“If Neil Young admires that sentiment so much,” John Lennon said not long before he died, “why doesn’t he do it? Because he sure as hell faded away and came back many times, like all of us.”
With 738 pages of text, Jimmy McDonough covers all these sides of Neil Young and more: epileptic, dopehead, devoted father of children with mild to severe forms of cerebral palsy, and – a total surprise to me – a co-owner of Lionel Trains. All rock biographies are, in a sense, about the same thing, really, morons with money, and McDonough is guilty at some level of the usual excesses of the form, but the book has so much more on its mind. McDonough's focus isn't merely to create a comprehensive apologia that tracks down every last concert, business deal, broken friendship or broken heart. Instead, he goes for broke. The book combines detailed reportage, the author’s own feisty, no-bullshit personal voice, and generous interviews with everyone involved – including a few obsessive fans – as well as Young himself; interviews where McDonough asks all the right questions and Young digs deep into himself for an answer. It’s an authorized biography (the copyright is held by both author and subject) but it doesn’t demand an excess amount of skepticism, as both McDonough and Young freely criticize the music, life and choices, sometimes in fairly harsh terms. It becomes fairly clear that Young is a totally mercurial control freak who, as his manager Eliott Roberts said recalling the Stills debacle, can “fuck you like a snake.” And yet, he seems to inspire rather than command the totally one-sided loyalty he gets from his inner circle of renegade enablers.
“I’m tough, but I’m fair,” says Roberts, who immediately corrects himself. “No, I think I’m way tough, but I don’t think I’m fair at all. Fairness comes into the equation sometimes, but when I deal with Neil for Neil, I don’t care what’s fair – I only care what Neil wants. Not what’s fair.”
What Neil wants; it’s the refrain you hear over and over. “Neil tells everybody what to play, note for note,” says occasional drummer Kenneth Buttrey. “If you play somethin’ he doesn’t like, boy, he’ll put a look on you you’ll never forget.”
This is as good an explanation as any why Young continues to play with Crazy Horse, by almost universal accord the shittiest band in the business. Detractors say Young plays with the band only because he can dominate them, and Young doesn’t exactly disagree: “If a good musician plays with me, they play too much. They always play too much. Always trying to show me how great they are.”
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
Super reivew Rodney: very fine representation of the book and of Neil himself, as subject as big as the great outdoors.
2 - Mary
Though I learned a lot from this book (e. g. never knew Rick James and Neil Young were in a band together), I found the author too fond of grand pronouncements to take seriously. He loves to make generalizations about whole decades, writing off the whole 80s for example, when the truth is there is good music and bad being produced at any moment in time. Such sloppy thinking and pretentious writing to boot!
3 - Rodney Welch
I never thought the thinking was sloppy. Was the writing pretentious? Well, it wasn't unpretentious, I'll grant you that, but here was a case where I thought the personal approach worked, much the way it does in the work of people like Lester Bangs or Nick Tosches.
4 - Thrasher
Rodney,
Interesting review of Shakey. Really liked your points about Neil playing with Crazy Horse since it demonstrates that Neil often is in this for more than just the music. It's often about a band that allows him to be himself and go to places he hasn't been before.
Take Greendale for instance.
Anyway, enjoyed the review and put a link to it on Thrasher's Wheat at:
http://home.earthlink.net/~thrasher1/wheatfield.html
There's also a link to other reviews of the Shakey bio.
Keep on Rockin!
Thrasher
5 - Rodney Welch
Thanks. I bought On the Beach this weekend -- hope to post some comments in the next day or so. A most interesting disc.
6 - bluesufi
at times i see neil young as a van gogh of music
he has definitely brought us colors we have never seen before
but given the tool of media, which van did not have, he has consciously created his own legacy
if he is a contradiction, he is a contradiction by choice
he seems to know, or has learned, the differences between utter selfishness, self preservation and pursuing the art of what he hears and wants to share.
how many of us given the means could do that ?
how many other rock artists given millions have had the consciousness to do that ?
dylan for sure
he is a man on many missions on many levels and somehow accomplishes it or walks away from it
he has never been owned by the music industry or any other artist
if nothing else, neil determined at an early age to be remembered and to do whatever that required
he's as strange a bird as rock music has ever heard and seen
except if he was a real bird he'd refuse to fly he'd make birds that drive tractor trailers and trains a reality
for a canadian he's as american as you can get
remember the american's ? (stills, '73)
to hate him is to love him