Shakey: Neil Young's Biography

McDonough deserves credit for researching Neil Young's life, particularly his early days. His early days in Canada are particularly revealing, showing how Neil's hard-driven personality propelled into great success.

McDonough also deserves credit for getting the always obscure Neil to be about as open as he gets. The interviews are at their best when Neil is describing events in the past. Neil is at times very candid about his failings in his personal life (two divorces) and in his professional life (over-producing "Mr. Soul").

Unfortunately, the book suffers on a few fronts.

First of all, it is poorly edited. The length of the book could have easily been cut 200 pages without much loss. Several times the book will describe events, then have length quotes from Neil exactly describing the same event.

Second, McDonough's status as a hard-core Neil Young fan makes some of his prose rather silly. His exhaltations of "Tonight's the Night" just seem silly. For Pete's sake, Jimmy, it's just Rock and Roll, not the second coming of Jesus.

Finally, the last 100 pages or so are really regrettable. McDonough inserts himself into the biography. Suddenly, it's Jimmy teaching Neil about Nirvana, Jimmy trying to save Neil from the evils of being a Lionel Trains Tycoon. Most annoying is McDonough's whining about Neil giving lots of interviews. Oh, boo hoo, Jimmy's interviews with Niel aren't that exclusive.

But, for a Neil Young fan, this book is indispensible. After reading this book, I have a better understanding of the folks in Neil's sometime backup band, "Crazy Horse". I understand more what is involved with producing an album, and what impact producer David Briggs had on Neil's work. I now know that Neil's unique sound is the result of an ancient guitar dubbed "Ol' Black".

I now have an idea of who Carrie Snodgrass is, although, to be honest, I think McDonough is very unfair with her, along with Neil's first wife. Neil himself seems to be more even-handed with his ex-wives. McDonough seems to hold any woman in who didn't put up with Neil's shenanigans in contempt.


A Whole Lot of "Shakey" Goin' On   June 25, 2002
Brian D. Rubendall (Oakton, VA)
38 out of 44 found this review helpful

I'm a huge Neil Young fan, with over two dozen of his albums in my collection. But I'm not a fanatic, and as a result I found his biography, "Shakey" to be as stimulating, but as frustratingly erratic as the artist himself. One thing Neil Young could never be accused of is self-censorship, and author Jimmy McDonough writes about him in the same vein, telling in nearly 800 pages a stoory that could have been more succinctly and powerfully conveyed in about half that number. McDonough spent over ten years working on the book, however, and I guess he felt that his huge investment of time justifies the book's length.

The book is a rambling narrative of Young's life, mainly as seen through the eyes of his closest associates, but is told in the Hunter S. Thompson "gonzo" style of journalism as McDonough frequently inserts himself into the story. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this approach, in may have in fact been necessary, but it ends up padding the length. The main story is interspersed with a hundred or so pages of text from McDonough's various interviews with Young in which the artist is quoted verbaitim. It is a fascinating and unprecedented look into Young's mind, but again it starts to become wearing after awhile. Lengthy passages about such relatively uninteresting subjects as Young's passion for model trains slow things down even further.

Ultimately, "Shakey" is likely to be endured only by Young's most ardent fans and will not win the artist any new converts. But I get the feeling that Young would prefer it that way. As McDonough recounts, the quickest way to get Young to drop a song from an album is to tell him its going to be a surefire hit. He is that rare rock star who actually eschews popularity. Young remains a startlingly original talent after nearly four decades in the recording busines and for all of its flaws, "Shakey" manages to capture his essence.


Rock N Roll Masterpiece   May 8, 2002
Johnny Piedmont (Seattle, WA USA)
21 out of 23 found this review helpful

Shakey is one of the best Rock and Roll bio's I've ever read, ranking equal with Nick Tosches Hellfire. Author Jimmy McDonough manages to capture the genius, stupidity, humor and relevance of Neil Young without whitewashing Young's career and life or exploiting it. It's both personal and critical, the author obviously admiring Young as an artist, but unafraid of delving into the darker aspects of the rocker's character. It's also a great read and you'll find yourself keeping yourself awake just to get to the next page. Young's life goes through so many changes and he works with, sleeps with, fights with or just bumps into so many people, rock and pop icons that the book also serves as a great historical survey of pop culture from the 1960's-today. For Young fans and Rock n Roll fans alike, this is the bio of the year. Shakey is simply a masterpiece.


Disappointment   June 25, 2002
20 out of 26 found this review helpful

I'm a fan of all the Neil Youngs: the one who plays with CSN, the one who plays unplugged, the one who plays with Crazy Horse, and the rest of them. I couldn't wait to get my hands on this book.

For me, there are three major problems with the book. First, Jimmy McDonough inserts himself as a character in Neil Young's story, making him something other than an objective reporter, and distracting the reader to ... distraction. We get it, McDonough: you know the guy real well, and we don't. We inferred that you'd have to know him to get all those interviews.

Second, this book is too "inside" for even a long-time Neil Young fan (who is still less a fanatic than those Neil Young fanatics who have no life). It's almost as if McDonough set out to write a book that would appeal to a very narrow audience.

Finally, McDonough spends a disproportionate amount of time up through the seventies. While that period is interesting, it is dark and depressing, as well, and leaves me feeling uneasy about a song writer who is second to none. McDonough himself seems to have little interest in the Neil Young who has emerged in the last ten years, so he doesn't tell us much.

The saving grace of the book, especially for those who have been studying enigmatic lyrics for thirty years, is some insight into some songs that would be difficult or impossible to achieve any other way. Not intrepretations, just insights: events surrounding the creation of some exceptionally fascinating songs.

Overall, however, this seems like a big, long self-indulgence for Jimmy McDonough . He missed the opportunity to write a great three or four hundred page book that anyone interested at all in music would have loved reading. I'll try to put this book out of my mind and think of the Neil Young who is defined by his own songs.


A mediocre biography at best   June 14, 2002
SteveR (Rocky Hill, NJ United States)
18 out of 19 found this review helpful

Although I did enjoy reading a lot of Shakey, I ended up disappointed. The early chapters which describe Neil's battles with polio, his parents divorce, and epileptic seizures I found extremely interesting. Unfortunately once you get to his professional music career, Jimmy McDonough spends more time trying to psychoanalyze what Neil's intentions were instead of just focusing on how things came about. He offers up his personal reviews of albums (many of which I disagree with) that seem like they were taken from his archives as a journalist for Spin magazine. He also picks apart lyrics describing his great interpretation of the heavy symbolism in the songs. Dude, "Homegrown" isn't about man's struggle with the universe, it's about pot! I also found his constant returning to the "Tonight's The Night" album as Neil's greatest accomplishment and the measurment of everything else he's ever done annoying. Also, according to McDonough, Neil Young must be the worst performer of all time since he spends so much time ripping every live performance to shreds describing how out of tune the band was, how much feedback there was, how they couldn't keep the beat, etc. The end of the book finds McDonough complaining to Neil about how much time he's been spending on TV, at the RnR Hall of Fame, at the Academy Awards. Yeah, one thing I hate as a fan is seeing too much of a performer I like! But most of all what I felt the book accomplished was showing Neil as a very unlikeable character. Someone who has temper tantrums, is impossible to work with, doesn't care about the quality of the work he puts out, fires band members on a whim only to call them back years later when he needs to use them, then dump them again, on and on. Well, if you're a Neil fan you may want to check this out, but be aware that at times you will be annoyed.