Consequence‘s review series Dusting ‘Em Off examines classic albums that have established an enduring place in pop culture. Today, Neil Young leaves the “middle of the road” with the “Ditch Trilogy.”
In 1972, Neil Young released Harvest: a commercial titan that launched his solo career and provided him with enough cultural cachet to be able to tell his old CSN buddies to “eat a peach.” Even 50 years later, thanks to the staying power of songs like “Old Man” and “Heart of Gold,” it stands as his best-known work. Which is all well and good — unless you’re Neil Young in 1973, doped-up, rebellious, and looking for excitement anywhere that wasn’t the mainstream.
“[Heart of Gold] put me in the middle of the road,” he wrote of the sweet-as-honey acoustic tune in the liner notes for the 1977 compilation Decade. “Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch.”
And head for the ditch he did, following the soft, folky, best-selling Harvest with a run of three increasingly dark albums that, while now canonized, failed to move nearly as many units as Harvest: Time Fades Away, On the Beach, and Tonight’s the Night. Recorded and released between 1973 and 1975, the trilogy of records finds Young at his emotional lowest and artistic peak, grappling with inner turmoil, his extravagant (and dangerous) lifestyle, and his role as a burgeoning rock star. Ultimately, it’d be the run of albums that defined Young’s uncompromising and revolutionary artistic spirit.
Time Fades Away, released in October 1973, was the first of the so-called “Ditch Trilogy.” In retrospect, it serves as the jarring bridge between Young as the traveling, Dylan-eqsue folk hero and Young as the sprawling, boundary-pushing rock ‘n’ roller. A live album documenting his post-Harvest tour, it’s also, as it turns out, an effort Young isn’t particularly proud of.
“I think it’s the worst record I ever made,” he said in a 1987 radio interview with Dave Ferrin. “But as a documentary of what was happening to me, it was a great record. I was onstage, and I was playing all these songs that nobody had heard before, recording them, and I didn’t have the right band. It was just an uncomfortable tour. It was supposed to be this big deal — I just had Harvest out, and they booked me into ninety cities. I felt like a product, and I had this band of all-star musicians that couldn’t even look at each other. It was a total joke.”
By all accounts, Young took out his frustration with the plastic, processed nature of commercialism on stage, playing loose, hard-edged sets to audiences who bought tickets to hear, well, “Heart of Gold.” Listen to the drunken shuffle of the title track, the sprawled-out jamming of “Last Dance,” or the energized and electric blues of “Yonder Stands the Sinner” (which begins with a member of the band remarking, “This will be kind of experimental”), and it’s easy to understand why audiences felt as if they had had the rug pulled out from under them. They came to sing “Old Man,” not to hear Young abuse his guitar in front of a backing band who sounded like they were barely managing to hold onto the tune.
Which is not to paint Time Fades Away as purely a document of chaos. Select tracks manage to reign in the wildness, with Young taking to the piano or picking up the harmonica. Rather than ooze with poetic beauty like the ballads of Harvest, however, “Love in Mind” and “The Bridge” instead come across with a deep, crushing sense of melancholy. “Journey Through the Past” is the closest Young gets to his pre-ditch days, though notably was the lone track recorded at a show in 1971 — i.e. before Harvest became the best-performing album of the following year.
Sure, it’s rough around the edges and doesn’t quite live up to the heights of Young’s following two releases, but it was perhaps the first taste fans got of Neil Young as a musical antagonist, a role he continues to play to this day.
What comes next depends on who you ask. Technically, according to release dates, On the Beach arrived as the first studio album of the “Ditch Trilogy.” And yet, purists will point out that Tonight’s the Night was actually recorded first, being held by Young’s label until he insisted upon its release in 1975.
But, to follow the path that the average listener would have back in the ’70s, On the Beach landed as Young’s official follow-up to Harvest. Despite its title and the sunny scene depicted in the album art, the record is far darker, heavier, and more disillusioned than any of Young’s first few studio efforts.
As if he was playing a cruel meta-joke on his fanbase, however, Young hides that fact by opening the album with “Walk On,” a bouncy rock tune about perseverance. Following the relative high of “Walk On,” though, are seven tracks that fully embrace the ditch; three of which explicitly have “blues” in the title (for the statisticians out there, that’s a whopping 37.5% of the tracklist). Over gloomy, brooding rock instrumentals and sparse, depressive cooldowns, Young tackles themes of existential breaks, paranoia, and lost love.
