reprise rejected the record, and Young went right back and made On the Beach, which shares some of the ragged style of its two predecessors. But where Time was embattled and Tonight mournful, On the Beach was savage and, ultimately, triumphant. "I'm a vampire, babe," Young sang, and he proceeded to take bites out of various subjects: threatening the lives of the stars who lived in L.A.'s Laurel Canyon ("Revolution Blues"); answering back to Lynyrd Skynyrd, whose "Sweet Home Alabama" had taken him to task for his criticisms of the South in "Southern Man" and "Alabama" ("Walk On"); and rejecting the critics ("Ambulance Blues"). But the barbs were mixed with humor and even affection, as Young seemed to be emerging from the grief and self-abuse that had plagued him for two years. But the album was so spare and under-produced, its lyrics so harrowing, that it was easy to miss Young's conclusion: he was saying goodbye to despair, not being overwhelmed by it.
On the Beach was certified gold in the United States, selling 500,000 copies. In 2007, On the Beach was placed at #40 in Bob Mersereau's book The Top 100 Canadian Albums. It was voted number 195 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums in 2000. In 2020, Rolling Stone included the album at number 311 on their list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, writing: "Reeling from the losses that sparked Tonight's the Night the previous year, Neil Young shelved that album for a while and made this one instead: a wild fireball of anger (“Revolution Blues”), nihilism (“For the Turnstiles”), and tentative optimism (“Walk On”). The album peaks on Side Two, a stoned symphony of grieving whose three songs (“On the Beach,” “Motion Pictures,” “Ambulance Blues”) are among the most emotionally real in Young's catalogue."
Tune In and Turn On the evening of Sunday, July 28th, and every Sunday evening at 8:00 PM for The GOAT'S "The Long Play with Al Neff.”
Don’t forget, right after the “Long Play”, we do a “Replay” of this week’s GOAT GUEST DJ SHOW.
