The pain and the passion

Despite the soppy outrages perpetrated by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, few would dispute that Neil Young is one of the most talented singer/songwriters of our time. Whether he deserves a 780-page biography is another matter entirely, but then rock journalism has never erred on the side of brevity.

Jimmy McDonough managed to secure the "partial" participation of Young in the book and includes large chunks of him talking about his life and work. The result is a semi-authorised biography in which McDonough makes no pretence at keeping any distance between himself and his subject, but instead swings wildly about from idolising Young to lambasting him for terrible career moves and lacklustre albums. Far from resenting this, Young seems to like being subjected to these tirades - one suspects he would soon have tired of a more sycophantic biographer.

According to Young's father, Scott: "We were never a close family; there were always too many thistles in the salad." Scott Young worked as a sports reporter in Toronto. Neil's mother, Rassy, was an alcoholic. When Young was five, he was diagnosed with polio, which left him physically frail and self-conscious about his body - he refused to swim for fear that other children would tease him for being puny.

From the start, music seems to have been a refuge for Young - a way of both engaging with the world and retreating from its harshness. Aptly enough, his first song was called No - chorus: "No, No, No!" He also had a remarkably clear idea of how he wanted his songs to sound, ostensibly loose, even shambolic, but actually very tightly controlled.

Few, however, shared his faith in his own abilities. According to one promoter, Young "sang like a fag". Aged 19 and fed up with Canada, he headed to California in a hearse, bumped into Stephen Stills in a traffic jam on Sunset Boulevard and they decided to form a band. Ten days later, Buffalo Springfield went on tour opening for The Byrds. But just when Young's career was taking off, he started to suffer from epileptic seizures, much to the disgust of other band members who reckoned he was faking them so that women would lay damp towels on his head.

By now Young had hit upon the sound he wanted: a blend of The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. He had also become increasingly single-minded in pursuit of what he wanted. He walked out of Buffalo Springfield when he decided he had outgrown them and began performing with other musicians, setting a pattern which has endured. He's never been too fussed about expertise, what he wants are musicians who play with passion and whom he can control. David Crosby once remonstrated with him for playing with Crazy Horse: "I'd say to Neil, 'What the f*** are you doing playing with these jerks?' He'd say, 'They're soulful.' I'd say, 'Man, so is my dog, but I don't give him a set of drums.'"

Yet, at the same time, Young has always been hugely adept at controlling his image. His decision to join Crosby, Stills and Nash seems to have been entirely a commercial one. They were already popular and he was able to hitch himself to their wagon while negotiating a contract which gave him a free hand to do solo projects. When these projects were good, such as After the Goldrush or Tonight's the Night, they were very good indeed. And when they were bad, Young simply shrugged his shoulders and wrote another bunch of songs.

For a while in the Eighties, he threatened to go off the rails altogether, releasing two albums that were so uncommercial that his record company sued him for making records " musically uncharacteristic of Young's previous recordings". What no one outside his family knew was that his second son, Ben, had been born with cerebral palsy. His first son, Zeke, also suffered from the illness, but Ben was much more seriously affected. He was spastic, quadriplegic and unable to speak. As Young says now: "I didn't know that I shut the door on music when I shut the door on pain."

But even in the midst of his anguish, Young's commercial instincts didn't desert him. He went back into the studio and recorded the bland but populist Harvest Moon, which hoisted him back up the charts. These days, he seems as content as he has ever been. He built a huge model train set for Ben to play with - and liked it so much he bought the company.

It's hard to imagine anyone trying, or wanting, to better this book in terms of thoroughness. Although McDonough's prose is serviceable at best and hardly hums with insights, it does have an abundance of what Young values above all else - passion.