I Heard Ol’ Neil

Prepping for a molasses-slow crawl up the Queen Elizabeth Way to Toronto in hopes of seeing 78-year-old Neil Young bash out “Powderfinger” and caterwaul “Like a Hurricane,” I reread two essential texts of Canadiana: Jimmy McDonough’s Young biography Shakey (2002), the best rock’n’roll bio I have ever read (admittedly, the field is fallow), and the philosopher George Grant’s Lament for a Nation (1965), the meditation of a “Red Tory” on the absorption of Canada into the economic and military sphere and “homogenized culture of the American Empire.”