Neil Young Is My Co-Pilot: Screenwriting In Los Angeles

On The Beach is the greatest album ever created about Los Angeles that is not by Steely Dan. Neil Young arrived in Los Angeles in 1966 from his hometown of Winnipeg, where he briefly played in the Rick James-fronted band the Mynah Birds. Neil arrived in America in one of its periodic bouts of historical madness, and in 1967 police knocked out one of Young's teeth in one of the infamous Sunset Strip riots. A band member claimed that Neil's epilepsy was caused by being beaten up by the LAPD in this melee. The lyric "stick around while the clown who is sick does the trick of disaster" from "Mr. Soul" refers to Young's having subsequently had seizures in front of audiences while performing live.

In 1969 he released an album entitled "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere," articulating a vivid yet shapeless sensation each transplant to Los Angeles carries around on first relocating to the Pacific pomopolis. The cover of this album, nearly as emblematic as On The Beach, features a drawing in colored pencil of the singer superimposed over the syrupy rainbow of one of our chemical sunsets, the unstable brown dirt mountains of Mailbu and some sort of transparent crystal P.K. Dick downtown that I would say looked like ours if I could pick the nondescript Los Angeles skyline out of a Saint Louis-Newark-Milwuakee downtown line up. This cover righteously broadcasts what Everybody Knows In Los Angeles: If this suburb/city/garden paradise/desert is every place all at once, it can't really be Somewhere.

On the Beach was released in 1974, its cover features Neil at the very edge of Western culture, the California sand. This is where America and the world run out of room to run and road to travel. His back to the whole U.S.A., Young seems to contemplate the fact that all of America's extremes travel to and are trapped here. All the fads and hysteria and joke religions and hokey shopworn fantasies circle around between the Sierra Nevadas and the deep blue sea forever when they die. All the grand schemes dead and flat broke and busted stay revenants with no hope for requiescat or bus fair back to Ohio. A bluesy record like its gloomy predecessor Tonight's The Night, which was shelved for being "too depressing" in favor of the later On The Beach (which is, uh, not depressing?) OTB works the theme of how disastrous and dark the California ideal had become for so many by the mid-70s.

Songs like "Revolution Blues" deal with a Manson-like figure "asleep on your lawn" and "Ambulance Blues" is a folksy dirge for Richard Nixon, but this gorgeous downer of a record also features the lilting "Motion Pictures," a current favorite of mine. This song is dedicated to Academy Award nominated actress Carrie Snodgrass, who was the singer's new girlfriend at the time. Like a smoggy dawn over the Sierras, this song is a minature red sun silhouetted through the grey murk of decades, each era enshrouded by its emblematic California disasters and delights. This song, the loveliest on the album, brings a weary light to the California dreamer who is old enough to know better but dumb enough try. "But I hear some people have got their dream. I've got mine," Young sings. "Motion pictures, motion pictures."