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"You can't go along from people to people, place to place, creating, changing, without hurting a lot of people. How can you do that? Can you think of an answer? I think I'm going a good job--even though it's painful sometimes."
Neil Young is one of rock and roll's most important, influential and enigmatic figures, an intensely reticent artist who has granted no writer access to his inner sanctum--until now. In Shakey, Jimmy McDonough tells the whole story of Young's incredible life and career: from his childhood in Canada to his cofounding of the pioneering folk-rock group Buffalo Springfield; to the bleary conglomeration of Crazy Horse and simultaneous monstrous success of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; to the depraved depths of Tonight's the Night and the strange changes of the Geffen years; to Young's unprecedented nineties "comeback" with Ragged Glory and Harvest Moon.
McDonough spent six years doggedly pursuing rock's most elusive quarry, talking to more than three hundred of Young's associates (many of whom spoke freely for the first time), as well as sitting down with Young in person for more than fifty hours of interviews. This long-awaited, unprecedented story of a rock and roll legend is filled with never-before-published words directly from the artist himself:
-on heroin: "I didn't see any reason to try it. I never shot up anything... I guess after I wrote a couple songs about it, then people who might've offered it...didn't."
-on abruptly firing Crazy Horse to record with Pearl Jam: "That happens over and over again through my whole fuckin' life with all these bands. That's the reason I'm still here. Because as painful as it is to change--and as ruthless as I may seem to be in what I have to do to keep going--you gotta do what ya gotta do. Just like a fuckin' vampire. Heh heh heh."
-on himself: "Look around me-I'm a fuckin' capitalist businessman! I've got all this shit. I'm a good businessman, right?"
By his own admission, Young has left behind "a lotta destruction....a big wake" in achieving his dreams, and for the first time he addresses that subject in painful details. Shakey-titled after one of Young's' many aliases, Bernard Shakey-is not only a detailed chronicle of the rock era told through the life of one very idiosyncratic, uncompromising artist, but a compelling human story as well: that of a loner for whom music was the only outlet, a driven yet tortured figure who learned to control epilepsy via "mind over matter." It's also about an oddly passionate model-train mogul who, inspired by his own son's struggle with cerebral palsy, became a major activist in the quest to help others with that condition. The story is uniquely told in McDonough's interwoven voices--those of biographer, critic, historian, obsessive fan--and by the ever cantankerous Young himself, who puts his biographer through some unforgettable paces while answering the perennial question Is it better to burn out than to fade away?
- Sales Rank: #1008906 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Random House
- Published on: 2002-05-07
- Released on: 2002-05-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.51" h x 1.65" w x 6.00" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 800 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Amazon.com Review
Cantankerous and secretive, Neil Young has banished authors from his inner sanctum--until now. In Shakey, Jimmy McDonough distills more than 300 interviews (including guarded yet revealing interrogations of Young himself) into the definitive biography: the skyrocket success, willful disasters, health horrors and triumphs, stunning comebacks, and highly colorful scuffles with equally impossible characters like Stephen Stills, David Crosby, and the incompetent yet brilliant musicians of Crazy Horse. Young is not quite the noble soul some thought--he's an astounding control freak. But he is never less than fascinating. "As ruthless as I may seem to be," Young tells McDonough, "you gotta do what ya gotta do. Just like a f-----' vampire. Heh heh heh." --Tim Appelo
From Library Journal
More than a biography, this work from journalist McDonough (Village Voice, Variety, Spin) is the re-creation of an era.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Review
“Most people did their best work when they were younger. Neil Young is as good as he ever was, which is quite an accomplishment.... I don’t know if you could name anybody better who came out of rock & roll.” -- Randy Newman
“For someone like me, who loves Neil Young’s music with a deep and abiding passion … Jimmy McDonough’s fat, teeming, obsessive and revelatory biography of Young is a pure shot of all-access pleasure.” -- LA Times
“As the music journalist Jimmy McDonough makes clear in Shakey, his exhaustive, quarrelsome and sometimes maddening biography, it’s never wise to presume to understand this complicated artist…. Fans thirsty for the melancholy hues of Neil Young will not be disappointed: He avoids lights! He drinks tequila all night long! Songs are recorded in one take! Songs are made up on the spot!…. Part of the uncanny shrewdness of Neil Young, never more apparent than in the nearly 800 pages of Shakey, is the evasion.” -- The New York Times Book Review
“Inconsistent? Eccentric? You bet. McDonough’s Neil Young is a reclusive loner in flannel shirt and workboots, a stubborn changeling and zing-zag wanderer whose erratic genius and pursuit of the muse has made him a potent force in popular music for 35 years at the same time as he’s left lovers, business associates, friends and fellow musicians puzzled, angry and disillusioned…. The Neil Young in Shakey … is finally an impossible, even ridiculous man. Impossible to predict, impossible to categorize, impossible to unreservedly love, perhaps, but just as impossible to really hate. Even more than Sinatra, he’s done it his way on the human highway.” -- The Globe and Mail
“McDonough spent a decade writing his semi-authorized tome, the first three years just trying to get Young to talk. Even then it was like meeting Brando’s Kurtz in a cave at the end of Apocalypse Now. McDonough, 42, has taken the trip upriver for every journalist who ever had a notion to interview Neil, and after reading the exhaustive results, I can only say better him than me…. Young comes across as a Jekyll-and-Hyde loner whose life has unfolded like a reckless chemistry experiment -- a control freak on an endless quest for the uncontrolled moment…. Displaying an obsessive zeal that matches his subject’s, McDonough traces every step, and misstep, of Young’s life in staggering detail. [Shakey] offers a motherlode of fascinating detail, especially about the circus of characters around Young.” -- Maclean’s
“The thrill of McDonough’s breezy, anecdotal prose is that it sheds meaningful light into every cranny where it chooses to snoop…. With its rotating cast of characters, Shakey presents Neli Young’s messy, brilliant, erratic story with humour, sadness and big, greasy dollops of truth -- a rarity in the “official biography” genre…. a worthwhile read for fan or foe alike.” -- The Ottawa Citizen
“…a meticulously detailed and thoughtful book that sidesteps the sort of robotic adulation and self-censorship that often drags down rock biographies.” -- The Toronto Sun
“Despite there being a virtual cottage industry in Young books in recents years, McDonough’s access to the man himself, along with his tenacious research, renders [Shakey] the definitive volume. McDonough crafts an engrossing portrait of a man whose obsession and focus turned to megalomania.” -- Winnipeg Free Press
“For Young, authenticity is all, and more than any previous book, Shakey shows to what extremes he is prepared to go to stay spontaneous and fresh.” -- The Gazette (Montreal)
“This book is a necessity for the rabid Neil Young fan, the sort who lies around contemplating where the idea for the hand claps in the intro to Cinnamon Girl came from, or wonders what particular brand of guitar was responsible for the sound on Zuma. But any fan at all will enjoy it.” -- The Calgary Herald
“…a sympathetic and understanding, yet clear-eyed and merciless biography…Young, who has always sought authenticity above refinemnt, truth over glamour, has…got the biography he deserves.” -- Vancouver Sun
“Jimmy McDonough’s biography of Neil Young is…passionate, urgent and thorough. Young fans, get ready to bliss out.” -- NOW magazine, Toronto
“Through the different voices of friends, relatives, enemies and associates, as well as the often profane talks with the man himself, McDonough is able to provide strong, penetrating insight into a unique, complex individual.” -- The Toronto Sun
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
As good a biography as Neil fans will ever get.
By R. Ruddock
This will forever be the definitive biography of Neil Young for one, simple reason: no one else is going to, or even can at this point, write one nearly as detailed. Many of the key figures who were with Neil during his formative years are now gone. David Briggs. Ben Keith. Larry Johnson. Neil's parents. Carrie Snodgress. And that's just a sampling of the ones McDonough talked to.
Jimmy McDonough is pretty clearly a near-superfan of Young, and that's where many of the less than stellar reviews of this book come into play. Yes, Jimmy often inserts himself into the story in ways that many would argue a biographer should not. And yes, Jimmy is sometimes willing to gloss over the train wrecks Neil left behind him at the urging of "the muse" or whatever fleeting feeling he had at a given moment, sometimes ignoring that his actions did indeed have consequences for people other than himself.
The thing is this: McDonough's book is so painstakingly detailed and researched that attempting to write anything coming close to it for sheer completeness would be folly. McDonough also manages to scrape together a pretty cohesive timeline of "the ditch years" from '73 to '75, a time Neil has more and more smoothed over as a good 'ol boys-being-boys adventure with a lot of drugs, booze, and bad decisions. McDonough paints a much less pretty picture, with a lot more gritty detail and emotion - this was a time of sadness, anger, and desperation in Neil's career, and I think Jimmy hits it right on the head when he says no one really knew if Neil was going to make it out. They were dicey times because of his lifestyle, as dicey as they ever got. There's stuff in there that Neil just won't talk about today because, as he says in his own autobiographies, he could be a really angry, irrational guy. There's a reason Jimmy and Neil were so on-again off-again while he was writing this book - Jimmy was poking around in history where Neil wasn't comfortable. Hell, Neil threatened to sue him if he published for a while there in the 90s.
Could the book be shorter? Absolutely. I can't even get into Neil's toy train obsession - it's tedious stuff. And the latter years portions of the book are a little tainted by McDonough's self-involvement in Neil's life. Granted, doing a biography on Neil Young probably put 5 extra years on Jimmy's face, so I think he gets a pass on some of it. This cannot have been an easy book to finish.
It's not perfect, but it's as close as we'll get. If you want a book that doesn't ignore the ugly parts of Neil's career, even relishes in them at times, this is one of a kind, and always will be.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Lots of info- so so writing and editing -- No active table of Contents
By h,s (s h)
If you're not interested in Neil Young, you won't find a lot of this book interesting at all. But for anyone interested in Young to begin with, there is a lot told. The coverage is good, extensive. The author did his homework. The book bounces between a generally chronological narrative of Young's life and an interview in which Young comments on the events and people. This is not a bad structure for a bio -- it lets you see, e.g., that some characters, Stills, Nash, especially Stills, do not come off very well in the writer's eyes, although Young seems to think a bit better of them than the author does. Also, the then and now structure lets you get Young's take on what happened, sometimes profound, sometimes trite, sometime mature, sometimes childish. This book might have been aptly titled "More Barn". Fame and fortune didn't change who or what Neil Young was, but it indulged him and made it possible for him to shout, "More barn - The Biography of Neil Young" (see page 369-370). ;)
Like most biographies, if you idolized the person before, you probably won't afterwards, which is probably a healthy thing. Everybody (except Richie Furay) comes off as pretty messed up -- some with redeeming human qualities and some not. Stephen Stills comes off especially badly; it seems the author can't even think of Stills without disparaging him. But Stills isn't the only one to show neurotic, egotistical, insecure, control freak, anger management issues, drug abuse (including alcohol) problems -- it can be a bit depressing to read what unrelenting egotistical, spoiled jerks the characters can be. With money and fame comes the ability to indulge those facets. E.g., the way Young morns a dead heroin addict is by severely abusing alcohol -- lesson learned? Probably not but it made for a good album (well, good depending on your taste and tolerance for drunken performances). And the author paints Young's response to a second child with cerebral palsy as "Why is this happening to me?", a somewhat egocentric perspective for a parent. Is it accurate? You can't really tell without another source to compare with.
The sentence structure and word choice is not as high quality as the overall structure. In fact, the mostly so-so writing at times is dripping with adulatory goo. The author's narrative slips from the formal to the familiar to the downright jocular (addressing the reader as "Man", as in "That's not cool, man"), and from the third person to first person narrative. This is unnecessarily clumsy. The grammar needs correction and stylistic improvement in places. So, the book would have been improved by better, more aggressive editing or at least a proof reader with a copy of _Strunk and White_ in hand. The author is at his worst when giving artistic criticism. The critiques are often pompous, excessively subjective, and sometimes just plain awful. E.g., assessing the Ragged Glory recording sessions with Crazy Horse, the author offers this plop of insight: "Young used the band like the vessel in Fantastic Voyage, taking a trip deep inside" (p. 646-7). Less offensively, the author occasionally gets lyric lines out of order ("Love to Burn", p. 647).
The last few chapters turn into a sort of aimless buddy script without a plot, with the main characters being Young and the author--wait, how did the author get into the story? Was the author a musician playing in Young's band? A worker on Young's ranch? Maybe at least a cook in the kitchen or the kid that delivers the newspaper? No just a biographer who ends up talking about him and Neil hanging out as former interviews the latter. The more the author inserts himself into the narrative, the less interesting it is. By the end of he book, you'll wonder why it didn't finish several chapters sooner. My conjecture is that the author had promised the publisher x-many chapters and came up short, so he wrote a me-and-Neil finish to fluff up the last few paragraphs into several chapters.
The Kindle edition has active chapter end notes (although not all of them are inked correctly) but it has no active table of Contents. Shame on Random House; if the publisher is going to impose a pricing scheme that prevents competitive discounts, then it could at least include an active table of contents. I recommend you borrow the book from a friend or library. Otherwise, you'll only encourage the buggers. ;) Otoh, if you're a Young fan, you'll probably find the work interesting enough to warrant a purchase. And it's far and away the best Neil Young bio so far, it being the only serious one as yet.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Neil moves in mysterious ways
By Jeffrey Crawford
Much like Bob Dylan, Neil Young is a wilful, unpredictable creative force. Jimmy McDonough captures all of that incredible and infuriating force in Shakey (which derives from Neil's filmmaking pseudonym, Bernard Shakey). The author doesn't shy away from anything - the bitter split between his parents, Neil's tenuous relationships with Crosby, Stills & Nash, and the powerful, often difficult people Neil works or worked with (David Briggs, Jack Nitschke, Elliot Roberts etc). Neil even pulled the plug on this book after giving his permission to write it - but McDonough wrote it anyway. Neil also said he'd never write an autobiography, but he then went and did that too (Waging Heavy Peace). As I said, wilful and unpredictable. Great book.
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