A man needs a "Shakey": Neil Young's bio

I need to say something very simple here: Thanks to Jimmy McDonough for writing Shakey. I'm not quite through yet, but I'm reading this book—a 2002 biography of Neil Young—with such awe. It's exactly the kind of work that one wishes existed re: every artist one loves.

It's unauthorized in the strict sense, yet with full access. McDonough interviewed Young himself exhaustively, but maybe more importantly, he interviewed just about everyone who ever worked with Young and brought their opinions to NY for consideration. It's a true 360-degree portrait. (More than 300 interviews—MORE THAN 300!) And all the personality study is in service of the music. There's not a single song or album or bootleg discussed here that you don't want to run out and hear. And McDonough tells it to you straight: what's worth checking out and what's not.

Some of the reviews quoted on the book jacket have been really bothering me. Two of them use the word "maddening." One of them says "unmanageable" and "overzealous." Overzealous? Would we prefer our biographies of monumental artists to be merely zelaous, or underzealous? And what exactly is maddening about leaving no stone unturned? About doing impeccable research and synthesizing it into something lengthy (but not unreasonably so, given that we're dealing with a four-decade career here) and eminently readable? As for unmanageable, how exactly? Maybe if you'd rather read a capsule review or a blog post.

It's so wonderful to check this book out and so sad to think about how alien it seems from most writing on the internet, i.e., most writing that people read. There's no need for a curmudgeonly rant here, but there's something so pre-internet about this book. McDonough flew out to all corners of the country to visit with the major players in Neil Young's life. He worked this thing out over something like a decade, even wrangling with Young's own mixed signals, which nearly sunk the project. This is not a deadline-driven thing. It was obviously open-ended in the best sense.

It might sound "overzealous" but I think this is a heroic act: to try to make sense of a life, specifically one that is not one's own. Not a life that's worth more than other lives, but simply one that is public, that has touched a lot of people as a result of what it has yielded.

What I'm saying is that every great, public artist—every great, public human, really—deserves a Shakey, a passionate and more importantly READABLE primary-sourced guide to the person and the work and the complex solar system of friends, associates, lovers, nemeses and whatnot that made it all possible. A work that's grounded in the facts but that doesn't burden you with them. A scrapbook compiled by a true fan with the wherewithal to speak objectively.

And now, back to the 1991 NY & Crazy Horse triumph, Weld...

Work song: Keelhaul, household chores and the unthinking

"...with rock & roll, the more you think, the more you stink."—David Briggs, quoted in Shakey

I'm currently ensconced in the marvelous Neil Young biography cited above. In one of my favorite passages, Briggs, Young's longtime producer, rants about the pitfalls of modern recording practices ("People realized they could do their part... later. Play their part and fix it later"). Maybe there's cliché at the heart of this sentiment ("Turn off the brain" and whatnot), but is it not so true that rock comes from another place than the mind?

I have all this on the brain today—see? the brain again—at the outset of what promises to be a great holiday weekend. Watched Woody Allen's Alice this morning with my new fiancée (great movie), and then we launched into one of our epic cleaning fits. I always self-assign to doing-the-dishes duty and I actually love it. The reason is that it affords me the perfect opportunity to Rock Out to whatever music I choose for an extended, uninterrupted period.

Re: "the more you think, the more you stink," something I've noticed is that certain music can rule more the less you specifically concentrate on it—like, say, if you're doing the dishes or running on the treadmill while you're listening. Case in point: Keelhaul, a band whom I've often written about before (like here and here) and whom I've become re-obsessed with over the last few days after learning that they're playing Santos Party House in NYC on August 5 (with Unsane, can't wait). Today I blasted their latest album, 2009's Keelhaul's Triumphant Return to Obscurity, as I soaped and scrubbed all the bowls, forks, knives, cutting boards, whatever. And though it was such a mundane domestic task, there was something beautiful about my ACTIVITY paralleling that of the music.

You listen to Keelhaul, in other words, and you want to work. Because what this band does best is work. They are riffsmiths, endlessly churning through labyrinthine math-metallic constructions—a practice that somehow transcends a conventional task like songwriting. Some Keelhaul songs are a minute long; some are seven minutes long. Some have vocals; some don't. Some are unrelentingly brutal; some are downright chill. But what unites all of their music is a sense of drivenness, of single-minded, less-you-think-less-you-stink MOTION.

Enslaving yourself to a riff. Is there any point to it? Well, the point is that it gets you out of your head. I've often found this at STATS rehearsals, as we cycle through repetition after repetition after repetition of a riff. It's not something you'd ever perform (unless you're Cheer-Accident doing "Filet of Nod"!), but you do it for the release, the pleasure of activity and motion and forwardness and non-static-icity and sculpting something out of sound.

That is so often the pleasure of making and listening to music for me—just being on a moving train, or somesuch. Exorcising the demons via vigorous movement. And if you're not playing music, DOING SOMETHING while listening is often the next best thing. So I wish you all activity—unthinking and nonstinking—as well as a great ROCK soundtrack this Independence Day weekend, and in that spirit, here are Keelhaul themselves, destroying the silence and the inactivity with pure WORK music in their hometown of Cleveland just a few weeks ago: