- Hardcover: 512 pages
- Publisher: Viking (4 Oct 2012)
- ISBN-10: 0670921718
Blimey.
This is a monumentally peculiar book. It is disjointed, repetitive, and
meanders from subject to subject with a total lack of focus. I also like it a lot. Neil Young writes how
he has given up alcohol and marijuana some months before commencing work on
this long-awaited autobiography, and there are times within these 400+ pages
that he reaches a new lucidity about events of his past, almost as if he is
revisiting them with a new and sober vision.
The disjointed and episodic nature of the
book is disconcerting in the first few chapters, but after a while one realises
that it has its own internal structure and logic and that if he had written the
book in a more conventional linear manner it just would not have worked
anywhere near as well. He keeps
revisiting his current obsessions; the LincVolt project, and his PureTone
process which he hopes will replace mp3s as the industry’s standard for digital
streaming of music.
He is a strange, but oddly likeable fellow;
and although he appears to have been brutally honest about his chequered past –
the break ups of his relationships prior to meeting Pegi, for example – he
still comes over as a nice man, and more importantly, a man of steadfast
integrity. His accounts of his relationships with his two sons, Zeke and Ben,
who were both born with cerebral palsy even though they had different mothers,
are oddly touching, and I was very impressed by the way he always refers to
them as Zeke Young and Ben Young in the text.
Doing this, rather than just using their Christian names as nearly
everybody else on the planet would have done, emphasises that he sees them as
true individuals, and wants us to do likewise; not ignoring, but seeing passed,
their disabilities. This is a massively laudable thing, and I take my hat off
to him.
He also doesn’t attempt to brush over his
brief relationship with Charles Manson, although the song Revolution Blues
which appears on his On The Beach album from the mid-70s does appear to be more
admiring of the Family ethic than the account given in this book. However, unlike the retrospective accounts by
Dennis Wilson, which are quoted in Heroes and Villains by xxxxxx , Neil Young
does not indulge in retroactive histrionics. He just states the facts, gives a
wry smile, and moves on.
He is obsessed with cars, and motor
vehicles in general. His LincVolt project, for example, seems to be
particularly dear to him. It is an
attempt to convert large luxury cars to sustainable eco-friendly methods of power. This is something that if I had the money, I
would be involved in as well. I miss
driving a Jaguar, but I’m only too aware that each time someone does so it is a
another coffin nail into the casket of pollution which surrounds the ‘green
hills of Earth’. I like the way he names
each of his cars, and most of his instruments; his favourite guitar – the one
he recorded so many classic albums with – is called Big Black. I was oddly sad
to finish the biography late last night, and I am very pleased that Neil seems
to have got the writing bug and intimates that there will be more books of
autobiography on the way. This is good,
because he has only scratched the surface of his remarkable life in this
book. Long may he run.
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