Waging Heavy Peace by Neil Young

This is a memoir by Neil Young, and much like the recent Dylan memoir, I think he wrote it.  It is just not all that polished.  It meanders frequently and at times he is just frankly off the beaten path of the story he is trying to tell.  That said, it is not badly written, I do not mean to imply that at all.  He also has a very good story to tell—he was important places at important times.  He was part of one of my favorite bands from the very early 60’s, Buffalo Springfield, and the stories he tells about those early days are very fun to read—even though a lot of people have written about them, I never tire of hearing those stories, and because I was in grammar school, a lot of the cultural references I remember but could not contextualize from personal experience, so I like reading about the ideas of others.  And Neil Young has some very good ideas.  He is an interesting guy—which I think is not always the case with singer-song writers, even though I would like that to be true.  His songs tell stories and he clearly loves to practice and perform with other musicians.  He is not all about being the front man.  That comes through most clearly when he is writing about Crazy Horse and his relationship with that band.  He wants to create music with other people.  He can’t get to the same place by himself, and he likes both the journey and the result.  He is not a perfectionist in the sense that the product he puts out on stage has to be perfect—he wants it to be good, but he also likes to test drive some ideas in front of an audience, see how it plays, and then either add it to the performance or change his idea.  I like that concept.  He contends that he can no longer do that because in the age of YouTube, the imperfections would be under the microscope of not just the audience in front of him, but the audiences yet to come, and that they are not all that forgiving.  But he doesn’t have a chip on his shoulder about that in the book—it is what it is.  Accept it and move on.

There are many things that you would expect—the women, the drugs, the booze, the hours and the traveling.  There are also a few things in here you might not expect—he has a long-time wife, who he is still quite attached to.  He is an involved father who cares for all his kids—two of whom have cerebral palsy.  He likes to build things and work with his hands.  He had polio as a child.  He is loyal.   By the end of the book I felt like it would be interesting to have dinner with him.  He shares value with me.

If you are a Neil Young fan, this is a must read.   If you are not, but want to see the evolution of a rock legend over time, this is a good read—I liked it better than the Keith Richards memoir and not as much as the Patti Smith memoir.  It is funny, interesting, and hopeful.