Neil young shakey biography

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    • Shakey: Neil Young's Biography

    July 16, 2008
    I'd started out with this in a state of exhilaration, and found myself carrying it in airports, reading it in cabs and generally just gripped by Young's story, but it began to fade for me, just like Young's music can. There was a stretch in his career when I found that every side he laid down was essential stuff, then, like Dylan, he went through a prolonged drought, then he bounced back, and was essential again. Some time ago (six years ago, thereabouts) I cracked that if we were going to have a Bush in the White House we could take consolation in the fact that at least we'd get some decent music out of Neil Young-- unfortunately it hasn't happened yet.

    I was surprised at how much I knew about Young, and how much I'd known but forgotten. Part of the initial rush of the book came from seeing this enigmatic figure come into focus-- and part of the letdown came from the fact that once he is in focus, it is clear that he is really kind of a jerk. In fairness to Young, McDonough's portrait injects a great deal of McDonough into the process, and McDonough seems pretty burnt out about Neil Young by the time Young is into his fourth or fifth renaissance. At first McDonough's strategy of injecting himself into the narrative seems brilliant. He often starts chapters about a portion of Young's life off by describing his contemporary impression of some person who was important to Young at some time in the past. He then weaves that individual's recollection into a narrative that also includes excerpts from his interviews with Young conducted over the course of the project, other third party accounts, and omniscient narrative drawn from other sources. This works well for a while, but gradually McDonough becomes a more and more important character, and we find that we are reading more about McDonough's impressions of a particular gig or recording than we are about anyone else. Since these impressions are frequently negative,

    Neil Young

    Canadian and American musician (born 1945)

    For the album, see Neil Young (album).For other people named Neil Young, see Neil Young (disambiguation).

    Neil Percival YoungOC OM (born November 12, 1945) is a Canadian and American singer-songwriter. After embarking on a music career in Winnipeg in the 1960s, Young moved to Los Angeles, joining the folk rock group Buffalo Springfield. Since the beginning of his solo career, often backed by the band Crazy Horse, he released critically acclaimed albums such as Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969), After the Gold Rush (1970), Harvest (1972), On the Beach (1974), and Rust Never Sleeps (1979). He was also a part-time member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, with whom he recorded the chart-topping 1970 album Déjà Vu.

    Young's guitar work, deeply personal lyrics and signature high tenor singing voice define his long career. He also plays piano and harmonica on many albums, which frequently combine folk, rock, country and other musical genres. His often distorted electric guitar playing, especially with Crazy Horse, earned him the nickname "Godfather of Grunge" and led to his 1995 album Mirror Ball with Pearl Jam. More recently, he has been backed by Promise of the Real.

    Young directed (or co-directed) films using the pseudonym "Bernard Shakey", including Journey Through the Past (1973), Rust Never Sleeps (1979), Human Highway (1982), Greendale (2003), CSNY/Déjà Vu (2008), and Harvest Time (2022). He also contributed to the soundtracks of the films Philadelphia (1993) and Dead Man (1995).

    Young has received multiple Grammy and Juno Awards. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has inducted him twice: in 1995 as a solo artist and in 1997 as a member of Buffalo Springfield. In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked Young No. 30 on its list of the "250 Gr

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    • Shakey - Neil Young Biography

    by Jimmy McDonough

    Neil Young Book Review

    Neil Young News

    Read excerpts of "Shakey" Biography

    Here are some book reviews of Jimmy McDonough's long awaited biography of Neil Young titled "Shakey": Neil Young's Biography which was finally released in 2002. Weighing in at 786 pages, it is considered to be the definitive account of Neil's life and music.

    The "authorized" biography's publication resulted in a lawsuit filed by none other than Neil himself. The lengthy publication delay and the surrounding controversy are just another chapter in the unpredictability of Neil.

    In an article on Slate, Marc Weingarten writes on the "Shakey" lawsuit:

      "Shakey is a curious hybrid: part hagiography, part laundry list of perfidy. As the book makes abundantly clear, Young has always been at war with his own impulses. He's a ferociously ambitious artist who lives capriciously. He started out as a frail, polio-stricken fan of Little Richard and the Shadows' Hank Marvin living in a rural Canadian outpost where American records were hard to come by. His father was a popular journalist, his mother a tough-love matriarch. They divorced, and Young drifted into bands, but with his own interests at heart: He insisted that his first professional band, the Squires, rename itself 'Neil Young and the Squires' when they started gigging."

    From Guardian Unlimited article by Adam Sweeting with Young commenting on the Shakey biography:

      Young:"I think Jimmy McDonough is a great writer and that's why I asked him to do it. I didn't want some watered-down flowery version of who I am - that's nothing but a self-serving piece of shit. But rather than let anything happen officially, I should have just let people do whatever they wanted to do. That was a mistake, but I'll live with it. I fought it coming out because I wanted it delayed until after my daughter turned 18, and I managed to delay it for a couple of years, so I did OK.' "
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    “Type of guy you think I am, you probably think I’ll run over that dog and get a new one.”

    “You know what? You would feel so bad that for the next six years you wouldn’t even tell anybody – but this dog motif would appear in fifty songs.”

    – An exchange between Neil Young and the author, Jimmy McDonough

    After reading Jimmy McDonough’s new biography of Neil Young, you emerge from the experience having learned two things: that Neil Young is an enigma and that Jimmy McDonough blew a chance to write a good book. In Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography, McDonough’s exhaustive and exhausting biography of the rock legend, McDonough comes across as so self-indulgent, so desperate to impress the reader, that he almost completely loses track of what he’s here to do: to write a frickin’ biography. During his school years, Neil Young once clobbered a bully with a dictionary. By the end of Shakey, you want to do the same to McDonough, using this particular weighty tome instead.

    Neil Young has had such a fascinating career over the past thirty-some years and is such a fascinating person that it’d be hard to muck up a book about his life story, but McDonough tries his best to ruin things. Shakey is haphazardly organized: at times, it wants to be a straight-ahead biography, and then it tries to be an oral biography, and in the last hundred pages, it shifts into a lame attempt at gonzo journalism. Like a Crazy Horse album, this book reads like it was thrown together in one marathon sitting, with no overdubs. Er, I mean editing. And like the last Crazy Horse album, Broken Arrow, it’s a rather hit-and-miss affair.

    When McDonough hits, though, he connects, and Shakey shows potential. The first 150 pages of Shakey chronicle Young’s formative years: his early life in Toronto with parents Scott and Rassy Young, the family’s subsequent years in the small Ontario town of Omeemee (the

      Neil young shakey biography