Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography by Jimmy McDonough. Anchor Books. 786 pages. $16.95

It’s probably about as hard to sum up Neil Young as it is to sum up Jimmy McDonough’s fantastic biography of him, but one incident comes close.

The year is 1975. Young is touring with Stephen Stills, former bandmate from Buffalo Springfield and of course CSNY. Stills, whose obnoxious disposition cranks up a few notches when he’s high, loudly bitches at Young’s crew at a show in Charlotte. Later, with the two stars in separate buses heading for the next show in Atlanta, Stills gets Young on the CB radio and starts tearing into him personally. Young decides he’s had enough. After ripping the CB out of the wall, he tells the driver to take the Memphis exit. Stills arrives in Atlanta not only to find no Neil, but – with 21 sold-out dates to go – no tour. All he has is a telegram: “Dear Stephen, funny how some things that start spontaneously end that way. Eat a peach, Neil.”

Rash decisions, snap judgments, sudden bail-outs at the worst possible time; Neil Young seems to have done a lot of living by the seat of his pants, and he makes records the same way. This is not to say he has no regrets; the guy who once sang “Why do I keep fuckin’ up?” has apparently done a lot of it and put other people at risk in the process – like his manager, who had to make good on all those missed shows. His art is that of never staying in the same place very long. He makes reputedly great albums he won’t release, releases dreck that never should have seen the light of day, and – like Bob Dylan, the only major rock star to whom he compares – suddenly uncorks a masterpiece just when you’ve counted him out; sometimes, as in the case of his 1975 disc Tonight’s the Night, a masterpiece that sounds like dreck the first time you hear it because it’s too twisted and idiosyncratic for you to get a grip on it – or, maybe, because it starts spontaneously and ends that way.

“I like it if people enjoy what I’m doing,” Young tells McDonough, “but if they don’t, I also like it. I sometimes really like aggravating people with what I do. I think it’s good for them.”

It probably is – and God knows Young has provided enough sides of himself for everyone to love or hate. How many Neil Youngs have there been over the last 30 years? Well, let’s see. There’s the singer-songwriter who – with or without Crosby, Stills and Nash – wrote pleasant, slightly obscure ballads and rock classics that have become oldies staples: “Heart of Gold,” “Old Man,” “Helpless,” “Southern Man,” “Ohio,” et al. There’s the Crazy Horse Neil, a hard-rock warrior leading a rag-tag band through soaring, sonic chargers like “Like a Hurricane” and “Cortez the Killer,” where the lyrics are sparse and Young’s blistering Fender tells more than words can say. There’s the techno Neil who tried to harness digital sound, and the retro Neil who went back to basics. There’s the politically incorrect reactionary who thumbed his nose at the hipoisie and voted for Reagan, and the voice of the common man who helped get Farm Aid off the ground. And there’s the elder statesman Neil, grunge before grunge was born, still cool enough when he was pushing fifty to be quoted in Kurt Cobain’s suicide note: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”