What Happens When a Beloved Rock Star Gets Fed Up?

When the Woodstock festival took place in August 1969, it was famously only the second gig for the newly minted supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. “We’re scared shitless,” David Crosby, a noted wag, informed an audience of 400,000-plus during their set. Watching their performance in Woodstock, Michael Wadleigh’s legendary documentary film, you can see the nerves, and the skill, on display. They were four men with the hubris, and quite possibly the talent, to fulfill promoter Bill Graham’s prediction that they would become the American Beatles. Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash all appear in the movie, on split-screen and in close-up, flushed with the consequence of the moment. But there’s one anomaly: Neil Young never appears at all.

Something about the festival had made him uneasy, and it was definitely not the last time his instincts told him that the corporate-utopian gloss of the hippie movement was not his speed, or his lane. Five years later—after the circus of Watergate, the brutally pointless slog of Vietnam, and the gradual deevolution of the counterculture ethos—Young’s path forward came into bold relief. He had become a massive solo star in his own right, following 1972’s beatific folk-rock landmark Harvest, and he did not like the way it felt: The song “Heart of Gold” “put me in the middle of the road,” he wrote in the liner notes to the 1977 compilation album Decade. “Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch.” The “ditch” in question refers to the three records—Time Fades Away, On the Beach, and Tonight’s the Night—Young released from 1973 to 1975, colloquially known as the Ditch Trilogy. Taken together, they represent one of the most fascinating digressions in the rock-and-roll tradition, and possibly the first time that a minted rock star actively sought to alienate a devoted fanbase.

Each of the LPs in the Ditch Trilogy is musically different, but they all vibrate on a similar frequency. Time Fades Away (1973) is like a burlesque show performed at the gates of hell, all barrelhouse boogie and half-repressed childhood trauma. Tonight’s the Night (1975) is a tequila-soaked tribute to Young’s lost bandmate Danny Whitten and former roadie Bruce Berry, both dead of heroin overdoses. It also doubles as a too-late warning flare to a generation slipping deeper into the undertow of narcotics. Both are unvarnished and memorable records. But Young never dug deeper or got lower than On the Beach, which was released between them in 1974. This solemn folk-rock autopsy, which came out 50 years ago this month, examined the rapidly corrupting values of a hippie era founded on notions of social justice and equality—an era that eventually came to embody something far darker and more compromised.

Young was always a bit of an odd fit with his bandmates. By the time of Woodstock, it had only been a few months since CSN, without Young, had released their wildly successful debut album. Young had been added afterward at the suggestion of the Atlantic Records label head, Ahmet Ertegun, who felt that the group could use extra guitar muscle. The omniscient and powerful Ertegun was not a man whose suggestions you typically rebuked, yet this change was not an easy sell. Young and Stills had played together in a short-lived psych-rock act called Buffalo Springfield, creating ferocious sparks musically and interpersonally. Their alternating guitar solos onstage were like musical fistfights; other times they dispensed with the guitars and just screamed at each other. Graham Nash, a genteel English singer from the Hollies, had never met Young, and at first flat out refused to allow him to join. It seems they never became particularly close—in 2009, Nash told Goldmine Magazine that the two weren’t actually friends. By the time he wrote his 2013 memoir, Wild Tales, Nash had revised that upward only slightly, calling Young “the strangest of my friends.”

Compared with his peers in CSN, Young was worried about different things. On the Beach is a record about ecological and spiritual crisis amid the fading memory of what he refers to as “the old folky days.” Los Angeles is a main character—a despoiled paradise where celebrities mistake their privilege for immortality, and abandon responsibility when the inevitable consequences of their long-term bacchanal kick in. Released almost simultaneously with Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, it shares that film’s queasy preoccupations with the aftereffects of westward expansion. Echoing the villain Noah Cross’s sinister plan to steal the water supply needed to make the desert town an oasis, Young acknowledges the complicity of all those who have benefitted from the ill-gotten bounty. “I'm a vampire, babe,” he muses in “Vampire Blues,” “suckin’ blood from the Earth.”

Drenched in Young’s Wurlitzer and Ben Keith’s keening steel guitar, the second track, “See the Sky About to Rain,” is On the Beach’s true template for the album’s themes. Over five minutes, Young sounds puzzled by his own revelatory lyrics: broken clouds, locomotives rolling down the tracks, train whistles blowing in his brain. He evokes Woody Guthrie and the wealth disparities that will, in time, become a hallmark of his generation’s personal and political proclivities:

“Some are bound for happiness / Some are bound to glory / Some are bound to live with less / Who can tell your story?” The answer, implied but unstated, is that the chronicles of the working poor and the political outsider—once the heart of the folk movement—are destined to become marginalized to the point of disappearing. Distantly, and uneasily, there is revolution in the air.

[Read: What makes Neil Young’s voice irrestistible]

Then, all at once, it isn’t distant at all. “Revolution Blues” is sung from the point of view of Charles Manson, whom Young kind of knew and kind of liked, back when Manson was just one of countless fringe musicians hanging around the Laurel Canyon scene. A muscle car of sheer groove and menace, “Revolution Blues” speeds past even more disturbing imagery: bloody fountains, slaughtered guard dogs, swarms of dune buggies. Crosby, Stills, and Nash were horrified by the lyric “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.” They were right to be scared. If musicians were going to proffer themselves as ersatz philosopher kings—as CSNY had begun doing with their interminable political “raps” at audiences during their shows—it only made sense that someone would take them too literally, and seek to inflict real violence.

When John Lennon was shot dead in 1980, the perpetrator was a disillusioned fan on the edges of the counterculture who had become convinced that the Beatles co-founder had betrayed some kind of principle. Manson himself had adopted his twisted interpretation of the White Album as a kind of deranged blueprint for the race riots and economic coups he sought to engender. The scariest song in a catalog with no shortage of scary songs, “Revolution Blues” provides no explanations and offers no apologies for Manson’s trail of carnage in 1969.

By the year of On the Beach’s release, rock and roll had become big business, and the American concert landscape was changing as a result. Bob Dylan and the Band had reconvened on their multimillion-grossing run of dates, and CSNY, too, had begun to sell out stadiums and arenas on what came to be known, by dint of its excess, as the Doom Tour. In time, messianic pop singers would create grotesque carbon footprints in the interest of advancing their brands. Young and his band were fueled by a combination of potent fried weed and honey, called “honey slides”—and the creeping paranoia that accompanies getting too stoned matches the mood of the album’s closing songs. Young sounds confused but resolute. On the almost seven-minute title track, he makes suggestions, seemingly to himself: “Get out of town, think I’ll get out of town,” in a way that makes you think as a listener, He’s never going to get out of town. “Motion Pictures”—an elegy for his estranged partner, the actor Carrie Snodgress—is about Young embracing the beauty of nature, as the people around him are captivated by their television sets. “All those people, they think they’ve got it made,” he sings. “I wouldn’t buy, sell, borrow, or trade / Anything I have to be like one of them.” He sings: “I’d rather start all over again.”

In some important fashion, the world had turned away from the pluralistic idealism of ’60s youth culture, and would never turn back. By the mid-’90s, the Woodstock generation had leveraged its massive demographic advantages to become a dominant voting bloc whose political concerns were short-term and self-serving. Within this vanity, and a seemingly boundless obsession with relevance, was the completed prophecy of On the Beach: an Eden descending into an ego- and market-driven hell. Watch Woodstock again—if you squint, you can divine a lot about the future in Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s respective performances. They are powerful, sure, but they also look like preening men of questionable judgment lost in the splendor of self-regard. Ghostly and unseen, somewhere off to the side, Neil Young took in the spectacle. And then he walked on.