You're only Neil Young once: reading Waging Heavy Peace from beginning to end
"When you were young and on your own ...". Yeah man, when I was young and on my own I'd never heard any music by Neil Young. This hippie Canadian singer had very little meaning - actually none - in my poppy/new wave-y/post-punk world of the late-70s/early-80s. And now, when I'm er, not young, well I've heard quite a lot of Neil Young. I blame After The Goldrush. Anyway, a few years ago I picked up a cheap paperback copy of Young's Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream (2012) autobiography. And now, years later, I've actually read it. What's the book like? Pretty odd, I guess. Or maybe not given this is Neil Young. It's cantankerous, sincere, somewhat boring, self-aware, over-long, repetitive, not exactly fun. Possibly it's quite a lot like its author. After all, this is a guy who prefers to "use the same words over and over" in his writing, and "be boring" because this is "true to who I really am". No fancy vocab...
