Something about being splendidly famous didn’t sit right with Neil Young. His star had steadily ascended throughout the later portion of the ’60s, and then went supernova with the release of Harvest in 1972. This unsettling career peak set against the backdrop of an aimless and endless military conflict, a freshly confirmed second term for a conservative warmonger (what year was this again?), and a handful of overdosing cronies sent Young careening into the abyss. The tours and records that immediately followed were a reckless expedition into the jungles of paranoia and despair, navigated with bloodshot eyes. By 1974, the intrepid songwriter probably needed a vacation from all that was heavy, and the aptly titled On the Beach could have been it; but two songs in, like a feverish jetlag nightmare, the demons pulled Neil down into the sinister funk of “Revolution Blues.”

From the opening chords, the tension is palpable, and the first verse lets us know the sort of character we’re dealing with: “Well, we live in a trailer / At the edge of town / You never see us / ‘Cause we don’t come around / We got 25 rifles / Just to keep the population down.” It’s not difficult to imagine the scene, even now, but as the ideals of the counterculture soured, this stanza must have seemed uncomfortably appropriate. Radical principles and isolation rarely make for good neighbors, and firearms tend to complicate things further. The verse continues as some sort of recruitment, but our antagonist needs to work on his pitch: Admitting that he’s “not above suspicion,” he fails to establish much trust, so the reassurance that he won’t attack us in the penultimate line is little consolation.

Whew… well, that was a creepy encounter for sure, but who hasn’t brushed up against madness on the bus or at the bar? Unfortunately, this lunatic is a little harder to shake, and the terror quickly escalates in the second verse: “Well, it’s so good to be here / Asleep on your lawn / Remember your guard dog? / Well, I’m afraid that he’s gone.” This crazy fuck followed us home and killed our dog?! Turns out he’s been hanging around our work, too, performing weirdo stalker-type demonstrations. Jesus Christ, Neil… what happened to “Heart of Gold”?

As the song staggers towards its bloody conclusion, the horror envelops us in a hail of machine gun shells and some sort of siege, the hallucinatory imagery culminating in the song’s most memorable and shocking stanza: “Well, 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.”

[Gulp!]

Chilling. The geographic location is perhaps most telling: It kinda feels like Young was re-imagining the Manson Family murders as a revenge fantasy on the rock royalty that popularly inhabited the Canyon in the early ’70s, a community to which his own fame was inextricably linked. These troubadours had become part of the establishment that they had once rallied against because it allowed them to make their music, and clearly that made Young a little anxious.

Whether or not Young intended to take aim at himself and his singer-songwriter contemporaries, “Revolution Blues” is still a compelling reflection of the times. Peace and love were still a recent memory, yet fear was seeping into every aspect of the culture. The revolutionaries had gone mad or militant, the musicians got rich or insane. It would certainly not be the last time Neil Young attacked his subject with such vehemence, but it may be the most terrifying.

Listen: “Revolution Blues” [at youtube.com]

Tags: Neil Young, On the Beach, Reprise Records

Read more articles like this:

The Switchback: Neil Young vs. My Morning Jacket’s Jim James

Origin of Song: Like a Runaway Hurricane

Classic Vantage: Buffalo Springfield