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Everything is an Afterthought
A pioneering ROLLING STONE critic gets his due.
What happened to Paul Nelson? In the '60s, he pioneered rock & roll criticism with a first-person style of writing that would later be popularized by the likes of Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer as “New Journalism.” As co-founding editor of THE LITTLE SANDY REVIEW and managing editor of SING OUT!, he’d already established himself, to use his friend Bob Dylan’s words, as “a folk-music scholar”; but when Dylan went electric in 1965, Nelson went with him.
During a five-year detour at Mercury Records in the early 1970s, Nelson signed the New York Dolls to their first recording contract, then settled back down to writing criticism at ROLLING STONE as the last in a great tradition of record-review editors that included Jon Landau, Dave Marsh, and Greil Marcus. Famously championing the early careers of artists like Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Rod Stewart, Neil Young, and Warren Zevon, Nelson not only wrote about them but often befriended them. Never one to be pigeonholed, he was also one of punk rock’s first stateside mainstream proponents, embracing the Sex Pistols and the Ramones.
But in 1982, he walked away from it all — ROLLING STONE, his friends, and rock & roll. By the time he died in his New York City apartment in 2006 at the age of seventy — a week passing before anybody discovered his body — almost everything he’d written had been relegated to back issues of old music magazines.
How could a man whose writing had been so highly regarded have fallen so quickly from our collective memory? With Paul Nelson’s posthumous blessing, Kevin Avery spent four years researching and writing EVERYTHING IS AN AFTERTHOUGHT: THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF PAUL NELSONN. This unique anthology-biography compiles Nelson’s best works (some of it previously unpublished) while also providing a vivid account of his private and public lives. Avery interviewed almost 100 of Paul Nelson’s friends, family, and colleagues, including several of the artists about whom he’d written.
Bruce Springsteen says, “He is somebody who played a very essential part in that creative moment when I was there trying to establish what I was doing and what I wanted our band to be about.”
This is a landmark work of cultural revival, a tribute to and collection by one of the unsung critical champions of popular art. Black-and-white illustrations and photographs throughout.
[Please note: There are listings online for a Feral House edition of this title, which was never published. The Fantagraphics edition is not only the preferred edition, it's the only edition.]
What happened to Paul Nelson? In the '60s, he pioneered rock & roll criticism with a first-person style of writing that would later be popularized by the likes of Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer as “New Journalism.” As co-founding editor of THE LITTLE SANDY REVIEW and managing editor of SING OUT!, he’d already established himself, to use his friend Bob Dylan’s words, as “a folk-music scholar”; but when Dylan went electric in 1965, Nelson went with him.
During a five-year detour at Mercury Records in the early 1970s, Nelson signed the New York Dolls to their first recording contract, then settled back down to writing criticism at ROLLING STONE as the last in a great tradition of record-review editors that included Jon Landau, Dave Marsh, and Greil Marcus. Famously championing the early careers of artists like Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Rod Stewart, Neil Young, and Warren Zevon, Nelson not only wrote about them but often befriended them. Never one to be pigeonholed, he was also one of punk rock’s first stateside mainstream proponents, embracing the Sex Pistols and the Ramones.
But in 1982, he walked away from it all — ROLLING STONE, his friends, and rock & roll. By the time he died in his New York City apartment in 2006 at the age of seventy — a week passing before anybody discovered his body — almost everything he’d written had been relegated to back issues of old music magazines.
How could a man whose writing had been so highly regarded have fallen so quickly from our collective memory? With Paul Nelson’s posthumous blessing, Kevin Avery spent four years researching and writing EVERYTHING IS AN AFTERTHOUGHT: THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF PAUL NELSONN. This unique anthology-biography compiles Nelson’s best works (some of it previously unpublished) while also providing a vivid account of his private and public lives. Avery interviewed almost 100 of Paul Nelson’s friends, family, and colleagues, including several of the artists about whom he’d written.
Bruce Springsteen says, “He is somebody who played a very essential part in that creative moment when I was there trying to establish what I was doing and what I wanted our band to be about.”
This is a landmark work of cultural revival, a tribute to and collection by one of the unsung critical champions of popular art. Black-and-white illustrations and photographs throughout.
[Please note: There are listings online for a Feral House edition of this title, which was never published. The Fantagraphics edition is not only the preferred edition, it's the only edition.]
512 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2011
2 people are currently reading
74 people want to read
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Paul Nelson
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There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
October 8, 2014
Our cultural phenomena, our arts, are here for us to have something to love. The older I get, and the more I engage in the consumption of, and cohabitation with, works of art, the more I am convinced that they exist to provide feelings of intimacy and closeness that are not as readily available elsewhere in my life. Not to suggest that these feelings of intimacy and closeness need only be emotional; they can be purely intellectual also. These feelings can lead one to a greater – I’d even say transcendent if it were not a contradiction – experience of reality; which leads many people to refer to arts as giving them a sense of life more real than life itself. This I think is the fundamental purpose of art – not ‘community building’, not as a way to embody or express eternal verities (though both of these are possible by-products). As should be evident, this fundamental purpose is at its deepest root profoundly solitary. Yes, we are all alone in this world, but art simultaneously heightens and deepens this aloneness and provides glimmers of a co-existence, of a closeness and intimacy with others, that can at times be too profound to believe.
And in the end we very well might find ourselves, after a lifetime of intimacy with art, and through that art participating in a community of relatively like-minded souls, getting our kicks, getting well known, alone in a 6th floor walk-up, destitute and starving, until one day we simply die in the very bed we’ve slept in for years, and it will not be until the stench our rotting body alerts a neighbor (a neighbor who quite possibly was barely a passing acquaintance) that we have died and that an impersonal authority should be contacted to investigate the end of the solitude of our life.
And in the case of Paul Nelson to then have our solitude unpackaged so that our days of closeness and intimacy with music and film and literature can be recreated through the shared medium of a book, thus furthering the feelings of profound aloneness and profound co-existence that only art can provide for some of us, the lucky ones I’d say, the Romantics.
And in the end we very well might find ourselves, after a lifetime of intimacy with art, and through that art participating in a community of relatively like-minded souls, getting our kicks, getting well known, alone in a 6th floor walk-up, destitute and starving, until one day we simply die in the very bed we’ve slept in for years, and it will not be until the stench our rotting body alerts a neighbor (a neighbor who quite possibly was barely a passing acquaintance) that we have died and that an impersonal authority should be contacted to investigate the end of the solitude of our life.
And in the case of Paul Nelson to then have our solitude unpackaged so that our days of closeness and intimacy with music and film and literature can be recreated through the shared medium of a book, thus furthering the feelings of profound aloneness and profound co-existence that only art can provide for some of us, the lucky ones I’d say, the Romantics.
November 7, 2011
When he died in July 2006, at age seventy, Paul Nelson had not published music criticism in nine years. In 1997, People magazine had printed his short notices of cds by Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark. (These reviews are not reprinted here.) After which he was still writing but privately, a screenplay, a memoir, and letters. Nelson had been living alone in NYC since the early Seventies, at sixty-five had experienced a windfall in his personal finances due to a Social Security Administration check for $10K, just at the same time as he was fired from his longtime job at an NYC videostore, where his customers included Jason Ruscio, Winona Ryder, and Martin Scorsese. He seems by the time of this firing to have been too hemmed in, socially, too extended in his promissory contacts with non-intimates, who included those who gave him money, the likes of Bob Dylan, and Jackson Browne, among others, nor was his record of paying debts back making him any less vulnerable, as it included two unreturned publisher-advances he worried would garnishee his accounts, so that he did not have a bank account until the last year or so of his life. The cause of death given was heart failure, but in fact Nelson seems to have whittled his homeopathy and dependencies down to one or two persons -- the owner of the video store who had to fire him (who can afford a clerk hurling insults at customers wishing to escape the store with a piece of Hollywood dreck?), and a fellow apartment tenant, from whom he was actually, and unknowingly, subletting his place. Nelson left in his wake at least one ex-wife, a son, a wealthy sister, and scores of friends in the film business, music business, musicians, and most loyally, rock critics. These latter would apparently have been willing to, and with only a few however significant exceptions did, go to any length to keep him alive had only Nelson permitted them to -- but he rather seems to have identified with those quite outstanding professionals who for whatever personal reasons no longer could.
Everything Is An Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson is a hybrid: part fan-biography, part literary collection of criticism. Kevin Avery's biographical endeavors are not in vain; he gets caught up in telling Nelson's story, hardly understanding how significant that story is. That is, Avery hardly seems to understand that Nelson's life sums up the whole history of rock discourse as a genre of literary history and American letters. His biography, almost entirely leaving out scholarship, does not stint on research, or love of inquiry; it's beaded out like an oral biography, and beautifully illustrated, but actually reads like a sensitive map into the field of rock criticism -- one rock criticism has never had -- and I count the only other book of its type, Jim de Rogatis's biography of Nelson's friend Lester Bangs. The collection in the book's second half is useful but disappointingly leaves out Nelson's work at The Little Sandy Review, Sing Out ! and Musician and re-prints, only sparingly, under the watchful legal superintendent of its ownership, the articles from Rolling Stone, so almost anyone with access to a good library and a pocketful of coins would do better spending an afternoon at the xerox machine to get the gist of Nelson's critical poetry.
A note on the folly of the Goodreads star system, and my above rating in particular: After Jann Wenner moved Nelson out as Music Editor at Rolling Stone, which Avery does terrific work in covering here, the founder of the counterculture's bi-monthly started the star system there for its record reviews, which Nelson had fought throughout his 4-year tenure as editor. It was around then -- just after -- June 1983 -- that I sent in my clip file to RS and was pushed along to the offshoot meant to cover more thoroughly the recording scene Wenner had grown tired of, the magazine called Record, whose editor, David McGee, is among Avery's informants. By then this 22-year old had swallowed a big mouthful of Paul Nelson. Who was he? He was an "appreciator" of Bob Dylan, for starters. This may mean little to the reader -- there are many of those, after all. My point would be that in doing these stars, we are all Paul Nelson critics -- a phrase I mean with all possible ambiguity. Rock criticism makes a critical gambit, and effects to impose a rhetorical practicality that is one part consumer guide, one part civics lesson. Nelson began appreciating Dylan before he was Bob Dylan -- 1959, or thereabouts. And he and his friend, Jon Pancake, started a little magazine, The Little Sandy Review, in Minneapolis, to track the burgeoning folk revival record spree and provide its readers in an object lesson in collection, appreciation, and taste. When Dylan returned to Minneapolis in 1962, two years after he had left to go find Woody Guthrie in New York, Nelson and Pancake organized a listening party for his new music, taped it, and proceeded to brow-beat him for his fealty to the Baez sisters. That resistance to his friend's music is a crucial, one almost wants to say, mythological, vote yodeled among the spangles of rock's largest ambitions. And -- despite that none of this is in Avery's collection (so some will say my rating cuts him a break) -- that is all documented, part of the record, for those who care to look. Nelson's importance, the importance of his magazine, the story of how his career modeled the exigency of rock discourse, both within the business and without, is a large story, one the above rating also and unfortunately belittles. Nelson was right to resist the rating system -- and in homage to him, I rate this book that represents him, anyway.
Everything Is An Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson is a hybrid: part fan-biography, part literary collection of criticism. Kevin Avery's biographical endeavors are not in vain; he gets caught up in telling Nelson's story, hardly understanding how significant that story is. That is, Avery hardly seems to understand that Nelson's life sums up the whole history of rock discourse as a genre of literary history and American letters. His biography, almost entirely leaving out scholarship, does not stint on research, or love of inquiry; it's beaded out like an oral biography, and beautifully illustrated, but actually reads like a sensitive map into the field of rock criticism -- one rock criticism has never had -- and I count the only other book of its type, Jim de Rogatis's biography of Nelson's friend Lester Bangs. The collection in the book's second half is useful but disappointingly leaves out Nelson's work at The Little Sandy Review, Sing Out ! and Musician and re-prints, only sparingly, under the watchful legal superintendent of its ownership, the articles from Rolling Stone, so almost anyone with access to a good library and a pocketful of coins would do better spending an afternoon at the xerox machine to get the gist of Nelson's critical poetry.
A note on the folly of the Goodreads star system, and my above rating in particular: After Jann Wenner moved Nelson out as Music Editor at Rolling Stone, which Avery does terrific work in covering here, the founder of the counterculture's bi-monthly started the star system there for its record reviews, which Nelson had fought throughout his 4-year tenure as editor. It was around then -- just after -- June 1983 -- that I sent in my clip file to RS and was pushed along to the offshoot meant to cover more thoroughly the recording scene Wenner had grown tired of, the magazine called Record, whose editor, David McGee, is among Avery's informants. By then this 22-year old had swallowed a big mouthful of Paul Nelson. Who was he? He was an "appreciator" of Bob Dylan, for starters. This may mean little to the reader -- there are many of those, after all. My point would be that in doing these stars, we are all Paul Nelson critics -- a phrase I mean with all possible ambiguity. Rock criticism makes a critical gambit, and effects to impose a rhetorical practicality that is one part consumer guide, one part civics lesson. Nelson began appreciating Dylan before he was Bob Dylan -- 1959, or thereabouts. And he and his friend, Jon Pancake, started a little magazine, The Little Sandy Review, in Minneapolis, to track the burgeoning folk revival record spree and provide its readers in an object lesson in collection, appreciation, and taste. When Dylan returned to Minneapolis in 1962, two years after he had left to go find Woody Guthrie in New York, Nelson and Pancake organized a listening party for his new music, taped it, and proceeded to brow-beat him for his fealty to the Baez sisters. That resistance to his friend's music is a crucial, one almost wants to say, mythological, vote yodeled among the spangles of rock's largest ambitions. And -- despite that none of this is in Avery's collection (so some will say my rating cuts him a break) -- that is all documented, part of the record, for those who care to look. Nelson's importance, the importance of his magazine, the story of how his career modeled the exigency of rock discourse, both within the business and without, is a large story, one the above rating also and unfortunately belittles. Nelson was right to resist the rating system -- and in homage to him, I rate this book that represents him, anyway.
January 21, 2012
Paul Nelson's life narrative is too good and too tragic. A man who didn't compromise, and paid the price for his stance in the world - nor could he really take care of himself as well. in other words the dark noirish side of being a professional rock n' roll critic.
Nelson was one of the first important figures in Bob Dylan's professional life and eventually signed the New York Dolls to Mercury Records, where he worked as an A&R man. A job for sure that wouldn't last forever. The great aspect of Nelson's work as a critic and even as a human being is his ability to see through the artist's work and really define it on a very personal level. That I think is a critic's job, and Nelson nails it to the written page.
The painful thing about reading this book is a lot of people are going to identify with Nelson's love for culture and what it means to him/us/them. Any person who loved Jackson Browne as well as the New York Dolls is able to see beyond the veil of pop machinery and just focus on the work on hand. The fact that he went all out to get the Dolls signed is an amazing narrative. No one in the music biz liked the Dolls except for a handful of critics - and Nelson was the one who really stopped at nothing to get them signed and that alone we can be really grateful for Paul Nelson.
But here is a man who didn't drink alcohol, but consistently had two cans or bottles of coke with his daily hamburger (he is sort of a Popeye Wimpy figure) and led a life devoted to his interests and nothing else. Also the fact that he ended up working at a video store is both tragic and great at the same time.
The tunnel vision that made him unique is also what killed him in the end. And again, that is the scary part of someone who is so devoted to comment on music, film (a huge film fanatic as well as music) and living on the side of noir despair. A very sad book. But the interviews with his fellow critics and friends (most love him to bits) is quite moving and a tribute to those who write to expose how 'their' feelings are attached to the shine or the mirror-like image of pop culture.
Nelson was one of the first important figures in Bob Dylan's professional life and eventually signed the New York Dolls to Mercury Records, where he worked as an A&R man. A job for sure that wouldn't last forever. The great aspect of Nelson's work as a critic and even as a human being is his ability to see through the artist's work and really define it on a very personal level. That I think is a critic's job, and Nelson nails it to the written page.
The painful thing about reading this book is a lot of people are going to identify with Nelson's love for culture and what it means to him/us/them. Any person who loved Jackson Browne as well as the New York Dolls is able to see beyond the veil of pop machinery and just focus on the work on hand. The fact that he went all out to get the Dolls signed is an amazing narrative. No one in the music biz liked the Dolls except for a handful of critics - and Nelson was the one who really stopped at nothing to get them signed and that alone we can be really grateful for Paul Nelson.
But here is a man who didn't drink alcohol, but consistently had two cans or bottles of coke with his daily hamburger (he is sort of a Popeye Wimpy figure) and led a life devoted to his interests and nothing else. Also the fact that he ended up working at a video store is both tragic and great at the same time.
The tunnel vision that made him unique is also what killed him in the end. And again, that is the scary part of someone who is so devoted to comment on music, film (a huge film fanatic as well as music) and living on the side of noir despair. A very sad book. But the interviews with his fellow critics and friends (most love him to bits) is quite moving and a tribute to those who write to expose how 'their' feelings are attached to the shine or the mirror-like image of pop culture.
August 1, 2023
Everybody knows (or knew) a guy like Paul Nelson. The guy who builds of his obsessions a bunker and then disappears within it. The guy who says, this far and no further. This is the hat I'm gonna wear and the meal I'm gonna eat and the stuff I'm gonna like.
Could be video games. Fan fiction, horse racing, model trains. For Nelson, it was popular music (first folk, then rock) and movies. He was that guy who taped movies off the TV, lovingly annotated the VHS boxes and curated his library to the point where friends had to sign out a movie to borrow it. These guys are around for a while and then they're gone, nobody knows where.
We know where Paul Nelson went, though, because he was an anomaly, virtually the first of his kind. A rock critic. How early was he? In Minneapolis at the end of the '50s he was already self-publishing a music review journal when a teen in a local greaser band was stopping by his house to steal records so he could learn something about folk music. That kid changed his name to Bob Dylan and moved to New York.
Nelson eventually does the same and becomes Rolling Stone's first New York correspondent in the days when the magazine was a small San Francisco operation. Rock criticism was so new, there was no one to tell Nelson what he could or couldn't do. So he wrote 3,000-word album reviews that digressed into film noir, his personal life, and a lot of references to The Great Gatsby. He also came to edit and advise just about every influential rock critic that followed in his footsteps from Jon Landau to Dave Marsh to Cameron Crowe and David Fricke. They all thrived under Nelson's gentle guidance and went on to bigger and better things.
But Nelson didn't. He proved a remarkably poor fit within the glad-handing, unit-shifting culture at Mercury Records, then fumbled away numerous book deals. He couldn't put words on a page anymore. Even an album review would lock him up for weeks.
Why? Well, crippling writer's block surely. But also a manic obsessive compulsive disorder that went untreated all his life. He was very likely on the autism spectrum at a time when that diagnosis wasn't commonly available to people, especially adults. And then he seems to have been beset by early onset Alzheimer's, dating to his mid-fifties, if not earlier.
Kevin Avery is pointedly a fan of Nelson's, but his hybrid of biography and anthology is too little of this and too little of that. The biography portion is long on lurid details of Nelson's later years and short on insights. Most of the reporting consists of reminiscences from music biz types about a person that few people knew very well. A lot of the anecdotes end with simple shrugs.
The anthology is a grab bag of celebrity features, book proposals, and unedited manuscripts that clearly must have benefited from editing. You finish this book still wondering, Who was this strange man?
Could be video games. Fan fiction, horse racing, model trains. For Nelson, it was popular music (first folk, then rock) and movies. He was that guy who taped movies off the TV, lovingly annotated the VHS boxes and curated his library to the point where friends had to sign out a movie to borrow it. These guys are around for a while and then they're gone, nobody knows where.
We know where Paul Nelson went, though, because he was an anomaly, virtually the first of his kind. A rock critic. How early was he? In Minneapolis at the end of the '50s he was already self-publishing a music review journal when a teen in a local greaser band was stopping by his house to steal records so he could learn something about folk music. That kid changed his name to Bob Dylan and moved to New York.
Nelson eventually does the same and becomes Rolling Stone's first New York correspondent in the days when the magazine was a small San Francisco operation. Rock criticism was so new, there was no one to tell Nelson what he could or couldn't do. So he wrote 3,000-word album reviews that digressed into film noir, his personal life, and a lot of references to The Great Gatsby. He also came to edit and advise just about every influential rock critic that followed in his footsteps from Jon Landau to Dave Marsh to Cameron Crowe and David Fricke. They all thrived under Nelson's gentle guidance and went on to bigger and better things.
But Nelson didn't. He proved a remarkably poor fit within the glad-handing, unit-shifting culture at Mercury Records, then fumbled away numerous book deals. He couldn't put words on a page anymore. Even an album review would lock him up for weeks.
Why? Well, crippling writer's block surely. But also a manic obsessive compulsive disorder that went untreated all his life. He was very likely on the autism spectrum at a time when that diagnosis wasn't commonly available to people, especially adults. And then he seems to have been beset by early onset Alzheimer's, dating to his mid-fifties, if not earlier.
Kevin Avery is pointedly a fan of Nelson's, but his hybrid of biography and anthology is too little of this and too little of that. The biography portion is long on lurid details of Nelson's later years and short on insights. Most of the reporting consists of reminiscences from music biz types about a person that few people knew very well. A lot of the anecdotes end with simple shrugs.
The anthology is a grab bag of celebrity features, book proposals, and unedited manuscripts that clearly must have benefited from editing. You finish this book still wondering, Who was this strange man?
November 12, 2013
This is an unusual book: half is biography and the other half is Paul Nelson's writings. I first came across Paul Nelson in 1972 when I bought my first rock book 'Bob Dylan A Retrospective' in which Craig McGregor had assembled some articles about Dylan and it included two by Paul from 'Sing Out'. Not long after that I started to read Rolling Stone magazine when Paul was in his hey day. Then as I became more obsessed about music and stumbled across more esoteric items I would come across Paul's name on album cover notes and occasionally named as producer. He was there in Dinkytown when Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan. He was there when Dylan went electric. He wrote the best articles I've read about rock.
Paul was the ultimate romantic who took his obsessions with music, books and films very seriously. He painted himself into a corner where he eventually gave up writing and worked in a video store in Manhattan for 15 years. Then he just gave up at 70. They found his body in his Manhattan apartment a week after he died.
Paul's story here reads a bit like a detective novel - you start with the tragic circumstances of his death and then you try to figure out how things came to this. Kevin Avery does a very good job at this.
The title of this book comes from an article Paul wrote where he said: 'On these sands you've got plenty of past, a severely pinched present, and no future. Everything is an afterthought.' That just about sums up how Paul's life panned out.
Paul was the ultimate romantic who took his obsessions with music, books and films very seriously. He painted himself into a corner where he eventually gave up writing and worked in a video store in Manhattan for 15 years. Then he just gave up at 70. They found his body in his Manhattan apartment a week after he died.
Paul's story here reads a bit like a detective novel - you start with the tragic circumstances of his death and then you try to figure out how things came to this. Kevin Avery does a very good job at this.
The title of this book comes from an article Paul wrote where he said: 'On these sands you've got plenty of past, a severely pinched present, and no future. Everything is an afterthought.' That just about sums up how Paul's life panned out.
March 5, 2012
I know of Paul Nelson not by his writing, but through correspondence with David Lightbourne and Tony Glover about Dylan's Minneapolis days. Years ago I spent a week with David and he showed me many issues of Nelsons' Little Sandy Review, which certainly deserves a compendium of its own.
The golden age of rock criticism in Rolling Stone(to me the early 70's) didn't have much impact on me because I didn't relate to the record reviews. (I read Creem, Crawdaddy and Trouser Press) As a teenager, I could care less about musicians addressing failed relationships, living on farms and the pursuit of women and chestnut mares with equal enthusiasm. The first half of the book chronicles his years in Mpls and New York. He was a publicist and a&r man for Mercury Records and valiantly signed Blue Ash and The New York Dolls. The artists he interviewed often became friends and confidantes. Artists like Dylan and Zevon really appreciated his early support and understanding. The associated anecdotes are a fun read, but there is far too much wordage on his near misanthropic personality.
The second half of the book features reprints of his higher profile articles. I guess there is probably no better time than now for rock scribes to be anthologized and lionized... while people still care to read about it.
The golden age of rock criticism in Rolling Stone(to me the early 70's) didn't have much impact on me because I didn't relate to the record reviews. (I read Creem, Crawdaddy and Trouser Press) As a teenager, I could care less about musicians addressing failed relationships, living on farms and the pursuit of women and chestnut mares with equal enthusiasm. The first half of the book chronicles his years in Mpls and New York. He was a publicist and a&r man for Mercury Records and valiantly signed Blue Ash and The New York Dolls. The artists he interviewed often became friends and confidantes. Artists like Dylan and Zevon really appreciated his early support and understanding. The associated anecdotes are a fun read, but there is far too much wordage on his near misanthropic personality.
The second half of the book features reprints of his higher profile articles. I guess there is probably no better time than now for rock scribes to be anthologized and lionized... while people still care to read about it.
January 18, 2012
At first, I was thinking this was the critic who did the excellent Neil Young Love to Burn book; that was actually Paul Williams. My mistake.
This is a unique somewhat fatalistic and depressing look at a critic who made a huge impact in the 70's then quietly faded away (not really writing anymore)into semi-obscurity, living in a modest apartment, working in a video store, until he was found deceased in his NYC apartment.
Great introductory biographical info sets his early years in Minnesota. Then he moves on to NYC and discovers the New York Dolls and writes at length about the likes of Springsteen, Warren Zevon, Jackson Brown, Patti Smith and others. I read his long original piece on Zevon, (which really did need an editor). Made me relisten to his music (The Wind is a great final recording!). Nelson also did an interesting long piece on The River which I really enjoyed.
Nelson had a great passionate critical style and really put a lot into getting his reviews just right. He also had a love of film and apparently wasn't adept at dealing with the mundane world of customers.
Good collected writings in part two from the days when rock journalism really seemed more thought provoking and important. I give it 3.5 stars.
This is a unique somewhat fatalistic and depressing look at a critic who made a huge impact in the 70's then quietly faded away (not really writing anymore)into semi-obscurity, living in a modest apartment, working in a video store, until he was found deceased in his NYC apartment.
Great introductory biographical info sets his early years in Minnesota. Then he moves on to NYC and discovers the New York Dolls and writes at length about the likes of Springsteen, Warren Zevon, Jackson Brown, Patti Smith and others. I read his long original piece on Zevon, (which really did need an editor). Made me relisten to his music (The Wind is a great final recording!). Nelson also did an interesting long piece on The River which I really enjoyed.
Nelson had a great passionate critical style and really put a lot into getting his reviews just right. He also had a love of film and apparently wasn't adept at dealing with the mundane world of customers.
Good collected writings in part two from the days when rock journalism really seemed more thought provoking and important. I give it 3.5 stars.
September 22, 2012
His story is sad, and reading his work after learning about his life is only sadder. I'm not sure what else I wanted from this book - maybe just a wider range of subject matter in the anthology - but it's awfully good overall. I like the biography/anthology format, and it works much better here than in the Lillian Roxon book.
Best of the bunch:
- The Dylan piece from the original Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, done as a detective story.
- "We Are All on Tour," about Jackson Browne in the wake of his wife's suicide and the release of The Pretender.
- "Rod Stewart Under Siege," later incorporated in the book Nelson sort of wrote with Lester Bangs.
- "Warren Zevon: How He Saved Himself from a Coward's Death," which despite the above competition manages to be the greatest thing here. It's really one of the finest pieces of writing I've ever come across, and reason enough to read the book.
- The long final chapter of Nelson interviewing himself about his time working for Mercury Records in the early '70s, an interesting insider's view of the business with cameos from the New York Dolls, Rod Stewart, and a slew of forgotten acts.
Best of the bunch:
- The Dylan piece from the original Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, done as a detective story.
- "We Are All on Tour," about Jackson Browne in the wake of his wife's suicide and the release of The Pretender.
- "Rod Stewart Under Siege," later incorporated in the book Nelson sort of wrote with Lester Bangs.
- "Warren Zevon: How He Saved Himself from a Coward's Death," which despite the above competition manages to be the greatest thing here. It's really one of the finest pieces of writing I've ever come across, and reason enough to read the book.
- The long final chapter of Nelson interviewing himself about his time working for Mercury Records in the early '70s, an interesting insider's view of the business with cameos from the New York Dolls, Rod Stewart, and a slew of forgotten acts.
January 17, 2013
Great stuff on many of my favorite musicians: Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, New York Dolls, Patti Smith (an unusual but well written dis of Horses), Neil Young, Rod Stewart, Mott the Hoople, Bruce Springsteen, and Warren Zevon and on writers (Ross MacDonald) and actors (Clint Eastwood) as well. Nelson is a Lester Bangs compatriot (they co-wrote a chapter in Paul’s Rod Stewart book called “Two Jewish Mothers Pose as Rock Critics”) with an intense passion for music. He introduced me to Elliott Murphy (the first album, Aquashow, is the only one that I can find) who combines the best qualities of Lou Reed and Ian Hunter, two of Nelson’s other heroes, and sent me back to albums I’d lost touch with like Neil Young’s classic breakup album, Zuma (which came out the same year as two other classic breakup albums: Blood on the Tracks and Still Crazy After All These Years). I even liked his essays on musicians I don’t much care for, like Jackson Browne since it’s the writing that really counts. Lester Bangs, Richard Metzger, Robert Christgau, Greil Marcus, Luc Sante, Geoffrey O’Brien….Paul Nelson is right up there with the best of them.
April 21, 2012
This is the story of one of the best professional American writers of the 60's and 70's who just happened to cover Folk and Rock Music. As Youth Culture developed, so did the writers who covered the movement, and Paul Nelson was one of the most trenchant and hard-hitting. Almost half of the book is devoted to a biography of Nelson, and the second section covers the man's writings. Nelson's personal life could be seen as an abject failure(he certainly does not appear to have been a very happy man), yet his insight on Art and his descriptions of the artisits are some of the finest ever published.
Even if you are not a fan of these musical genres, "The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson" is are worth your time!
Even if you are not a fan of these musical genres, "The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson" is are worth your time!
March 14, 2012
I did not know about Paul Nelson and I am glad to have encountered his writing though this book. Not that I agree w/ him in his rock critique, but I admire the passion and intelligence he brought to it. I think this bio and his writings capture a lost time of cultural critique. Gone for reasons that are hard for me to make sure are not coming from nostalgia for print and the treasure hunt that was involved in finding new and local scenes.
Criticism from a time before the hyperdifferentiation of styles, sounds and scenes.
Criticism from a time before the hyperdifferentiation of styles, sounds and scenes.
July 1, 2012
i picked this up because i wanted to know how someone goes from being the head of the rolling stone record review department to working in a video store. in that regard, this was a mildly interesting book. but as luridly fascinating as the man's life was - to be entirely honest - "everything is an afterthought" didn't in any way interest me in reading anything the guy had written. an insider's perspective of warren zevon's intervention still seems, after finishing this, about as dramatic and interesting to me as an insider's perspective of leonard cohen's colonic.
December 23, 2011
This is a gem. Its first half comprises the life story of one of rock and roll's most principled and enigmatic writers (and one hell of an A&R guy), the second a compendium of his best work, including a stunning piece on Warren Zevon and some of the best writing on Bruce Springsteen I've ever read. It is not a happy story, but it is truly an American one.
December 18, 2013
This is 200 pages biography, 250 pages best-of, and both parts rescue a great but almost forgotten music writer, who died alone, from obscurity. A true labor of love on Kevin Avery's part. Raise two Cokes in tribute.
February 27, 2015
Best book I read in 2012.
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