It was. Though a word of caution: It's very much a late-period Neil Young work - which means it can come across as unfocused, overlong, repetitive, and utterly brilliant all at once.
In a way,
Waging Heavy Peace is a story of itself. We read it as Neil wrote it, more as a long blog post explaining why he's writing an autobiography rather than the actual autobiography. He's having to take it easy with a broken toe, he's recently given up drugs and alcohol after spending 40 years smoking pot "the way other people smoke tobacco", and not knowing how to create music sober, he has to do something with his fingers. And so he writes, quickly, before his muse moves on to something else. Tellingly, in one anecdote, he tells of a health scare he had a few years ago, when he was told he needed brain surgery to prevent a deadly aneurysm. The surgery was in a week, so rather than just hang around New York worrying, he went down to Nashville and wrote and recorded an entire album in a couple of days - the excellent
Prairie Wind. That's how he works, in flashes of not always well-guided inspiration, and that's how he writes.
And what he writes is basically his entire life (or rather, the bits he wants us to know about). Put this together the right way, and you have it all: growing up in a small town in Canada, dealing with polio and divorced parents, drifting into music, eventual superstardom with Buffalo Springfield, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, and Crazy Horse, the downsides of fame, the people who fell by the roadside (he's lost a lot of close associates over the years to drugs, cancer, AIDS...), love, marriage and family, the trouble of trying to raise a severely handicapped child, dealing with failing health, sobriety and aging, the fear of senility... and a LOT of stuff about his opinions on digital distribution of music, toy trains, and electric cars. Seriously, there's a lot of passages about that; for a 65-year-old rather grumpy rock star, Neil Young is very much interested in what's happening in technology. Oh, and the music itself, of course. Though we don't get the story in that order. We get it in whichever order he happens to think of it, free-associating from whatever he's doing that day. Which makes it a frustrating read sometimes, and one where there are entire passages that are probably of far more interest to Neil himself than to anyone else, but also one that keeps surprising both the author and the reader.
It strikes me that this trend of rock stars writing their biographies is probably a result of how much gets written about them. Unlike an interview, a book is a one-way street, and much like Bob Dylan did in
Chronicles, Neil uses that (though he's far more generous with facts than Dylan was). When you spend 50 years as a successful musician, especially one who'll shelve albums, cancel tours and fire musicians on a moment's whim, you inevitably end up treading on people's toes - and the biography is a great opportunity to be gracious towards them 30 years later. Still, overall it's one of the more honest rock star autobiographies I've read - not necessarily in terms of the details he chooses to present or ignore, but in the picture it paints of the person behind it all.
Neil Young's best and worst work always came when he was working quickly, in first takes, without any self-censorship or second-guessing at all - fittingly, the book ends with him telling us how he recorded "Will To Love", one of his most haunting songs, recorded on a small tape recorder in front of a crackling fireplace and never performed live since he could never recapture it. But scratch the surface, and you'll realise that for all his talk of following the muse, of always doing exactly what he feels like and dropping it the second it starts boring him, of never doing it the same way twice, he wouldn't have lasted this long if he didn't have a professional bone somewhere deep down, a knack for seeming to improvise when he actually knows exactly what he's doing, where his strengths lie. Turns out some of them actually lie in writing. Whodathunkit.
I always thought this quote from his song "From Hank To Hendrix" summed up his entire career, and it does just as well for his autobiography:
Sometimes it's distorted, not clear to you
Sometimes the beauty of love comes ringing through
New glass in the window, new leaf on the tree...
He spends a not insignificant part of his autobiography wondering if this is it for him as a musician, if the fact that he hasn't written any new songs in months means he'll have to stick to other avenues from now on, speculating on what other books he might write... Shortly after he sent the book off to the printer's, he went back into the studio with Crazy Horse and recorded two whole albums. That's Neil for ya.
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