"Innaresting characters."

Neil Young likes to surround himself with them, biographer Jimmy McDonough says.

So, when it came to getting Young to open up in interviews for Shakey, McDonough's new authorized tome of Young's life, it didn't hurt that the writer was a bit of an "innaresting character" himself.

"I've interviewed thousands of people," says McDonough, a New York City native, self-described Neil Young obsessive, pop-culture maven and rapid-fire talker.

"Without a doubt, this guy was the hardest interview ever. He is just a complex and, to use an overused word to describe him, elusive character. I threw everything at the wall, hoping something would stick. I wore T-shirts with funny slogans to catch his attention. I'd play him his own music and show him photographs. Any stimulation, any humiliation on my part. Clown suit and multi-coloured wig -- whatever it took, I tried it."

It took McDonough more than a decade to compile information for and write Shakey, published through Random House and already in bookstores. During that time, the author was usually welcome in Young's day-to-day inner circle and was given full access to his archives.

The result is a meticulously detailed and thoughtful book that sidesteps the sort of robotic adulation and self-censorship that often drags down rock biographies. Anecdotes and commentary are tied together by lengthy interview transcripts that are insightful or puzzling.

Even McDonough acknowledges that after all the ground he covered with Young, there's still a sense that his subject was hiding part of himself away.

"I thought, 'Oh gee, I've got it made!' " he says of being recruited as Young's biographer after doing an uncharacteristically candid interview with the singer for the Village Voice in 1989. "We have a contract! He's going to sit down and we're going to get into his life!' "

But it doesn't work that way with Young.

"You never know what's going to upset the apple cart or what's going to amuse him, or what other dimension he has a foot in. His mind is so quick he's maybe five steps ahead of you. That was one of the reasons I used a lot of transcripts of these rambling, at times inane, interviews. It was just to give a sense, a feeling of how this guy was. Hopefully I achieved it to some degree."

McDonough still sounds surprised that Shakey happened at all. One of the book's most dramatic moments occurs in the '90s. McDonough berates Young for not being more candid about his feelings over Kurt Cobain's "better to burn out..." suicide letter. Young hangs up on him, but then invites him out on tour for more discussions.

"People say biographies are supposed to be objective," McDonough says. "I think that's impossible."

He laughs as he recalls his ice-breaking first meeting with his subject.

"I keep telling this old canard, but when I first met him I got in the car and said, 'Look, buster, if you sing Sugar Mountain again I'm gonna go buy a gun.' He laughed. I think he found my idiotic candidness refreshing."

But while he offers astute and decidedly unfawning assessments of Young's work in Shakey, McDonough maintains he's "not a rock critic.

"I'm a storyteller and I like to hear stories about people's lives. (Young) knew I was going to go into the deep end. Maybe he also sensed that I'd go so deep I'd never come back. I don't think that would be something that would make him unhappy either!"