Day 25

Old Man Takes a Look at His Life

In his rambling, terrific memoir, Neil Young describes both hazy days backstage and business ventures like building a hybrid electric Lincoln Continental.

Casanova's doctor told him that the best cure for his malaise was to give up sex and write his memoirs. Neil Young's doctor didn't go that far but did recommend his abstaining from weed. Mr. Young, newly straight, not having written a song in ages, unsure of where the next one would come from, then broke his toe: There was no alternative but to write a book. One doctor gave us "Histoire de ma vie," the other "Waging Heavy Peace."

Mr. Young is surprised to find writing "very convenient . . . a low expense . . . a great way to pass the time," adding this impish encouragement to his peers: "I highly recommend it to any aging rocker who is out of cash and doesn't know what to do next. You could hire someone else to write it for you if you can't write it yourself. That doesn't seem to matter." In fact, it does. Mr. Young says of his friend David Crosby's books, co-written with Carl Gottleib, "I would like to read a book he wrote in his own words." Singer-songwriters especially shouldn't need assistance. We want them in their own words.

Waging Heavy Peace

By Neil Young
Blue Rider, 497 pages, $30

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Redferns

Neil Young backstage in Oakland during a 1974 Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young tour.

Keith Richards's best-selling (and ghostwritten) memoir notwithstanding, there has recently been a marked shift in the art of the rock autobiography toward genuine authorship. Bob Dylan, as ever, led the field with "Chronicles"; Patti Smith followed with "Just Kids", another classy piece of self-mythology; next month Pete Townshend will explain "Who I Am"; Bruce Springsteen may follow. Each member of this million-dollar quartet represents a specific time and place in cultural history, an association that can broaden the appeal of a book.

But Neil Young—Californian hippie, Canadian folkie refusenik, Godfather of Grunge—isn't so easily sold. "Waging Heavy Peace" will likely find most of its readers amonghis audience, the "Rusties." That is a shame, because the book is terrific: modest, honest, funny and frequently moving—an antidote. "Waging Heavy Peace" is typical, in structure and tone, of a man who has seemed at times to be consistent only in inconsistency, both in his artistic output and in his views: a songwriter who once scrapped album after album and now releases everything, a guitarist who creates unearthly random noise yet is annoyed by minor mistakes on the recording of "Like a Hurricane."

"Waging Heavy Peace" takes the form of a diary, a life-in-the-day structure that gives Mr. Young room to maneuver, as he takes us on a wander round his memory palace—a drive down the coastal highway, stopping off occasionally for a meeting with the CEO of Warner Music Group to demonstrate PureTone (the audio format he is developing that will deliver music in perfect quality to the downloader) or for a trip to the Costco ("You can find anything"). The book is erratic (if everyone else weren't going to do it, the urge to compare its structure to one of his guitar solos would be irresistible), charmingly mundane (a paean to his Sonicare Toothbrush calls it "a product I am very impressed with") and comically repetitive (almost everything in the book is said twice and, if Mr. Young is worked up—as he frequently is—many more times than that). The book contains so many Thank Yous that you occasionally wonder whether you've stumbled into the acknowledgements by mistake.

In many ways, the closest antecedent to "Waging Heavy Peace" may be Laurence Sterne's 1760 masterpiece, "Tristram Shandy," in that it marries a conversational style (featuring many direct addresses to the reader) and a digressive structure that includes frequent updates on the writer's own progress ("I have only rewritten about one paragraph," Mr. Young reports), not to mention occasional advertisements for products that the writer himself is selling: in Sterne's case, future books of sermons; in Mr. Young's, PureTone (renamed "Pono"—Hawaiian for "righteous and good"—during the book's composition because of trademark concerns). None of this is a complaint: Neat and tidy would make for a weaker book, less representative of its author.

Such a literary link may not be fanciful. Unlike Bob and Patti, those more self-consciously literary songwriters, Neil grew up in a bookish atmosphere; his father, Scott Young, a journalist and sportswriter, wrote more than 45 books. The novelist Robertson Davies was a family friend. Neil's childhood memories are of "a group of writers in our living room smoking their pipes."

"Waging Heavy Peace" is haunted by the ghosts of his youth and of departed friends: David Briggs, his long-time producer; Danny Whitten, Crazy Horse's first guitar player; Bruce Berry, the roadie (memorialized in the title track of "Tonight's the Night") who overdosed just a few months after Whitten's death; Larry Johnson, the film producer who encouraged Mr. Young in his Shakey Pictures endeavors. Mr. Young has made a lot of money and lost a lot too, some of it on hare-brained schemes. There is little kiss and tell, though plenty of first-name guest appearances. Bob, Paul and Willie are here (you don't really need their surnames), but don't open the book hoping for backstage bacchanalia. There are a few hazy tales of drug busts (he has his coke and snorts it too) but little you won't have read in back issues of Rolling Stone. He jokes, when he describes the laboratory contents of Crosby's car: "Forget I said that. Was my mic on?" Most of all, "Waging Heavy Peace" is unfailingly kind, a tribute to everyone who helped him become who he now is: a happy family man still doing what he loves.

"Waging Heavy Peace" is subtitled "A Hippie Dream." The heavy peace he is waging is against the status quo, the suits, the men in gray who make life difficult with their petty rules and schemes. One can have nothing but admiration for a man who remains a dedicated campaigner, trying to find solutions rather than merely doing a few benefit concerts (which he also does, and arranges: most notably the Bridge School Benefits and Farm Aid). Like any good hippie, he avoids value judgments ("it's not good, but it's not bad"); he likes clichés ("What's wrong with clichés?"); he believes in The Great Spirit (female) and likes to get a bit cosmic ("Woah!"); he has worn more or less the same clothes since 1969; and he values independence both in his bandmates and his friends.

Most of Mr. Young's obsessions involve restoring a version of a previous innocence or purer quality: getting back to the garden. His LincVolt project is "repowering the American dream" by putting a green engine in a 1959 Lincoln Continental Convertible. He is a walking TED talk on why the degraded sound of MP3s is killing music (PureTone to the rescue) and even eloquent on the way the computer keyboard does not replicate the feel of an old typewriter (he is going to rectify this with PureType—OK, I made that last bit up, but when Mr. Young starts waxing nostalgic about his father's old Remington, it seems the logical next step).

Apparently Volume Two will be about cars. I may not read that since much of Volume One is already about cars. The rough pie chart of its contents would be, in order of diminishing slice: PureTone, cars, music, family, various harrowing medical procedures (all described with Damien Hirst-like clarity—he has seen a lot of doctors), model trains and the LincVolt project (which is more cars).

My favorite moment (of many) is Mr. Young's entire statement on the endlessly rehearsed brouhaha concerning his classic songs "Southern Man" and "Alabama," bitter condemnations of Southern racism, to which Lynyrd Skynrd responded with "Sweet Home Alabama," which called him out by name. "My own song 'Alabama' richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me with their great record," Mr. Young now concludes. "I don't like my words when I listen to it today. They are accusatory and condescending, not fully thought out, too easy to misconstrue."

Elegance itself. As Mr. Young says elsewhere: "You don't have to read between the lines." Long may he—and his energy-efficient cars, with their PureTone sound systems—run.

—Mr. Stace is a singer-songwriter under the name John Wesley Harding and the author of
the novel "Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer."
February 28, 2013
7:30 PM
Alumni Hall, Student Center
Central Connecticut State University