When McDonough hits, though, he really connects, and the book shows a lot of potential. The first 150 pages of Shakey chronicle Young's formative years: his early life in Toronto with parents Scott and Rassy Young, the family's subsequent years in the small Ontario town of Omeemee (the subject of Young's song "Helpless"), Young's battle with poliomyelitis at the age of six, the break-up of his parents' marriage, and Neil and Rassy's move west to Winnipeg, Manitoba. The Winnipeg years are well-documented, and McDonough hints that the Prairie city possessed the most important Canadian rock and roll scene in the mid-Sixties. As opposed to the strictly rock or folk schools of thought in a place like Toronto, Winnipeg teenagers had access to music from radio stations all over the American Midwest. Geographically situated at the northern end of the North American Plains, kids could tune in their radios every night and hear stations from as far away as New Orleans and Shreveport, and Young and his buddy Randy Bachman would study the new sounds and compare notes, eventually forming, in Bachman's case, the Guess Who, and in Young's, the Squires. McDonough quotes many of Young's Winnipeg cohorts, adequately describing a part of Canadian music history few Canadians even know about.
