SHAKEY: NEIL YOUNG'S BIOGRAPHY(Random House)
The second paragraph on page 468 of Shakey, Jimmy McDonough's exhaustive Neil Young biography, begins, "Toward the end of January, 1975, Young and Ben Keith headed to Village Recorders…"
SHAKEY: NEIL YOUNG'S BIOGRAPHY
(Random House)
The second paragraph on page 468 of Shakey, Jimmy McDonough's exhaustive Neil Young biography, begins, "Toward the end of January, 1975, Young and Ben Keith headed to Village Recorders…"
That's right. It takes 468 pages to get just to 1975.
Shakey, titled after one of Young's aliases, is an obsessive, rambling, scattershot chronicle of an artist with those very qualities. Minus bibliographies and such, the text comes to 738 pages, and as engrossing a read as Shakey is at times, there's no overlooking the sheer audacity of the excess. McDonough intersperses extensive excerpts from Young interviews throughout the tome, and though some of them dwell on minutiae, they rescue the text from an otherwise slow death.
From Young's earliest forays into music, back when he told a partner in a high school folk duo to "think bongos," he followed the call of his muse no matter where it took him, no matter whom it left behind. So what emerges from Shakey is a story about an artist who does what he wants when he wants, no matter how maddeningly contradictory or arbitrary it seems. Stephen Stills and Young were at each other's throats in Buffalo Springfield, yet Young joined Crosby, Stills, and Nash to record Déjà Vu in 1969. Newly signed to Geffen Records in the 80s, Young followed his muse into a wormhole, producing the vocoder-soaked Trans, the 50s/rockabilly-ish Everybody's Rockin' and the straight country Old Ways in the span of three years. His creative tunnel vision resulted in a lawsuit from Geffen requesting damages in excess of $3.3 million, because his work for the label was " not 'commercial' and…musically uncharacteristic of Young's previous recordings." Although the suit was dropped, the relationship between Young and Geffen was damaged irreparably, and Young didn't produce an album that was commercially or critically successful until 1988's This Note's For You, which marked his return to Reprise.
His challenges haven't always been of the artistic variety. A polio survivor, Young is also epileptic, though he weaned himself off of seizure-repressing medicine in favor of mind-over-matter techniques. Two of his children have cerebral palsy, with son Ben rendered quadriplegic, nonoral and spastic by the disease. Young has also dealt in excess (with cocaine primarily), even after witnessing heroin's destruction of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten in 1972.
Jimmy McDonough comes off as the biggest Young fan alive. His hundreds of interview subjects are often, as Young describes them, "innarestin' characters," and McDonough is often dragged quite willingly into the story itself. Each Young recording is critiqued, and it gets to be too much sometimes; a fan serious enough to read such a long Neil Young biography is most likely familiar with Young's official releases, and extensive opinions on bootlegs and unreleased material is, at best, of limited usefulness. Learning that 1975's still-unreleased Homegrown album is a lost gem can only serve to frustrate the avid fan. By the end of the book, McDonough is freely inflicting his opinion on Young himself, advising him not to release a newly recorded song, or telling him no version of "Rockin' In the Free World" can compare to the one he performed on Saturday Night Live.
Young filed a lawsuit barring Shakey's publication, which was eventually settled. That move alone intimates that McDonough unearthed something a little too honest or unflattering. The book is certainly full of infamous exploits with "quasi-criminal" Crazy Horse, chemically handicapped Crosby, Stills and Nash, and almost any and every other person in Young's circle.
Still, there's a sense that we somehow don't know the man any better. Young's career path has certainly been no secret, as were anecdotes such as how a "blob" of cocaine in Young's nostril had to be removed from the Band's The Last Waltz movie. Young dodges the intent behind his lyrics, but that doesn't come off as aloofness so much as a standard artist's preference to leave interpretation to the listener. We know Young's an oddball, and we know that when he's on, he's brilliant. The only genuine revelation is that during the time Young was recording Re-ac-tor in the early 80s, his family spent 18 months of 18-hour days in excruciating physical therapy with baby Ben. Young kept this from the public at the time, and looking back, one can't blame him.
So by page 738, one is left with the impression that Neil Young, no matter how bare he's laid, is not particularly knowable, no matter how many interviews one conducts. Maybe it's because the man doesn't know himself. One is also left with the impression that what's here could have been said more economically. This is not to say that this and every biography should be 330 pages. Clearly, though, this book could have shed hundreds of pages and lost nothing of importance.
The more the reader works to know Neil Young, the more arbitrary and enigmatic he seems. Maybe the lesson here is that genius is always skewed, and we are perhaps best served by focusing on the medium within which a recording artist expresses himself or herself, instead of seeking the answers from the written word. Brian Briscoe [buy it]
