Search - Neil Young :: On the Beach

It will change you in the middle of the day

Noddy | New York | 07/29/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I knew an omadawn once named Eddie, from Ennis he was, who pronounced ambulance abumbulance and who never tired of telling anyone who'd listen that the last track on this curiously covert Neil Young album was his favourite song of all time. "Abumbulance Blues," he used to insist, ceaselessly, "sure there's divil the bit to bate it." I often wondered if Eddie only pretended to be the village oaf. Not that Ambulance Blues isn't a good song, it's a brilliant song, an epic song, with stupendous acoustic guitar and some of Neil's best lyrics AND vocals, but for me the high note here has always been For the Turnstiles, a song often singled out by irate listeners as being particularly unlistenable to on account of Neil's painfully screechy delivery. Not so sez I. During the 1980s I worked for a spell in the laundry of a prestigious German loony bin and to pass the time waiting for the huge dryers to let out I would sing this song in an even screechier caterwaul than Mister Young's and each and every time I finished mine daffy und batty mitarbeiters would stop their folding und pressing und ironing und start up with what I invariably took to be a generous round of applause. "Feelin dank," I'd say, "feelin dank, yiz are all too kind." In any event something about that mad little ditty got well and truly wedged in me gulliver, where I can happily hear it to this day. Overall though der whole album ist eine colossally underrated werk off Youngkraft und der cover ist totalish wonderbar all on its own, what with Shakey there in his yellow shirt staring out to sea, his big beach boots beside him, the crash-landed chevy, also yellow, the yella umbrella and chairs, the almost palpable absence of sunshine, the newaspaper and of course them cans of Coors. All in all the very picture of not exactly mellow yellow and indeed something of a brooding flipside to the witty cover of Supertramp's Crisis? What Crisis? At any rate when you're in the mood for something sublimely moody and you've just accidentally snapped your only copy of Tonight's the Night in half--don't ask--you could do a lot worse than a trip to this out of the way little beach."