Shakey
by Jimmy McDonough
Random House

In Neil Young's biography, "Shakey," we learn a lot about its author, Jimmy McDonough. We learn that McDonough, in an Indianapolis head shop, stared "forever" at the cover of Young's album Zuma on the day of its release in 1975. We learn that after seeing Young perform "Like a Hurricane" on a TV special in 1977 — "I'll tell ya, it looked real" — McDonough and a girl "I was obsessed with" were inspired to hop in a 1976 Grand Prix and "[blast] down the highway, headed for a cheap motel." We learn how McDonough wormed his way into the Neil Young "circus" by telling the iconoclastic rocker, "Some asshole's gonna write a book about ya. It might as well be me." And we witness Young hanging up the phone on McDonough when the author harangues him, soon after Kurt Cobain's 1994 suicide, about the "phony dumb shit" TV appearances and interviews Young had been doing, only to be called back 10 minutes later and invited to a train collector's convention in York, Pa.

Oh, and we learn a lot about Young, too. But McDonough has a knack for not being able to stay out of the way of his own material. In the strong first part of the book, writing about Young from his birth in 1945 until the time he released his harrowing Tonight's the Night in 1975, McDonough gets as close as anybody can to deconstructing a man and a musician that even his closest compadres haven't been able to figure out. But in covering the years after 1975, McDonough and his experiences with Young come to the fore. That flaw is what turns "Shakey" from a possibly definitive music biography, like Peter Guralnick's two-volume Elvis series, into merely a decent read.

It may be natural that McDonough took this project a little personally. McDonough — who met Young while writing about him for the Village Voice — spent eight years with the musician, then another two years writing the book, only to have Young pull the plug on the project. It must have been devastating to McDonough, but the author establishes that from the earliest stages of Young's music career, back when he wanted his Winnipeg coffeehouse band to change its name to "Neil Young and the Squires" from "The Squires" once they got an out-of-town gig, Young drafted and dumped people as he felt necessary, whether it was backup bands (in particular, Crazy Horse) or wives (Young went through two turbulent marriages before settling down with his current wife, Pegi, in 1978). After reading the book, you might think of Neil Young a raging asshole (and some interviewed for the book use such words, such as Graham Nash, Young's cohort in Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, even as they praise Young's musical abilities). But McDonough didn't just think it, he did something about it — suing Young for $1.8 million in 2000. The two ended up settling a year later.

The lawsuit doesn't make it into the book, but lots of stories about how McDonough snagged or didn't snag interviews, or McDonough's opinions about Young's work, make it into the 738-page, epic-sized tome, which reflects McDonough's background as a writer for Spin in the 1990s — particularly in the early part of that decade, Spin's writers had a knack for writing stories about writing stories, getting to the subject of the stories whenever they damn well felt like it.

This is particularly true in the section of the book dealing with 1990-97, the latest time covered, in which McDonough seems to ride shotgun with Young through his whole professional life, seeing himself as his conscience, the one who would help Young keep his rock-and-roll edge instead of throwing it away on Lionel Trains and car restorations. "February 1996, Young and I were going at it again. I thought he was distracted by all the shit he was doing; Neil maintained he was charging his batteries, waiting for inspiration to create."

In focusing so much on his opinion of Young's career, McDonough glosses over other important aspects of Young's life, failing readers who might be seeking insights into his often weird, genre-switching, sometimes unlistenable music of the 1980s. Young's day-to-day family life with Pegi, with the exception of some discussion of Young's relationship with his son Ben, who has severe cerebral palsy and is nonverbal and quadriplegic, is largely unexamined, which McDonough hints was part of the deal to get access to Young himself. But Ben is a running subplot through Young's famed bounce from music style to music style in the 1980s; he recorded the synth-heavy Trans in 1982 as a reaction to his frustration at being unable to communicate with Ben, and his and Pegi's ill-fated attempt, urged by doctors early on, to perform round-the-clock therapy to get their son to crawl.

Perhaps in McDonough, Young saw Crazy Horse, his on-and-off backup band since 1969. Ralph Molina on drums, Billy Talbot on bass and either Frank Sampredo or the late Danny Whitten on guitar, were technically terrible, but Young is a musician who works by feel, preferring first takes, mistakes and all. In many cases — Everybody Knows This is Nowhere (1969), Zuma (1975), Rust Never Sleeps (1979) and Ragged Glory (1991) — it delivers exhilarating rock and roll, and in some cases — Re-Ac-Tor (1981), Life (1987) and Broken Arrow (1996) — it delivers turgid slop. McDonough is the same way in "Shakey."

However, Crazy Horse knew enough, at least around Young, not to stick their noses in the spotlight. Would that McDonough had done the same.

— Bob Cook (bobc@flakmag.com)