Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream by Neil Young
As loose and rambling as a guitar jam, Neil Young’s memoir Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream is as sprawling as any of his albums, but it doesn’t quite have the same magic as his music.
Weighing in at nearly 500 pages and nearly 70 chapters, Young’s memoir touches on just about everything: his time with Buffalo Springfield, model trains, how to record an album and his dislike of mp3 files. If he writes about anything, it’s about how much he hates lossy audio formats. And about how his Pono system is going to change everything.
At times his book verges on an infomercial as he repeatedly explains how CDs only have 15% of the fidelity as a vinyl record and mp3s only a fraction of that; how Pono will have a switch to show the difference in quality; that he has it installed in a car he just drove in. It’s a little annoying, although I suppose his heart is in the right place.
But between Pono, the digressions on how he helped save Lionel model trains and frequent asides on his electric car project, I found myself with a strange-sounding criticism for a memoir: I wished he’d write more about himself.
In the past, Young’s shown himself as an able judge of his own talent. Take his first compilation record, Decade: it’s a well-chosen set of material with insightful notes on each song. And when Young does write about his music here, it’s usually interesting. He explains how the cover for On the Beach came together, the fateful LA traffic jam where he crossed paths with Stephen Stills; the importance of Ben Keith’s steel guitar playing to his music.
The problem is how infrequent these insights are. Instead of a liner narrative, Young dives back and forth, going from one period to another and back again, usually without any rhyme or reason. It’s where the muse took him, I guess. And when Young gets to some of the trickier sections of his life, he can be a little self-serving. He admits he can be a hard guy to work with, but he’s got to follow his muse. As he puts it: “if you do it for the music… everything else is secondary.”
Remember: this is the guy who split from Stills mid-tour to support an album they recorded together, via a telegram Stills received while waiting at a venue for Young. “Eat a peach,” it read. And that’s to someone Young calls both a genius and his oldest friend!
At other times, Young sounds cranky, like when he rails against the shuffle feature on iTunes (and, one supposes, CD players): “I make albums and I want the songs to go together to create a feeling,” he writes. “After all, it’s my shit.”
But for Young fans – and I consider myself one – there’s a lot of peach to chew on. Young’s account of the quick rise and even quicker demise of Buffalo Springfield is a fascinating both for it’s look at the inside of a seminal 60s band and for the harsh lessons a naïve Young got at the hands of shoddy agents and overzealous producers.
Likewise, when Young writes about his family, it’s hard not to feel the intense love he has for Pegi Young and his children. Or for his long-term musical partners: Crazy Horse, Ben Keith, Elliot Roberts or David Briggs. Young constantly reminds readers how important these people have been to his career.
And his career is touched on, especially the early years when he toured around Ontario with The Squires or as a folkie, often driving around in the big hearse he’d memorialize in Long May You Run. And he shows the workings of Crosby, Stills and Nash: what each of them brought to the group, why they worked so well together and why the group abruptly came to a halt in the mid-70s.
I just found myself wishing he’d cover more about his life and career: he writes about the pain of Danny Whitten’s sudden death, but barely touches on the tour and live album that immediately followed. He casually mentions maybe a half-dozen finished, yet unreleased records, but never explains why he never released them.
Sometimes he does, but in a way that feels oddly unsatisfying. One example: his problems with Geffen Records are only briefly covered and although Young blames himself (for buckling under their pressure, mind you), one gets the feeling he’s trying to not to anger the other side.
This attitude also shows up with Pono: he repeatedly says he has no problems with Apple, but gosh darn, he just doesn’t like the audio format they sell or the shuffle feature of their software.
While it’s loose and rambling nature will probably be a turn off for most people, Young die-hards will have a bunch of stuff to chew on with Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream. But they’ll have to dodge the frequent Pono and Lincvolt ads to get there.
Rating: 2/5