Shakey: Neil Young's Biography [Paperback]

Cantankerous and secretive, Neil Young has banished authors from his inner sanctum--until now. In Shakey, Jimmy McDonough distills more than 300 interviews (including guarded yet revealing interrogations of Young himself) into the definitive biography: the skyrocket success, willful disasters, health horrors and triumphs, stunning comebacks, and highly colorful scuffles with equally impossible characters like Stephen Stills, David Crosby, and the incompetent yet brilliant musicians of Crazy Horse. Young is not quite the noble soul some thought--he's an astounding control freak. But he is never less than fascinating. "As ruthless as I may seem to be," Young tells McDonough, "you gotta do what ya gotta do. Just like a f-----' vampire. Heh heh heh." --Tim Appelo --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Some come to praise, some to bury; some to demystify, some to prop up the myth. What all music biographers share is the knowledge that their readership will be drawn mostly from their subject's fan base, and from the more fanatical end at that. So what's the conscientious Boswell, someone aiming for more than either a puff job or a kneejerk bit of iconoclasm, to do? (For a look at the product of a lack of conscience, consult the works of Albert Goldman.) One recent book, justifiably ballyhooed, provides a good miniature case study by tackling extremely contrasting subjects and achieving similarly compelling results.
Neil Young's artistic pre-eminence is indisputable (can anyone other than Bob Dylan even stand in the same room with him?); the quality of his output, with exceptions, has been sustained for nearly forty years; where others endured constant damning comparisons to other musicians, Young is sui generis. And most pertinent to Jimmy McDonough's biography is that Young isn't dead. Far from it. In one of this book's many transcribed cat-and-mouse exchanges between the subject and his "authorized" biographer (never has the term been so loaded with irony) the legendarily evasive and contrary Young hazards a guess as to why his work inspires such intense identification in fans: "That's because it's not so specific that it eliminates them. To write an autobiography would go against the grain of all that." So, too, apparently, would co-operating with one's biographer. McDonough's frustration at Young's slipperiness practically forms a motif for the book, inserted as it is at regular intervals; incredibly, what he manages to reveal is still enough to make his book as epic in length and scope as Neil Young's career.
McDonough, we see from the outset, is determined to get it ALL down. How many biographers would have bothered digging up (and actually reading) father Scott's early novel about the Winnipeg flood, or tracking down the Thunder Bay man who produced a demo by the teenaged Young that prefigures much of his subsequent output? For fans, the lengthy account of Young's Canadian childhood and apprenticeship will be an eye-opening treat, far outstripping previous treatments, including Scott Young's. It's always tempting in biographies of the great and famous to invest every youthful anecdote with looming significance; McDonough resists that, but still gets at the essential Canadianness of his subject, and at the roots of his longevity, tellingly observing how "Scott was—just as Neil would be—lucky, adventurous, and driven to the point of mania."
It would take a book-length review just to recap the stages of Young's career and how McDonough chronicles them, so I'll limit myself to a couple.
The journey in a hearse from Toronto to California, and the subsequent Icarus-like career of the oh-what-might-have-been Buffalo Springfield (a story fictionalized to great effect in Ray Robertson's riotous novel Moody Food) provide priceless drama and farce. At one point Young's irascible mother, Rassy, berates Stephen Stills for not allowing more of her son's songs in the band's set; at another we're vouchsafed a look into the present life of long-lost genius bassist Bruce Palmer, who appears all but unhinged.
In the most illuminating sections of the book, McDonough digs deep into the early-70s period when Young, fresh from mega-success with the sweetly melodic Harvest and seemingly set for a lucrative run in the middle of the road, pulled a remarkable u-turn and released a series of abrasive and unsettling albums—Time Fades Away, Tonight's The Night, On The Beach—that reflected the destructive tendencies just below the surface of the California myth. McDonough finds a fitting metaphor for the mood of the time in a drug dealer's murder in the hippie musician's colony of Topanga Canyon. This incident and others even closer to home—the deaths of Crazy Horse bandmate Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry, a failing marriage—affected Young deeply, and his decision to risk career suicide by reflecting his mood in music is probably his greatest achievement. McDonough doesn't come right out and say this, but the space he allocates to this era is acknowledgement enough.
Greatly to McDonough's credit, too, is how he gives full play to the long-running behind-the-scenes figures who've provided the ballast for Young's impulsiveness: manager Elliot Roberts, the late producer/sparring partner David Briggs, maverick mentor Jack Nietzche and especially Crazy Horse, the great loose-cannon innocents of rock and roll whose ongoing 30-year on-off relationship with their boss almost defies belief.
A major caveat: In 1984, Neil Young gave an interview to Britain's New Musical Express. He was in the middle of a reactionary Reaganite phase, and among his pearls was this: "You go to a supermarket and you see a faggot behind the fuckin' cash register, you don't want him to handle your potatoes." It was one of the most despicable things any reputable artist has ever been quoted as saying. For some years after, I couldn't listen to a Neil Young album. (Friends have described reacting similarly; our boycott was probably made easier by the fact that Young's output at the time consisted of a dreary series of genre exercises seemingly designed to annoy his record company; when David Geffen "scandalously" sued Young for delivering unrepresentative product, many of us inwardly cheered.) Surely McDonough, who quotes the comment and often makes a point of his own feistiness, will take Young to task for it? But no, he lets it go with hardly a comment. Strange indeed.
Also on the debit side is that McDonough's passion for Young's early work and the culture from which it sprang has an unfortunate curmudgeonly flipside. As the story proceeds into the nineties and Young's work careens from sustained flashes of genius (Ragged Glory, Sleeps With Angels), maddening water-treading and nostalgia-mongering (Unplugged, Harvest Moon), and failed attempts at hipness (the hookup with Pearl Jam whose title I can't be bothered looking up), McDonough increasingly betrays a sour alienation from contemporary culture. He comments, for example, on how Bob Dylan's 1997 Time Out of Mind album was especially heartening "for those of us who felt that everything was going down the shitter." Well, speak for yourself, sir—there are those of us who saw Time Out of Mind as one among many great concurrent releases, albums by the likes of Radiohead, Portishead, The Verve, Jeff Buckley, even old geezer Van Morrison. Given Young's stated credo—"Rock and roll is just a name for the music of the young spirit"—McDonough's grumpiness is all the more unseemly.
"How do you finish a book about a guy when you feel in your heart he's ignoring his muse?" despairs McDonough in the home stretch, when Young is being especially uncooperative (and musically lazy, preferring to concentrate on his activities as a model train mogul.) The answer, seemingly, is that you don't finish it; interest and anecdote drop off sharply after 1997. But never count Neil Young out: his 2002 album may be a dud, but there's no reason not to think another masterpiece might be just around the corner. Shakey is, to quote its author, "not an obituary but an action painting. Still in progress." It's hard to imagine that anyone who reads it won't gladly sign up for the journey's next leg.
Ian McGillis (Books in Canada) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.