Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream

I get why some people have received this book with derision or disappointment. Yes, Young's writing style is, shall we say, inelegant. At times, the book reads like 500 pages of somebody's blog. When he strives for profundity, it sometimes sounds like fortune cookie messages. And I can also see why this book might be cause for alarm or annoyance: Aging rock icon gets a sizable book contract and delivers a rambling tome, seeming to bypass an editorial guiding hand entirely, just because he's used to getting his old ways.

And yet. Admittedly, I'm pretty deep in the woods when it comes to Neil Young fandom these days, if not quite a completist. But I still feel like there's a wealth of insight here, once you sift through the repetitive bits about Pono (his anti-MP3 crusade), shopping trips, and other flotsam. This is a deeply felt book when Young is eulogizing deceased collaborators like David Briggs, Ben Keith, and Larry Johnson. It is even more moving when he writes about his family, especially his son Ben, who has a severe disability. And sure, Young may be no prose master, but the chapter about his 2005 brain aneurysm is harrowing.

True, you are not going to get a pile of anecdotes about the making of classic albums. (For that, as most hardcore Neil fans know, read Jimmy McDonough's bio Shakey.) But Young gives just enough first-hand information about Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, On the Beach, Rust Never Sleeps, Trans, Mirror Ball, Prairie Wind and others. And his explanation of the controversial line in “Hey Hey, My My” is definitive.

The non-linear structure of the book gives it a kind of dream logic. But by the end, you get a sense of a man coming to terms with his long life, yet still striving. In many ways, this book is the exact opposite of Keith Richards' Life. That book, written with James Fox, has more juice and more dirt. But you can feel the Keef persona take over the man halfway through, and the book never recovers. Waging Heavy Peace is by all appearances written by no one but Neil Young. It's often clumsy but increasingly disarming. By the end, you feel he has revealed himself, not entirely, but to an effect that is bracing and even a little inspiring.