Jimmy McDonough is a journalist who has contributed to such publications as Variety, Film Comment, Mojo, Spin and Juggs. But he is perhaps best know for his intense, definitive Village Voice profiles of such artists as Jimmy Scott, Neil Young and Hubert Selby, Jr. He is also the author of The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.
The raw materials of the story are sensational: burning ambition, clashing egos, onstage epileptic seizures, deranged groupies, great albums, the birth and death of Sixties idealism, and, most of all, extremes of substance abuse * Scotland on Sunday * Succeeds in stripping a star of his iconography - McDonough's book excels at anecdotes of music excess from a bygone era * Observer * It's hard to imagine anyone trying to better this book - It has an abundance of what Young values above all else - passion * Evening Standard * I've been reading this biography of Neil Young called Shakey and it's changed my life, man -- Liam Gallagher * NME *