Waging Heavy Peace

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Overview

Neil Young—reflective, introspective, insightful, brutally honest—discusses his life and career. From his youth in Canada (where his father was a well-known journalist) to his first band's travels across the U.S. seeking fame (and girls), to his forming of the Buffalo Springfield, his massively successful solo career highlighted by After the Gold Rush, to his joining with Crosby, Stills & Nash, to his roll as one of the last uncompromised (and uncompromising) survivors of rock 'n' roll—this is Neil's tale. Told episodically, with great detail, and intermingling his current obsessions with musical sound quality and the environment with his recollections of the way things were, this is a memoir that will stand beside those of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards as exemplar of the genre.

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What People Are Saying

From the Publisher

“Elliptical and personal…Waging Heavy Peace eschews chronology and skips the score-settling and titillation of other rocker biographies. Still, Young shows a little leg and has some laughs…. As the book progresses, the operatics of the rock life give way to signal family events, deconstructions of his musical partnerships and musings on the natural world. It is less a chronicle than a journal of self-appraisal.” –David Carr, The New York Times

“Waging Heavy Peace finally is Neil Young on Neil Young. Inasmuch as this memoir compares to anything, it's Dylan on Dylan in Chronicles Volume 1, and at the risk of offending, one must read it as perhaps one might the Bible: Young's reality is plastic, his prose prophetic; and myth, metaphor and madness meander through his musings….It is a beautiful book, and the sturdy stock gives it a substantial heft. The prose is conversational, peppered with sentence fragments, more stream-of-consciousness than narrative. This in itself is lovely, as reading this book likely is a close as most of us will get to riding with Young in his bus, shooting the breeze, reminiscing.” –Ted St. Godard, Winnipeg Free Press (Canada)

“Terrific: modest, honest, funny and frequently moving…Waging Heavy Peace takes the form of a diary, a life-in-the-day structure that gives Mr. Young room to maneuver, as he takes us on a wander round his memory palace… In many ways, the closest antecedent to Waging Heavy Peace may be Laurence Sterne's 1760 masterpiece, Tristram Shandy…Elegance itself.” –Wesley Stace, Wall Street Journal

“An inspirational account of tragedy, triumph, and toy trains…If you love Neil Young you will love his autobiography….There is humor in his approach, and a preoccupation with the feeling of things; of sound, and with the world of soul and spirit…. [Young’s] is a hero’s story; a man put through trial after trial who is still fighting at the end with humor, courage, and rage to be the most powerful and genuine artist he can possibly be.” –Suzanne Vega, The Times (London)

“Revealing, even (at times) oddly beautiful, a stream-of-consciousness-meditation on where Young has been, where he thinks he's going and, perhaps most revealing, where he is right now.” –David Ulin, The Los Angeles Times

“[Waging Heavy Peace] isn’t a book to part with. It is as charismatically off the wall as Mr. Young’s records, and the recent concert films so imaginatively directed by Jonathan Demme. And however privately calculating it may be, it seems completely free of guile….[A] playful, capricious portrait…Waging Heavy Peace has an affirmative spirit that is one of its most poignant qualities.” –Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“Full of casual asides, unpredictable tangents and open-ended questions as he looks back on his life at age 66.... Dryly hilarious...poignant....Waging Heavy Peace shows that Young is still in full possession of that stubborn, brilliant, one-of-a-kind instrument. He doesn't always go exactly where you want him to, or stay long enough once he gets there, but did anyone really expect anything else?" –Simon Vozick-Levinson, Rolling Stone (four stars)

“Waging Heavy Peace is a convoluted road map to that life, drawn on cocktail napkins and pinned up with refrigerator magnets — part free-form blog, part liner notes to some future hundred-disc anthology and part loopy travelogue through one aging hippie’s expansive backyard….Young’s voice here is pure, unadulterated Neil.” –Howard Hampton, The New York Times Book Review

“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.” –Bob Ruggiero, The Houston Chronicle

“Young writes with dry eloquence in a voice that is clearly his own…His narrative voice is like his music—direct, emotional, hopeful, sometimes funny, willfully naïve, and often, quite beautiful… At its core, Waging Heavy Peace is a story about love of the enduring variety.” –Jeff Miers, Buffalo News

“Lively, rollicking, high-spirited, and reflective… Like one of his long, inventive jams, Young weaves crystalline lyrics and notes about friends… with reflections on the enduring beauty of nature, and the lasting power and influence of music.” — Publishers Weekly (starred)

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Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

I'll defer to Rolling Stone: "Penned without a coauthor, Waging Heavy Peace often reads less like a traditional autobiography than a lively blog—full of casual asides, unpredictable tangents and opened-ended questions as he looks back on his life at age 66.... [The book] shows that Young is still in full possession of that stubborn, brilliant, one-of-a-kind instrument."

The New York Times

…as charismatically off the wall as Mr. Young's records, and the…concert films so imaginatively directed by Jonathan Demme. And however privately calculating it may be, it seems completely free of guile…[Stephen King's] writing is recalled by Mr. Young's frankness, small-town backbone and comfortable familiarity with ghosts…The personal stories about Mr. Young's children and their mothers, about friends and band mates lost to ill health and drugs, can be as eerie as any of Mr. King's daydreams. But Waging Heavy Peace has an affirmative spirit that is one of its most poignant qualities.
—Janet Maslin

Publishers Weekly

In his lively, rollicking, high-spirited, and reflective memoir, Young, the hugely influential Canadian singer-songwriter invites readers to sit down on his porch for comfortable conversations about his guitars, his bands, his cars, his inventions, his trains (he owns a small share in Lionel), and his family. Musically, he ruminates, he may or may not have peaked because "other things continue to grow and develop long afterward, enriching and growing the spirit and the soul." Young openly shares intimate moments of life with his sons, Zeke and Ben, who suffer from cerebral palsy, and his artist daughter, Amber, devoting entire chapters to the ways they have changed his life, as well as to his beloved wife, Pegi, and their life together. Like one of his long, inventive jams, Young weaves crystalline lyrics and notes about friends Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, and Bruce Springsteen, former band mates Stephen Stills, and the late great pedal steel player Ben Keith of the Stray Gators, with reflections on the enduring beauty of nature, and the lasting power and influence of music. (Oct.)

Library Journal

Young has successfully explored so many different musical styles in his solo and collaborative work that his career could serve as a map of rock music in the last 50 years. Not every musician could have moved so silkily from the gentler sounds of Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, & Nash to the hard-driving rock of Crazy Horse to experimentation that has led to Young's being dubbed the godfather of grunge. A noncompromiser and active environmentalist, too; here's his story.

Kirkus Reviews

The long-awaited memoir from the legendary rocker. Readers will learn few of the secrets of Young's art of songwriting, save that "Ohio" came in a flash in response to the bad news from Kent State, and he didn't play a note on "Teach Your Children." Neither, apart from a visit to the clinic here and there, will they learn much about musicians' hedonistic ways. Instead, Young writes of electric trains. He loves them so much that he bought a stake in Lionel, and he has barns and rooms on his rambling California ranch full of them. "I saw David [Crosby] looking at one of my train rooms full of rolling stock and stealing a glance at Graham [Nash] that said, This guy is cuckoo. He's gone nuts. Look at this obsession. I shrugged it off. I need it. For me it is a road back," he writes. Trains return often in the narrative, as do dusty roads, old cars and tractors. But Young, author of "Trans" and other weird outings that once got him sued by his own record label for delivering music "uncharacteristic of Neil Young," is also a technogeek extraordinaire, particularly when it comes to sound; he often mentions the digital format that he's been tinkering with in his mad-scientist lab. He asserts that because it preserves so little--5 percent, by his reckoning--of the actual sound of a recording, "[i]t is not offensive to me that the MP3-quality sound is traded around." Along the way, Young discusses guitars and bands, revealing a now-improbable wish to reconvene Buffalo Springfield, which never lived up to its promise, and Crazy Horse. Sometimes he's even a little jokey about music in general (on America's song "A Horse with No Name": "Hey, wait a minute! Was that me? Okay. Fine. I am back now. That was close!"). Not the revelation that was Keith Richards' Life, but an entertaining and mostly well-written journey into the past, if light on rock 'n' roll.

The Barnes & Noble Review

What does rock 'n' roll do to a person, long-term? Decibels, overload, and the ravening Id; chemical attrition, abuse of the higher faculties; near-limitless scope for bad behavior... After decades of these, what effects? Well, the specimens are walking, or shambling, among us — and more than that, they are writing up their own case histories. On the microscope slide of memoir they are offering us slivers of old rocker brain. Keith Richards did it in 2010 ? in his book Life — with the help of co-author James Fox. Now Neil Young and Pete Townshend have done it, each in his own way, no co-authors involved. "Writing is very convenient, has a low expense, and is a great way to pass the time," declares Young in Waging Heavy Peace. "I highly recommend it to any old rocker who is out of cash and doesn't know what to do next. You could hire someone to write it for you if you can't write it yourself.... Just don't hire some sweaty hack who asks you questions for years and twists them into his own vision of what is right or wrong." Townshend, most Townshend-ianly, concludes Who I Am with a letter to his eight year-old self: "You have a brilliant mind. Unfortunately you are not going to exercise it quite as much as you should."

These are two very different books by two very different men. Who I Am is literate, self-aware, painstakingly chronological, and written in a spirit of lacerating candor. "I was still experiencing manic-depressive anxiety attacks, hearing voices and music, seeing visions. The only medication that helped was alcohol." Waging Heavy Peace is candid, too, but hazier and more graciously self-forgiving. The book ambles back and forth on a woozy narrative spiral — now he's talking about his latest car, now his broken toe, now his first band — and reads for the most part like it came curling off the top of Young's magnificent head. "So we are getting into this now. There may have to be more than one book. I read up on this sort of thing, and the worst thing you can have is a book that is too long." A couple of points of commonality, though, between Neil Young and Pete Townshend: they are both geniuses, and they have both largely expressed themselves with electricity, using amplified guitars.

Townshend's classic sound is a near-celestial ringing and whooshing, his solos a matter not so much of individual notes as of the huge choral combinations at that moment forcing their way through his built-to-order high-tensile noise-conducting neurotic Englishman's frame and hands. As a boy, we learn from Who I Am, he was subject to mysterious sonic overwhelmings, often triggered by rivers or the sea: "I began to hear the most extraordinary music, sparked by the whine of the outboard motor and the burbling sound of water against the hull. I heard violins, cellos, horns, harps and voices, which increased in number until I could hear countless threads of an angelic choir." When, as a man, he channeled this "alpha-state music" through his guitar, it would emerge stamped unmistakably with Townshend-ness — what Gerard Manley Hopkins, writing of the composer Henry Purcell (also a favorite of the young Townshend), called "the forg'd feature": "...it is the rehearsal / Of own, of abrupt self there so thrusts on, so throngs the ear."

Neil Young's sound — when he's really going — is heavier, weirder and more searing, with the glimmering immaterial weight of an epileptic aura. (Young himself has suffered from seizures, rushes, strange buzzings and gusts of "cosmic wind".) In Waging Heavy Peace he recounts the moment when he first delivered himself to it, surrendered to it, dangerously — the full current of his musical being. The occasion is a show by his pre–Buffalo Springfield band the Squires, at the Flamingo Club in Fort William, Ontario, where having played a solo "like I was out of my mind" Young is approached after the set by a well-respected local guitarist, a real shredder and proponent of "the Toronto sound." As Young records it, the man is agog. "What the fuck was that?! What the hell were you doing? I have never heard anything like that in my life! It was fucking great, man! Shit!" (That last exclamation capturing beautifully the enraptured, covetous sense of affront that is the truest tribute one artist can pay to another.)

Both Neil Young and Pete Townshend are also, in the best and most constructive sense of the term, cranks. Parts of Waging Heavy Peace double as a product pitch for Lincvolt, Young's vision of a fuel-efficient, sort-of-green classic car ("Lincvolt will be powerful, clean and sexy. This has to happen. It is going to.") and PureTone, his attempt to rescue recorded music, and the ears of its listeners, from the plague of the MP3. Throughout the book he is building, designing, inventing, fiddling with wires, giving up, starting again; he is a lifelong model train buff, with a "small share" in the collectibles company Lionel; reworking the interior of Broken Arrow Ranch (where he wrote "Old Man") he makes connoisseurial trips to the lumberyard, going through "stacks and stacks of twelve-inch-wide planks of rough-sawn A-grade redwood, choosing the ones with the most beautiful sap and grain. Maybe I took one out of every twelve."

He is a glorious gearhead: his relationship with his cars, with his guitars, is true intimacy. Ragged Glory, he tells us (rumbling with ecstasy) was mainly written in his "car barn," surrounded by "all of my best shit": "My Fender Deluxe with a Fender Reverb, my whizzer attached to it, my Magnatone feeding from that, and my Baldwin Exterminator feeding off of it, too." He has also adored dogs and people — especially people who, like good cars, do their jobs properly and with a bit of style: his formidable manager/confrere David "Be Great or Be Gone" Briggs is eulogized, in bursts, throughout Waging Heavy Peace, as are the likes of sideman Ben Keith ("a wonderful man, gentle as the rain") whose steel guitar playing on "Old Man" and "Heart of Gold" is the very definition of the word plangent.

The crankiness of Pete Townshend is more, shall we say, abstract. True, his breakthrough work with synthesizers around the time of Who's Next was quite Young-esque in its balance of inspiration and hands-on monomania. (Why is he not acknowledged as a pioneer of electronic music? Oh, that's right: because his greatest innovations are buried under the power chords of "Baba O'Riley.") The real action, however, was upstairs, in the throbbing Townshend brain.

There vague intuitions and intimations — about the power of Rock, about the coming of virtual reality, about the one true note from which all music springs, about a sad boy in a bubble — congealed into concepts, "high-flown congregational notions", few of which he was able to get across. "My excitement was greatest," he writes, "when I was exploring the terrain between the spiritual magic of music and the march of physics. Unfortunately I wasn't having much success communicating in the language I was using — one part science fiction, one part mystical waffle, one part visionary glimpses of the role computers could play in the future of electronic music." As he himself had prophesied in an early Who hit, he couldn't explain. His ego would rise in indignation. "It's like trying to explain atomic energy to a group of cavemen," he complained to his wife Karen in 1970, having failed to put his bandmates in the picture with regard to his Lifehouse project.

But the point about Lifehouse was that nobody understood it — not the Who, not their management, certainly not the kids who gathered at London's Young Vic theatre, in early 1971, in nebulous expectation of a futuristic Who/audience mash-up. ("We did manage to perform some songs to a pre-recorded backing track," relates Townshend in Who I Am, "but no new music was produced; the assembled audience wasn't given access to electronic instruments, or even tambourines to bang.")

We should be grateful, I suppose, that Townshend the electro-druid has opted to tell his story straight, in sequential black-and-white, rather than in whirring cyber-splinters on some unusable new social media platform. But telling it straight is important to him now, particularly with respect to the child pornography scandal that enveloped him in 2003. (Who I Am will reassure you that he meant no harm.) As for the reasons or purposes behind Waging Heavy Peace, they seem to be twofold: first, to check that Neil Young's brain is still working, and second, because no songs are coming to him at the moment. On the former point he is disarmingly straightforward: "I am always getting scared that I will be in the middle of some long-winded story and forget what I'm talking about and my secret that I am slowly losing my mind will be out. It is a real fear. Everyone will know! But that is not new. That is not a recent development. I have always been like that. That is what makes detecting the onset of early stages of dementia in me so difficult."

On the latter he is shrewd and artistic: "Songs are like rabbits and they like to come out of their holes when you're not looking.... So I feel like am standing over a song hole. That will never result in success." Childlike, senescent, wise, and wonderfully foolish, Young in Waging Heavy Peace hands down his lessons — the most fundamental of them, perhaps, being one to which the Townshend of Who I Am would readily assent. And it goes like this: "Don't be greedy. Be ready."

James Parker is the author of Turned On: A Biography of Henry Rollins (Cooper Square Press), and a correspondent for The Atlantic.

Reviewer: James Parker

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Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780399159466
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Publication date: 9/25/2012
Pages: 512
Sales rank: 6,878
Product dimensions: 6.25 (w) x 9.25 (h) x 1.60 (d)

Meet the Author

Neil Young and his wife, singer Pegi Woods, divide their time between Hawaii and the Bay Area.

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Waging Heavy Peace

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Cool.

Difficult to stay focused

Yay, Neil

Not terrible

Great Read ! even if you don't know who Neil Young is.

The spirit of the 60s and 70s revisited, and very much alive today.

A Day In The Life With Neil Young

He did a splendid job on this book,as he is who he is. neil writ

Disappointing given the life he's lead

Only is you are a huge fan

Hanging with Neil

I loved this book

Enjoyable read and highly recommended for Neil Young fans

Excellent reading

The best autobio

I thought the book was ging to be about his musical career but i

True to who he is

To Ash from Dreww

Ash

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