Neil Young: “Waging Heavy Peace”

A review, and a lament

You should never, ever read about your heroes.

Not even – and let me stress this – not even when they are doing the writing themselves.  Perhaps especially not then.

I can’t remember the last time I stopped reading a book (at least, a book I thought I’d care about) halfway through.  It might have been one of the strange sequels to ‘Rendezvous with Rama’ that Arthur C. Clarke wrote with a collaborator.  Yes, I’m pretty sure it was.  Should have left it alone, Artie, it was perfect as a trilogy of one.

But I did it with Neil Young’s autobiography.  I went away to read Danny Baker’s “Going to Sea in a Sieve” instead, a jolly romp through his early years, where I learned that he had lived much the same life as me, if you subtract from mine everything about his except his taste in music and the records he collected.

But, as when I stopped reading “Snuff” by Terry Pratchett, for reasons I won’t go into here (Pratchett, again, is living my life, but in his case with the added bonus of actually having written thirty or more books), I didn’t abandon it, but later went back to finish Neil’s book as well, out of some kind of horrible fascination.

“Waging Heavy Peace” (lol!) is subtitled; “A Hippie Dream”, god save us, which if I’d spotted it first time might have been some kind of warning.  Neil Young is many things, but a hippie he never was.  Maybe it IS a warning, direct from Neil;  “Hey, I’ve re-read this thing, and it’s a bit of a nightmare.  But I’m an artist, and I do what I feel, man.”

Where to start, where to start ….

OK, there are five main themes in the book.  No, make that six.  He confronts you with the first in Chapter One, Page One.  Model trains.  That’s right, boys and girls, you heard me right – model trains.  Neil Young has been a model train fanatic from his youth, and when he had big money to play around with bought his way into one of the major model trains companies of the USA which, sadly, has now been forced to manufacture in China.  We hear a lot about control systems and sound effects and track layout design.  More than we want to know, in fact.

The other five (in no particular order) are his PureTone recording/broadcasting system, his LincVolt electric car scheme, his relationships and family, a theme you could call ‘all my friends are dead’, and music.

The problem is that, although he tells us (several times) that he has stopped drinking and no longer uses ‘weed’ in haybale quantities, the book reads as if it was written by somebody who has fried his brains.  It hops backwards and forwards in time, for no good reason.  He says things that just occur to him.  He goes off on one occasionally.  Anecdotes start in one chapter, and maybe crop up and end two hundred pages later.  Sometimes they are repeated, subtly altered.  Only somebody who already has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of Buffalo Springfield, CSNY, Crazy Horse, The Squires and so on would stand a chance of keeping up.  I haven’t.  I just bought a few records, and read some magazines occasionally.  And love Neil Young.

Maybe if an editor was asked to look at this 500-page book and see if, by judicious cutting and pasting of sections, he could re-arrange it into some kind of narrative, readability could be restored.  But Neil proudly states (several times) that he doesn’t hold with that kind of shit.  Bully, Neil ….. bully!

Oh, there are six themes, not five!  How could I forget about the cars?  He talks endlessly about the cars he has owned when, as all of us know, the only one we are really interested in, is the one that ‘Long may you run’ was written about.  You thought that that was a love song?  You were wrong.  It was about a big shiny car that burnt out in Blind River in ought six, or something.  Very romantic.

LincVolt, his electric hybrid car scheme for powering lunkers from big batteries, forms part of this car obsession.  He has spent fortunes on trying to make the car work.  It doesn’t.  Once it tried to commit suicide by self-immolation, but he persists in trying to make it live.  Look, Neil once invested in ‘power your car on water’ schemes.  He sounds genuinely hurt and surprised that the guys turned out to be frauds.

I should cut him some slack.  Neil is 65, he (and also his last and long-term wife Pegi, also now a musician) has had major brain surgery, fears what his recent brain scans have shown and still ploughs on actually doing things.  Although he admits he hasn’t written a thing since on medical advice he stopped quaffing and toking, some twelve months before the book was written;  he gives hints that maybe the odd tincture might be needed soon.

And I would actually have liked to hear more about PureTone.  He rails against MP3 and Spotify and iTunes, claiming that since they are digital they may only give you fifteen percent of the original analogue sound, and that he has a miracle solution.  It’s the argument of CDs against vinyl.  A topic close to my heart.  I only hope that, in this one instance, it isn’t another of Neil’s wild and unwise enthusiasms.

You may ask me, why am I not talking more about music?  Go on, you may.

Well, part of the reason is that Neil doesn’t talk too much about it.  Sure, there’s a great deal about the bands and the tours and his guitars and amps and gizmos, but we rarely get to hear things like, oh, I don’t know ….. what was ‘Mansion on the hill’ written about?

[Time for a video to break this up:]

He only really comes alive and gets enthusiastic when he describes how other people play with him – and sadly like Danny Whitten of the original Crazy Horse and Ben Keith his long-time sidekick slide guitar player, they’re dead.  He is generous in praise of them, and of nearly all the other musicians he mentions;  Pearl Jam, Sonic Youth …. some other names you might find surprising.  He was trying to get in touch with Kurt Cobain shortly before Kurt’s demise, and was brought up short by the fact that Kurt’s last letter quotes something similar to lyrics from ‘Rust Never Sleeps’.  (Unkind words, as you might expect, are usually directed at record companies and managers.)

But there are passages in this that I wish I’d never read.

I’m well aware that musicians and others sometimes use substances to lubricate the creative process.  But I didn’t really want to hear that that the process of recording one of my favourite NY albums (I won’t name it, because I’m trying to forget the fact) consisted of sitting around drinking Jose Cuervo with the band until well after midnight, stumbling out to the barn and thrashing away until they seemed to be going in the same and right direction, then adding some lyrics that mostly didn’t have any meaning.  Learned academic theses have probably been written about some of those songs.

I got to the stage where I was trying to scan the lines ahead without actually taking them in, just in case he was about to reveal that, say, ‘Cinnamon girl’ was about a waitress in Starbucks who always used to give him extra sprinkles.

Oh hell.  I will forgive him anything.  Just for the intro to ‘Ohio’, and the fact of having written the song;  written overnight, recorded next day, no messing.  Raw and direct.  And as for his guitarwork ….. there are many fancier guitarists but no others who understand (in the phrase coined by Robert Fripp) ‘guitar mechanics’ better.  Not even Jamie of The Kills.  There are some harmonics he gets in some of his solos that just transfix you.  Many is the night I’ve spent in headphones, wanting the workouts at the end of ‘Cowgirl in the sand’ or other tunes just to go until dawn.

Whatever else this book is, it is honest.  And if you struggle all the way through it, taking in with difficulty all the things that are important to him, the last chapter will break your heart.  I thought only love was supposed to do that.

[Later addition:  OK, I'm going to give up, I'm just writing vanity stuff in these blogs.  I should get back to my day job, the salt mines always need hands.  Here's what a real writer who is getting paid produced, and it's a great and useful review:]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9664157/Waging-Heavy-Peace-by-Neil-Young-review.html

[Later later ... can't resist adding another video:]