Boppin_Brian
Registered: 02/01/04
Posts: 3,817
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| | 08/01/06 at 01:16 AM | Reply with quote | #1 |
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OBITUARY
Paul Nelson; critic who spanned folk and rock; 69
By Jon Pareles
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
July 13, 2006
Paul Nelson, a pioneering rock music critic, was found dead July 5 in his Manhattan apartment. He was 69.
His death was confirmed by Steven Feltes of Evergreen Video in Greenwich Village, his friend and former employer, who said that the cause had not yet been determined.
As a critic at Rolling Stone, where his writing appeared regularly and where he edited the reviews section in the 1970s, Mr. Nelson was a constant advocate for tough-minded music, particularly from singer-songwriters. He named Jackson Browne's album “The Pretender” as his choice for a desert island. During a brief stint working for a recording company, he signed the New York Dolls.
Mr. Nelson prized hard-boiled detective novels and film noir, and his style was pithy and passionate. Reviewing Neil Young's “Rust Never Sleeps” for Rolling Stone in 1979, he wrote: “For anyone still passionately in love with rock 'n' roll, Neil Young has made a record that defines the territory. Defines it, expands it, explodes it. Burns it to the ground.”
Mr. Nelson was born in Warren, Minn., and attended St. Olaf College and then the University of Minnesota. With a friend, John Pankake, he started Little Sandy Review, a magazine about folk music, in 1961.
Bobby Zimmerman, a songwriter from Hibbing, Minn., who was working at local coffeehouses, sought out Mr. Nelson after seeing the magazine.
“He had a whole lot of records, which probably couldn't be found anywhere else in the Midwest,” Bob Dylan – formerly Zimmerman – said in the 2005 documentary “No Direction Home.”
At one point, when he knew Mr. Nelson was out of town for the weekend, Dylan dropped by his house and, he said, “helped myself to a bunch more records.” About 25 disappeared from Mr. Nelson's collection, providing songs for Dylan's early repertory.
Mr. Nelson moved to New York City in 1963 hoping to write film criticism. Instead, he became the managing editor of the folk music revival's most important magazine, Sing Out! Two years later, when Dylan played his first electric concerts and was being booed by folk die-hards, Mr. Nelson wrote in defense of the change, and quit Sing Out! In an interview with http://www.rockcritics.com, Mr. Nelson said: “The folk music just turned into rock for me. When I heard 'Like a Rolling Stone' it changed everything for me.”
Mr. Nelson then worked at a pop magazine, Circus, and at Rolling Stone. In 1970, he took a job at the publicity department of Mercury Records and then became an “artists and repertoire” – or A&R – man there. He assembled the Velvet Underground's live album “1969” and signed the New York Dolls, the anarchic glam-rock band later recognized as a major influence on punk. When the Dolls failed to sell, he was fired. He returned to Rolling Stone, where he wrote features and edited the record reviews section until 1983.
Mr. Nelson left Rolling Stone when a new format drastically shortened the reviews. He wrote features for Musician magazine and reviewed albums for People.
In 1988, he collaborated with the rock critic Lester Bangs on a biography of Rod Stewart.
By the early 1990s, he had lost interest in current music, immersing himself instead in bluegrass and the jazz trumpeter and singer Chet Baker.
Until last July, he worked at Evergreen Video, an aficionado's video store, where he could watch and discuss movies all day. In 2000, he was working on a screenplay he never expected to see filmed.
“It's so different than anything Hollywood is putting out today,” he told rockcritics.com.
Mr. Nelson is survived by a son, Mark, of Dallas; a sister, Linda Barna of Pennsylvania; and one grandson.
ViA |
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