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.
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