(Credits: Far Out / Reprise Records / Henry Diltz)
Sat 10 May 2025 22:00, UK
I don’t know whether it’s what Hollywood has taught us or the innate spiritualism of the moving tide, but pop culture has closely linked beachy, sun-kissed landscapes with drug consumption. So when Neil Young told us to meet him On The Beach in 1974, who knew what state we’d find him in?
Everything about the record spoke to a more brooding, psychedelic disposition. The beach was less about a wider cultural idea that surfing, swimming and sunbathing gave way to chirpier times and instead leaned into the pensive introspection of on-shore gazing. Within that, there was some clear exploration of mental dissociation from Young. But as he looks out over the horizon on the cover of the album, he’s clearly picking the upstream channel in which to swim, for he’s rarely been enticed by the easy route. And so what came after was a darker sonic departure for Young, fuelled by a drug more unique than the one used by his contemporary musicians.
So, in the height of 1974’s music scene, when the simple sparking of a joint was as commonplace as a pair of headphones in the recording booth, what lengths would you have to go to to achieve originality? Well, throughout the recording of the record, Young and co smoked a homemade concoction of the drug they referred to as “honey slides”. Intensifying the effects of marijuana with honey, it was rumoured to have had similar effects as heroin, which many attribute to the more mellow disposition of the album.
But it wasn’t a secret recipe that Young was preserving for the sake of his own genius. Oh no, when he stepped foot on stage at the Bottom Line Club in New York City, in May of 1974, he introduced the world to his hallucinogenic cocktail.
“You know what a honey slide is?” Young yelled out to the audience in between songs. As he strummed his guitar to the mellow intro of ‘Motion Pictures’, he explained, “You know, poor grade marijuana worse than you get on the street, and you take it and you get your old lady, you know, if you got one, to cook it up on the stove”
He continued, “Put that stuff in the grinder, get it real fine, in a frying pan, put it on the stove. Turn the heat up a little and wait until the grass just starts to smoke, just a little bit, take it off the heat, don’t want to burn it too much.”
While he continued on with his mildly sexist remarks that insinuated this was a recipe for women to make their partners, he added, “Just heat that honey up until it’s slippery, you know, and mix that grass with it, the fine grass that you’ve cooked up just until it started to smoke and you took it off, mix those together and you get a spoon. I think you should eat it after that. Just eat a little of it, you know, maybe a spoonful or two, you’ll be surprised, it just makes you feel fine.”
It was an on-stage rambling that spoke to the somewhat disassociated and borderline arrogant disposition of a then prolific and creative Young. But that aside, the end product of his honey-slide affair was an album that has defied his on-stage comments and ripened like a fine wine. It’s a cross-platform epic, drenched with synaesthetic references from the album artwork to the lyrical sentiment, creating an album that perfectly juxtaposes the free and easy disposition of West Coast weed smoking, but with Young’s signature introspective darkness. Like the sweet and savoury profile of his homemade concoction, Young created an album that straddled the light and shade of 1970s life.
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