Neil Young - Still Burning

On November 10th I am proud to say I am finally going to see Neil Young in concert. Here are some awesome photos to enjoy as well as a review of his brand new memoir Waging Heavy Peace. I look forward to reading it.

Waging Heavy Peace

Reviewed by Bob Ruggiero

Of all the classic rockers whose music still matters nearly five decades after their first records, perhaps none have followed their artistic muse more fervently than Neil Young.

Sure, he’s released plenty of rock music. But he also has put out albums of country, blues, rockabilly, grunge, folk, American standards, synth-based new wave, drunken ramblings, political protests and one disc featuring nothing but guitar feedback.

And this is an artist who was sued by his own record company in the ’80s for releasing music that was “not characteristic of Neil Young.”

So those expecting “Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream” to be a straight-ahead, chronological memoir of Young’s life and career will be sorely disappointed. But they would also be missing out on an honest, insightful, engaging and, dare we say, fun literary rambling. It’s a yarn told by a good buddy in a dark bar over beers and tequilas with great music on the jukebox in the background.

The narrative certainly jumps at a rapid clip. His experiences playing Woodstock and Altamont, two of the most epochal musical events of the ’60s, are dispensed with in fewer than two pages. In a similarly brief passage, Young manages to pontificate on Crazy Horse, the Greendale record, the habits of insects on his ranch, his model train collecting and his obsession in launching his PureTone company.

In fact, PureTone (now called Pono), Young’s business endeavor to bring studio-quality sound to today’s MP3’s — along with his long-in-development LincVolt plug-in car — seem to be his primary obsessions.

“Today, I have no interest in touring or playing music, but that is not a threat to me. It has happened before,” Young writes. Of course, in a history of abrupt personal and professional about-faces since he penned those words, Young and the Horse have embarked on a major tour, released one album of American songbook covers (“Americana”) and are about to drop another double CD (“Psychedelic Pill”).

Famous faces drift in an out of Young’s reminisces, but he spends more pages on family members and musical collaborators. Whether it’s his sometimes difficult relationship with his father, noted Canadian journalist Scott Young; his adored wife, Pegi, and special needs children Ben and Zeke; or his studio-and-stage compadres (producer Jack Nitzsche, doomed Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten, longtime steel guitar player Ben Keith and producer/best friend David Briggs), hardcore Young fans get to see who has shaped his life and music.

“Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream” also holds plenty of Young’s sardonic humor. One tale is about his trip to a Costco in an effort to get new brushes for his Sonicare toothbrush (which he wholly endorses). Another shopping expedition finds him in a used book and record store where he finds 30 or 40 of his own CDs:

“There was my life’s work, thrown in a box on the floor. I felt suddenly very sad. I had spent so long making each one, pouring myself into it, making it sound great. Now they were in this little box, shadows of their former selves. [But] I found an old Clive Cussler book I must have missed back in the day, bought it for $2.50.”

Out of his dozens of records, Young feels perhaps proudest of the mostly overlooked “Comes a Time” (“as close to a perfect recording as I have gotten”).

And while he once had an admitted love affair with cocaine (a nose-dangling “coke booger” had to be blurred out from Young’s performance in the Band’s “Last Waltz” movie), Young writes here that he has completely given up smoking weed and rarely, if ever, drinks.

Having survived epileptic attacks in his youth and a brain aneurysm and subsequent bleeding that nearly left him dead more recently, it seems like a good path to follow. He has also taken up paddleboarding.

Not that Young ever did what was expected of him. He is currently back on the road with the Horse, playing furious, gloriously scuzzy rock ’n’ roll and raging against the dying light. And he’s still got to get his massive “Archives, Vol. 2” released, recut a bunch of his experimental movies, release those unreleased albums, get the dunderheads in Detroit to embrace electric cars and show kids how music is supposed to sound in a car or through those tiny earbuds.

The man who wrote “it’s better to burn out than to fade away” may have been referring to himself. Young still has a lot of irons in the fire.

Bob Ruggiero is a Houston-based freelance music journalist who has seen Neil Young cheered and booed in concert, often by the same person.