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 for Neil. He admits to being "somewhat of a hard person to work for, or with". And there are times when he sounds like one of the music industry's typical old-guy bores, banging on about how his "induction" into the "Hall of Fame" is the "biggest honour in rock and roll" (ffs). But no, there's still a lot of interesting stuff in this big baggy monster of a book. A bit like er, the ragged glory of Young's sprawlingly massive musical output. With Young, for every clunker such as Like A Hurricane there's a Heart Of Gold. For every duff paragraph (or chapter) in Waging Heavy Peace there's a decent observation that - more or less - makes it worthwhile. One step forward, one step back. Once or twice I honestly thought I'd never get through this strangely hard-to-read book, but I did, from beginning to end, and here are my must-read bullet points to prove it: 

Neil Young's baggy monster 

*One thing you soon realise with this book is that you're going to get a lot on two Youngian obsessions:  vintage American cars and the audio deficiencies of digitised music. The latter I can just about cope with; the former is a bore, from the first Buick Skylark we hear about to the last Lincoln Continental ("the Continental's generator cycles off and we are running on pure electric power ..."). Whole chunks of the book are devoted to accounts of Young buying and doing up "classic" cars. There are also passages on his love of vintage model railways (I think that's what he's enthusing  about though I may have nodded off during these parts) and stuff about his various tour buses and even a refitted boat. Needless to say, many of these vehicles are also given pet names which Young uses repeatedly and unembarrassedly. Blimey Neil, couldn't you have spared us all the tedious transport stuff? In some of this - if not much else - Young is apparently a soulmate of that other model railways buff, Pete Waterman.

*It's not quite as dull as the cars/buses/trains/boats stuff, but Young banging on about the degraded nature of digitised music is also pretty tiresome, especially by the 39th mention. Sure, he probably has a point. And it's clearly a sincerely-held view (Young is pretty sincere about everything). But I personally can't get all that worked up about audio quality issues in music (give me noise over purity every time) and Young's mentions of his protracted - and eventually doomed - efforts to launch his own high-quality music player (PureTone, later renamed Pono) is a move into tech start-up territory that I think the book could have done without. Whatever. For Young, though, sound is all. At one point he describes the Tonight's The Night album as "sounding like God when played loud". 

*In case we hadn't guessed, Young admits to being a "technical freak of sorts", and unsurprisingly this extends to his views about how to record in the studio. After the apparent debacle in the mixing of his first solo album (see the extensive Wikipedia explanation of what went wrong with Neil Young), afterwards Young apparently moved toward near-live studio recordings, with the musicans all playing together and only relatively minimal overdubs added later. "Most often the first time something is played is the defining moment", says Young. And on mixing debacles, he also says that Buffalo Springfield's first album was messed up by being hastily remixed - without the band's involvement - by their managers Charlie Greene and Brian Stone, a pair of "real hustlers", says Young.

*One anecdote that neatly brings out Young's obsessive audiophile tendencies: he says the master tapes for the Comes A Time album were damaged in the post on their way to New York for processing. The initial pressing of the album - apparently running to 200,000 copies - was so unsatisfactory to Young that he personally bought them all up in lieu of getting the album repressed. Later he's supposed to have stored them at his ranch and shot each copy with a rifle to ensure they'd never be sold (this from Wikipedia), but at this point I'm beginning to think the whole thing is some kind of weird Youngian fever dream.   

*The book has quite a bit on Young's approach to songwriting and his views on musical creativity. It seems that for him it's always involved some kind of out-of-body experience. Being "high" in some way. He mentions how in his early days playing with the Squires in Fort William he began to regularly freak out during his guitar solos. "I just went crazy." "While I was playing like that I was out of my mind", he says. Meanwhile, "unsure" about his singing in the early days, he apparently needed to "loosen up" with beer or amphetamines before letting rip with his vocals in the studio. 

*Interestingly, Waging Heavy Peace itself seems to be a sort of surrogate for new songwriting at the time of its composition, in/around 2011. Evidently, Young had been "straight" for the first time in decades and hadn't written any new songs during this time. "The muse is out and about and no doubt visiting with someone else." It's presumably no coincidence, then, that the first album after Waging Heavy Peace is Americana, an album of covers. 

*Young talks about needing to feel "relevancy" in what he's doing. "With Crazy Horse", he says, "I need to perform new songs on the next tour for me to feel anything other than ancient history close up". New songs are his "vehicle to the future".   

*One of the bits of Youngian lore that gets multiple (slightly self-regarding?) mentions is the famous episode from 1983 when Geffen Records sued him for making albums "uncharacteristic of Neil Young". It's a neat enough slice of record company idiocy and ultra-conservatism, though Young slightly milks it. For sure, Young seems to genuinely value artistic freedom, but, as with his recent run-in with Glastonbury over its "corporate" nature, his position within the music industry does feel a bit all over the place - righteous rebel one minute, selling his back catalogue to Hipgnosis the next. 

*One interesting strand in the book is the way that Young seems to own up to things. He says he wasn't "mature enough to be a very good father" for Tia, the daughter of his first wife Susan Acevedo. And that he wasn't "mature enough" for his wife either. Before Acevedo, in his Buffalo Springfield days, there were a "a lot of girls" who were taken to his love-shack cabin in Laurel Canyon. But, he says, "I was not very confident in myself and probably not an impressive lover". In a similar self-critical vein, Young recalls how he gave a "stupid" setpiece speech about Danny Whitten's heroin use at the end of a Crazy Horse tour. "It didn't feel right even as I was saying it, the wrong approach."

*A different kind of owning up relates to the tricky business of undue musical influence. With Bob Dylan, Young says, he had to "avoid listening" to him in the late-60s and early-70s to avoid "copying him". "Eventually", says Young, "I was able to pick up an harmonica without thinking I was copying Bob, just influenced by him". 

*Dylan aside, musicians Young esteems are not, it must be said, always my cup of tea: JJ Cale (his Crazy Mama is "true, simple, and direct"), Roy Orbison ("Evergreen is one of the most beautiful sentiments ever recorded") and Ian & Sylvia (Four Strong Winds "speaks to me always"). Meanwhile, Chrissie Hynde is called "one rockin' woman". On the plus side, Young praises the Ronettes' Be My Baby ("has a sound I always will love"), calls Phil Spector a "genius", and enthuses - of course - over Devo ("true originals") based on their Human Highway work together. 

*Meanwhile, staying with films (a big Young side-hustle), he says Jean-Luc Godard is his "favourite filmmaker", saying how he appreciates "long uninterrupted shots that played out and told a story". Fine, Godard was great, but er, were long uninterrupted shots really a Godard thing? 

*Among the many people Young played with at various times, one name somewhat stands out: Charles Manson. It seems he jammed a little with him after Manson had turned up one day at Dennis Wilson's house in Los Angeles. Young says:

"His songs were off-the-cuff things he made up as he went along, and they were never the same twice in a row. Kind of like Dylan, but different because it was kind of hard to glimpse a true message in them, but the songs were fascinating. He was quite good."

He was so good, in fact, that Young even recommended him to the record executive Mo Ostin at Reprise Records. 

*It seems that at one stage Young owned 35 cars and eight houses. While this might appear to be standard rock star behaviour, it seems with Young that it's - partly at least - a reflection of an obsessive collector's personality rather than sheer acquisitiveness and a very rich person's status hunger. That said, there's some airy talk in the book about getting "the best doctors" for his disabled son Ben Young. And there's no denying that with his houses/ranches in Hawaii and California and his all-round gilded lifestyle, Young is more rock star than down-home regular guy, no matter how beat-up and dressed-down his public image. Meanwhile, there's that memorable Young line from his interview with the music journalist Richard Goldstein from 1968 (of all years). With the two of them sitting on the patio outside Young's LA house, Goldstein asks Young what he'll do when the revolution comes. "I'll die defending the swimming pool" is Young's answer. 

*On the Ohio protest song, Young says that he wrote this pretty much instantaneously after seeing a Time magazine photograph showing one of the victims of the National Guard's shooting at Kent State University in 1970. Here, Young's politial allegiences - at least from the time - are clear. He was on the side of the anti-war hippies. "These people were our audience", he says. "That's exactly who we were playing for. It was our movement, our culture, our Woodstock generation." 

This summer I hear the drumming / 

Four dead in Ohio

*Meanwhile, this stark - and very sad - photo is just one of a number of grainy black-and-white pics that appear in Waging Heavy Peace. To my mind they add to the artistry of the book. They even reminded me - at little at least - of the many mysterious b&w snaps in WG Sebald's work or the low-res shots of buildings in Owen Hatherley's architecture books. Waging Heavy Peace may not be in the same bracket as either Sebald or Hatherley (OK, it definitely isn't), but still, the aesthetic around the use of photos is good. 

*And, while I might have made Young's book seem like hard work (which it is, to a degree), in its favour there are moments where the authorial voice assumes a slightly playful guise. Referring to his first solo album in 1968, he says:

"Looking back, I don't know why we didn't just do solo records and keep the Springfield together as well. That might have worked. Don't look back."  

Don't look back. It's a nice piece of self-reflexivity. A moment of puckish humour. There are a sprinkling of these in the book and they're some of its best bits. We're not exactly in the hyper-self-aware and self-reflexive territory of Tony Wilson's (far superior) 24 Hour Party People book, but it at least shows that behind that dour and crushingly sincere exterior Young has something approximating to a sense of humour.   

Overall, then, Waging Heavy Peace is a strange and not entirely satisfying book, but perhaps it's exactly the right book for Neil Young to have written. Self-indulgent, obsessive, heartfelt and slightly mad, it sort of fits with his 60-plus years of high-pitched singing, grinding guitar burn-outs and denim-and-plaid shirt uber-hippie-ness. Who else has been around so long and retained - to use the Youngian term - a similar degree of "relevancy"? Iggy Pop? No, not really. No, there's probably no-one else. My my, hey hey. Young may never have triggered the cultural earthquake of the Sex Pistols and punk - his music has generally steered a pretty middle-of-the-road course - but it was Rotten who would fade away much earlier than the old hippie Neil Young. Like Mark E Smith, Young has clearly understood the need for reinvention if he was to plod on for this long. I can't pretend to have kept up with his considerable ongoing output - or to have checked out everything in his bulging back catalogue (his '90s stuff wasn't bad: Ragged Glory through to Mirror Ball) - but I get the impression that Young has maintained reasonable quality control throughout the years. For my money, at his best his stuff is right up there, even if most of the best is from the 1970s. Earlier this week I bought - for 40 pence - this Greatest Hits CD (2004). Half the stuff is far from great and some only so-so. But there are, I reckon, three or four all-time greats here: Ohio (one of the great protest songs), Southern Man (one of the great anti-racism songs), The Needle And The Damage Done (one of the great anti-drugs songs), and Only Love Can Break Your Heart (one of the great love songs). Plus, Heart Of Gold is a wistful, stomping near-classic, and After The Goldrush is just an entirely beautiful song, a pop song with flugelhorn. Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s ...