My My, Hey Hey

Like dreams, our musical enthusiasms color, reflect, organize and enchant our lives. But everybody knows what happens when you try to communicate those dreams to someone else. Writing about musical passions can put a similar strain on the patience of your audience. For someone like me, who loves Neil Young’s music with a deep and abiding passion--for someone who shares the dream--Jimmy McDonough’s fat, teeming, obsessive and revelatory biography of Young is a pure shot of all-access pleasure.

Even for a fan, however, reading “Shakey” is something of a trial. The book is picayune, tedious, annoying and exhausting, part endless biopic and part clip job--a bulging portmanteau of solid biographical writing, jousting conversations between Young and the author, rock-press scrapbook fragments, music criticism of wildly uneven quality and inane celebrity testimonials. (Willie Nelson: “He’s more than a writer, more than a singer, he’s an entertainer.”) “Shakey” is cliche-ridden (“I wanted to find out what made him tick”) yet hugely original, a paradoxically compromised “authorized” biography that manages to serve up an astonishing amount of dirt on its subject.

For culture warriors who hate the ‘60s, “Shakey” (Young has adopted the joke name Bernard Shakey for his generally horrible work as a movie director) will be a house of horrors that confirms their worst suspicions about the Pied Pipers of the counterculture. The book lovingly documents decades of shameless, unrepentant drug use, drinking, debauchery and rampant egotism. (It probably won’t help that the reliably perverse Young has been a staunch Reagan supporter and proponent of the death penalty, as well as a devoted husband and a stalwart parent to three kids, two of whom were born with cerebral palsy.)

Casual fans of Young’s “mellow” hits, such as his only No. 1 album, “Harvest” (1972), won’t find much comfort in “Shakey” either. McDonough is a fierce proponent of Young’s loudest, roughest, most abrasive experiments in music. And for women of a certain age, the antics of the perpetually partying musician and his friends may present a picture of an arrogant hippie loutishness they’d rather not contemplate. (Young’s most committed admirers are almost invariably male; peruse any Neil Young fan gathering or Web site and you’ll find a world that is virtually devoid of women.)

Still, once you filter out all the dreck, what Young’s story offers for even the agnostic reader is a riveting case study of the cost of long-running artistic vitality and, in McDonough’s telling, a sustained consideration of the irreducible tensions between critic and fan. A crank and fanatic in the Lester Bangs mold, McDonough stalks Young through the book like a bad conscience, and it seems clear that this edginess is what attracted and later alienated Young.

“Shakey” has its roots in two tour de force articles McDonough wrote about Young for the Village Voice and Spin in 1989 and 1990, just as Young was emerging from a bad run of emotional problems, business conflicts and a decade of botched but intermittently brilliant albums. Traumatized by a futile quest to find an effective treatment for his youngest son’s severe disabilities, Young had sought refuge in a series of personas: an obsessive-compulsive ranter in his “Re-ac-tor” album (1981), a cyborg-singer in “Trans” (1982), a rockabilly doofus in “Everybody’s Rockin’” (1983), a herky-jerky country rube in “Old Ways” (1985) and an enraged synth-god in “Landing on Water” (1986). True believers couldn’t figure out why this amazing guitar avatar who was still making fantastic music on stage kept putting out lame records. Something strange was taking place between the studio and the stage, and fans simply had to take it in stride.

By 1989, however, Young seemed on the verge of a new start, and McDonough was there both to upbraid him for his failings and spur him on. “Too Far Gone,” his piece for the Village Voice, was a thrilling, confrontational, anti-professional feat of real-rock journalism, with the writer functioning as the surrogate for Young fans who felt betrayed by their hero but ready to forgive all. McDonough hectored, badgered and mocked Young to his face, and Young (who once said he’d never been to a therapist, adding “They’re real interested in me, though”) responded by talking honestly about his lost decade. When McDonough pushed his buttons--”If I hear ‘Sugar Mountain’ one more time, I’m buying a gun”--Young just laughed. McDonough didn’t just capture the reemergence of a “frighteningly alive” popular artist but somehow almost became a catalyst for that reemergence.

By the time McDonough wrote about the making of “Ragged Glory” (one of Young’s best albums) for Spin the following year, he had joined the outer orbit of Young’s inner circle. Young, maybe seeing some of his own pugnacious, willful, contrarian self in McDonough--or maybe just displaying a sly talent for co-opting his best critic--recruited the journalist to write the liner notes for a gargantuan multi-CD collection of old, unreleased and live music that was due to arrive at the beginning of the 1990s (and, to this day, is rumored to grow vaster with every year it fails to appear). In August 1991, McDonough and Young signed a contract with Random House to produce a biography, with Young reportedly receiving nearly 20% of the advance payment.

There would be trouble ahead.

McDonough is superb at describing and evoking Young’s childhood, family dynamics and his youth. Born in Toronto in 1945, the son of a famous sportswriter father and an irascible sardonic housewife mother, Young had an upbringing that was idyllic and shot through with trauma. Struck with polio at 5, he spent a significant stretch of time as an invalid. His parents went through a painful divorce in his early teens; the experience seems to have sharpened his hunger for self-reliance and hastened his passage into the journeyman life of a musician.

Arriving in Los Angeles on April Fool’s Day in 1966, 20-year-old Young almost instantaneously became a star in Buffalo Springfield. Two years later he was making his first solo album and, by 1969, as a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, he was a superstar. In 1970, just 24, he bought a sprawling mountain ranch south of San Francisco for $340,000 in cash, a prince on his way to becoming a pop king.

“Shakey” takes almost half of its nearly 800 pages to get this far; the second half fractures in a kaleidoscope of rock-star shenanigans. McDonough is often more successful writing about various supporting actors--like Young’s driven, hard-living, Dionysian producer, David Briggs--than he is with Shakey himself. But Young didn’t make it easy for him. After signing the book contract, he made a point of becoming all but inaccessible to his Boswell. It was hardly shocking behavior from a guy who once declared, “As soon as you start talking about mystique, you have none.”

But elusiveness has always been Young’s MO. Throughout his career, he has struggled to remain true to his instincts and his gift by embracing compulsive change; popularity be damned. (His latest album, “Are You Passionate?,” is at best an honest snapshot of a momentary slump, at worst a lump of callous product). This struggle has also been the central subject of his oeuvre and the constant preoccupation in his lyrics and his bewildering career shifts.

In “Thrasher,” one of Young’s best songs, the singer’s credo of escape is gorgeously dramatized in a landscape of looming mortality where the temptations of habit and self-indulgence and the sure thing are duly contemplated and bypassed. He sees his generation of musicians ossified in “rock formations”; traverses “the windy halls of friendship” where “the motel of lost companions/Waits with heated pool and bar” but chooses “a one-way ticket to the land of truth” and the loner’s open road.

Along with his music, Young’s aesthetic strategy of constant veering has influenced a long list of rockers trying to avoid dying before they get old, from Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan to R.E.M. and Wilco. But has anyone else practiced Young’s cruel art with such breathtaking heartlessness, walking out on recording sessions and concert tours when the feeling’s not right? As McDonough points out, Young’s on-again, off-again band, Crazy Horse, has spent long periods--years--waiting for Young to decide if he’s ready for another go-round with them. (During one protracted lull, they released a record titled “Left for Dead.”) Take this strategy, add a cocktail of heroin and depression, and you have Kurt Cobain, quoting from Young’s anthem to mutable intensity, “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue),” in his suicide note (“I don’t have the passion anymore, and so remember, it’s better to burn out than to fade away”) before picking up a shotgun.

Maybe it’s no mystery, then, that “Shakey” embodies the contradiction between Young’s ambition to memorialize himself and his profound fear of being buried in the past. In any case, “Shakey” peters out in the fall of 1996, when Young decided he’d had enough, cut off McDonough’s access and floated the idea that he’d like to buy out the book contract and quash the project. Two years later, McDonough completed the book, and Young apparently began doing everything he could to kill it. In May 2000, McDonough sued Young for $1.8 million in a campaign to free his book.

Thus, the only pop star ever sued and blocked from releasing albums by his label for making albums that were “musically uncharacteristic of [his] previous recordings”--as Young was by Geffen in the mid-1980s--ended up being sued by his own official biographer. “Young,” the lawsuit charged, “revealed himself to be a contradiction in terms.” The suit was settled last October, clearing the way for the publication of “Shakey.” The book is dedicated to two people, one of them McDonough’s lawyer.

After reading “Shakey,” I was left wondering if McDonough had emerged from the experience of chasing down his idol with his enthusiasm and affection for Young’s music intact. As an erstwhile rock critic, I used to dream about meeting Young and writing about him. Now I’m glad it never happened. I don’t think I’d like Young very much, and even if he didn’t turn out to be the mean, ruthless creep “Shakey” proves he’s capable of being, I’d prefer not to have the Neil Young I love through his music displaced by the real thing. McDonough uses a line from one of Young’s masterpieces, “Powderfinger,” as his book’s epigraph--”Just think of me as one you never figured”--without including the lines that follow: “Would fade away so young/With so much left undone.” The great thing about the song is that it works both ways.