As a musical illiterate, I’m in no position to fault Crazy Horse, but McDonough provides a helpful litany of abuses: “Muffed changes. Tattered harmonies. Tempos that slow down, speed up or collapse altogether. Guitar passages that last longer than a lifetime. Songs about nothing that never end. Repetition to the point of lunacy.” David Crosby is more blunt: “They should’ve never been allowed to be musicians at all. They should’ve been shot at birth. They can’t play.”

According to Young, they don’t always bring out the best in him, either, but they bring out something he can’t get with any other group: “[I]t’s such a special thing, because none of us can really play. We know we aren’t any good. Fuck, we’d get it in the first take every time, and it was never right – but we could never do it better.”

Besides being a great and somewhat heroic story, Shakey is also a great listening guide. McDonough goes deep into the music, pulling out odd facts – “Harvest” is apparently about Young’s suicidal former mother-in-law, for example – and fresh interpretations that had me diving into the record stack. I must have snoozed through early songs like “I Believe in You,” which turns out to be a gorgeous song about doubt, and I either completely forgot about the beautiful ringing guitar lines of “The Loner” or never paid attention to begin with. Young’s battle with epilepsy may have inspired both “Mr. Soul” – “Stick around while the clown who is sick does the trick of disaster” – and “Expecting to Fly,” of which McDonough writes: “the out-of-kilter sense of time in the arrangement captures the je ne sais quoi of Young’s electrical system.” Knowing the full story of Young’s doomed guitarist, Danny Whitten, gives an added poignancy to an album like Everybody Knows This is Nowhere. Young later said that “every musician has one guy on the planet he can play with better than anyone else,” and his guy was Danny Whitten. Listen to the way their guitars meld on the dark moody drama of “Down by the River,” and you know what Young’s talking about.

Throughout, McDonough’s critical acuity is balanced and usually sharp. He can nail some things perfectly. On Tonight’s the Night: “Young knew the attractions and rewards of being wasted out of your skull, and had no illusions about the price paid, which for some was the boneyard.” On Rust Never Sleeps: “American history by way of a bong hit.” His assessment of Young’s “Needle and the Damage Done,” that in the early 1970s “next to no one (at least in song) was writing about the death-trip flip side of feelin’ groovy,” perhaps should have been qualified by noting that on that score the Velvet Underground beat everyone to the punch by several years. Also, McDonough found more to love in “Will to Love” (from the 1976 American Stars N’ Bars LP) than I ever will – it’s about a salmon, fer heaven’s sake. One is grateful to Young for having sung that endless song exactly once, which is about as much as I’ve ever played it.