Neil Young is one of rock and roll's most important, influential and enigmatic figures, an intensely reticent artist who has granted no writer access to his inner sanctum - until now.
The raw materials of the story are sensational: burning ambition, clashing egos, onstage epileptic seizures, deranged groupies, great albums, the birth and death of Sixties idealism, and, most of all, extremes of substance abuse
Succeeds in stripping a star of his iconography - McDonough's book excels at anecdotes of music excess from a bygone era
It's hard to imagine anyone trying to better this book - It has an abundance of what Young values above all else - passion
I've been reading this biography of Neil Young called
Shakey and it's changed my life, man
Jimmy McDonough is a journalist who has contributed to such publications as
Variety, Film Comment, Mojo, Spin and
Juggs. But he is perhaps best know for his intense, definitive Village Voice profiles of such artists as Jimmy Scott, Neil Young and Hubert Selby, Jr. He is also the author of
The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.