An iconic figure in the history of rock and pop culture (inducted not once but twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame), Neil Young has written his eagerly awaited memoir.
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Neil Young is not a writer. He is one of the few rock icons who has forged a long and varied musical career, and he sets out here to make his own memoir. To Young's credit, the book keeps things simple. This is hardly a tell-all celebrity product; no one makes a long career in the toxic fishbowl of rock-and-roll fame without learning how to be silent when necessary. The book's prose reflects Young's reputation as a blunt, principled man, and reveals a shy rural kid who survived a head-on collision with the 60s. The sentences are clipped down to subject, verb, object. Sometimes this choice seems clumsy or pretentious. But at its best, it allows Young to say complicated things very simply. [When Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young reunited during the Iraq War to tour 1960's anthems for audiences forty years later] "...we had a sense of the old purpose. But things had changed; we split our audience in half with that music instead of bringing it together." (In the same more-with-less vein, Altamont is notable for "only one murder".) What the book documents best is how difficult it must be to become a celebrity. As the author points out, "Give a hippie too much money and anything can happen." It is clear that between drugs, youth, terror, management, and naivety, while Young was making rock and roll history, he had no idea what was happening. Something about the music, and cars: custom cars made too big, small cars that went too fast. They crashed, they burned. He sits down with the reader to see if he can figure it out now. He likes restoring old cars, but he always has. Like Young's music, his fans will celebrate his book because, rough edges and all, he keeps searching for something more important than his own fame. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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