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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
The story of the "Godfather of Grunge" is a tale of sickness, health, overweening ego, spectacular talent and reckless abandon.
Jun 5, 2002 | "Shakey: Neil Young's Biography," by Jimmy McDonough is a bruiser. At 786 pages it's longer than "Mandela: The Authorized Biography," by Anthony Simpson or "Mao: A Life," by Philip Short, but then neither Mandela nor Mao played guitar worth a damn. What Young does share with those two, however, is icon status, and after reading McDonough's staggeringly thorough examination of the arch-rocker's life and work, you're convinced he's earned it -- while the people who've orbited around him during his long and tempestuous career all deserve Purple Hearts, several dozen of them each, and a nice quiet place to spend their sunset years.
Tour manager Bob Sterne should get a bucketful of those medals. "Neil's come to me," Sterne tells McDonough, "and said, 'Go get all the set lists and throw 'em in the trash can' -- and he said this to me fifteen minutes before the show. He's not just talking about the band's set list, he's talking about the lighting guys, the sound guys -- every single list in the building." Young's longtime cohort and producer, the late David Briggs, said, "It's not fun at all working for Neil -- fun's not part of the deal -- but it's very fulfilling."
There's plenty not to like about Young in this biography. For that matter, there's plenty not to like about this biography, which is why I was surprised that I ended up liking it -- a lot. When I began reading "Shakey" (the title is the singer's nickname) I didn't expect it would be any more interesting, or readable, than most rock bios. Yet, as I dug into it, it gradually won me over because it's as good a book (albeit a portly one) as I've ever read about how an artist makes art and the wounds he sustains in the process, and the casualties he leaves along the way. That doesn't mean it's nearly 800 pages of the Neil Young blues -- McDonough gets it all: the chaos, the grandeur, the good times and dreary deaths, the alcohol- and drug-besotted recording sessions, the broken hearts and the sheer unfettered joy of a seriously gifted artist, who's madly productive, breathing in the spirit of his time and exhaling his life's work.
Writing intelligently and engagingly about art, especially when it happens to occur in rock music, can border on the impossible. On the one hand you run the risk of descending so far into tediously cerebral deconstruction -- overanalyzing lyrics in the case of a songwriter -- that you suck all the air out of the work. On the other hand, if you're a fan, as McDonough clearly is, you are in danger of producing a vapid hagiography that reads like a book-length testimonial. McDonough's portrait of Young avoids both pitfalls. He makes his admiration for the musician clear, but he also calls him on his bullshit, his thoughtlessness, his recklessness and his failures.
"His single mindedness is inspirational," McDonough writes. "It can also be exhausting. Even frightening. There is a dark side to Neil Young." Gary Burden, Young's friend and art director for many of his albums, puts it more succinctly: "Neil's a real artist, but he's also a ruthless motherfucker." Fair enough, now let's count how many major (or not so major) artists that statement could apply to. Never mind, we'd need a supercomputer to manage the tally.
The point is that what makes the work of significant artists significant in the first place is their willfulness, forcefulness, distinctive (and quirky) points of view and their insistence on having things their way while striving to achieve a sometimes unattainable level of quality. What keeps them going is a preternatural drive fueled by a formidable ego. That Young is an overbearing, difficult, prickly character -- which is what much of the buzz around this book has focused on -- is hardly a shocker. It would be a real revelation if McDonough had found him to be a mellowed-out cuddle bunny, but never fear, the "Godfather of Grunge" (a sobriquet Young disdains) is anything but.
Joel Bernstein, Young's archivist, describes him like so: "Neil does what he wants to do when he wants to do it and doesn't do what he doesn't want to do when he doesn't want to do it." Thanks to this approach, as Young himself contritely admits, he's left a wake of destruction. He's also produced some of the most compelling, thoughtful and courageous work of any popular musician. That he can be wildly inconsistent and sometimes just plain bad -- and then rise, phoenixlike, with a work of brilliance and astonishing quality -- is evidence of his drive to stay fresh and keep inventing. Young occasionally goes down dead-end streets, but it hasn't stopped him from taking roads he's never been on before.
That's a lot tougher than it sounds. As an artist matures, competing with his own past -- taking the necessary risks, upping the ante -- becomes increasingly more difficult, problematic and frightening. Some seek refuge in endlessly repeating themselves, others freeze up. Young seems to have done neither. How he pulls off this neat creative trick year after year and whether or not it's indeed better to burn out than to fade away, are central themes in "Shakey."
Everyone who's heard Young's "Helpless" (which means everyone who's been in earshot of a radio or stereo in the last few decades) knows that he comes from "a town in north Ontario." It was in that town -- Omemee -- that Young, now 56, contracted polio when the virus swept through Canada in 1951. It transformed the pudgy 6-year-old and nearly killed him. "Neil got polio and lost all his girlish curves," Rassy, Young's indomitable mother and a central character in "Shakey," tells McDonough. "Damn near died. Gawd that was awful ... Christ, he looked like hell on the highway. Skin and bones. He never got fat again ... We didn't know if he'd ever walk." When he came home from the hospital "fresh from a disinfectant bath, his black hair in spikes," Young asked the adults, "I didn't die, did I?"
