Peace ain’t heavy, bro
Afew things stand out about Neil Young’s memoirs, Waging Heavy Peace, an electronic copy of which was sent recently by a cartoonist friend from Singapore. The folk singer’s observation about the dramatic deterioration of the sound quality of today’s music downloads is point well taken, and something which he has sought to address by launching Puretone to rival the iTunes/Limewire phenomenon that revolutionized music appreciation and accessibility, and from whence the title of the book came: “Are you waging war on Apple, Neil?” came a question from one of his partners in the venture. His answer: “No, I’m waging heavy peace”.
Filipinos of the jukebox generation remember the singer-songwriter for a number of albums in the 1970s and 1980s, not least his collaboration with the seminal group Crosby Stills & Nash, and today the “Déjà Vu” album of CSN plus Young remains among the classics of rock music, right up there with the best of the Stones, Beatles and Bob Dylan, sometimes also known as the big three of pop counter-culture. Who can forget a song like Helpless, with its easily memorable and deceptively simple three-chord pattern, even up to the chorus and bridge? The lyrics admittedly occasionally varied, depending on how good the ears were of those taking them down.
What Waging Heavy Peace does for the most part is give the story behind many of the man’s songs, including assorted heartbreaks along life’s mad journey, the loves left by the wayside and friends overdosing never to be heard from again except for the impromptu tribute in these pages, the experience of fathering two sons, both special children that at first engendered paranoia but segued into a blessing. There are a number of songs that resurface upon reading through this memoir, one of which is Cinnamon Girl.
Culled from Young’s second studio album “Everybody Knows this is Nowhere,” Cinnamon Girl gained extensive airplay during the martial law years over such stations as dzRJ, sometimes juxtaposed with another gem from that same record with his band Crazy Horse, Cowgirl in the Sand. Cinnamon is driven forward by a bass line that can never be approximated by Young’s freewheeling narrative here (though to his credit he gives the late guitarist Danny Whitten his due and rues that he had not recognized the Crazy Horse pioneer’s genius in his lifetime).
As Young would tell it, he had decided to overdub his own background vocals of the high parts in Cinnamon Girl, editing out Whitten’s who had sung the same harmony part in the original take. Perhaps as a way of making amends, albeit belatedly, he has re-mastered the originals with the Whitten part restored and will release it soon on the projected “Puretone.” Young admits that he used to be so full of himself that he didn’t think twice about lopping off Whitten, who nonetheless took it good-naturedly. (Or so Young wrote).
Whitten, writer of the undying I Don’t Want to Talk About It, which has been recorded by artists from Rod Stewart to Tracy Thorn of Everything But the Girl, overdosed on heroin in the early ’70s, a death well chronicled in Young’s Needle and the Damage Done.
Stories, too, abound behind the recording of his most commercially successful and arguably best album, “Harvest,” which coincided with his romance with the actress Carrie Snodgress and the birth of their son who was to suffer from cerebral palsy. It is revealed in this autobiography that Young had health problems himself, and in fact survived polio as a kid, which could explain some of his psychomotor moments of distress. But fathering special children with different women may have on the other hand fed his art, though one wouldn’t wish such a situation even on a worst enemy.
The reader gets the lowdown on songs such as Old Man which Young’s own writer father had thought was dedicated to him, when it was really for an owner of a farm the rock star would eventually purchase. Young’s father, a friend of the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, had even mistook America’s A Horse with No Name as his son’s song.
There’s back-story also on Motion Pictures from the album “On the Beach,” which shows the artist digging deep inside himself in the midst of a breakup, with Hawaii as setting. When he reprints the lyrics in one of the book’s chapters it is as if you are hearing the song again, from a record bought in Farmer’s Plaza or Rustan’s Cubao of the suburban ’70s.
Young relates circumstances behind the recording of “Tonight’s the Night,” easily his darkest and roughest sounding record. The whole album was pervaded with the spirit of Whitten and another dead friend, and like Young’s writing style was postmodern and deconstructive when those terms were not yet in vogue. “Are you sure you want to release this?” He was repeatedly asked, and now it can be told there were two later albums that were released ahead of “Tonight’s the Night.” The artist won out; the triumph of the rough mix.
Much space is devoted to his episode with the Buffalo Springfield, his band with Stephen Stills that preceded CSN&Y. Those were the days of getting a band together, and you could almost smell the hunger and the groupies’ underwear and wisps of weed hanging in the air, such that the reader is given a briefer on the template of country, or the uses of the pedal steel guitar in the infancy of folk rock. That band of course spawned, apart from CSN&Y, Poco and Loggins and Messina and probably, in an indirect way, the Flying Burrito Brothers of Gram Parsons.
Young’s writing in Waging Heavy Peace is on the whole rather aimless and artless, relying mostly on gut feel and being a man “most like himself.” A reviewer in the New Yorker remarked on Young’s “vexing simplicity,” apparently borne out by the rocker’s admission that he doesn’t read. Another reveal: in more than a year that he has been off weed, Young has not written a single song.
But, significantly, he has come up with this memoir, which can be taken as an exercise in detox in the manner more conventional writers might use the craft as a form of quiet self-exorcism, though therapy by any other name is still therapy wherever the four strong winds blow, and whatever the coin in the jukebox or karaoke chooses to play. To paraphrase an old blues master, you should have seen what I heard.
