Paul Nelson R.I.P.

http://www.rockcritics.com/interview/paulnelson.html

The site's guestbook is long gone, but I remember seeing Bud Scoppa--amongst others--had entries in it pointing out this interview because he fallen out of touch with his old friends and they were glad to hear something--albeit indirectly--from him.

I just saw No Direction Home again the other day--Mr. Nelson gives a fantastic interview in it as well.

In addition to the live VU album, he also complied Rough Edges, the great Sir Douglas Quintet rarities comp.

He was one of the good guys. RIP

Had no idea he was almost 70, though, and that he seemed to have struggled in recent years. How could a guy that talented and in the seat he had during the punk revolution be left to drift in that way? I'm sure he enjoyed life to the fullest, but still -- he's one of those jewels all us young guys can only try to emulate.

But I would like to say RIP, Paul.

with more links/comments here
http://blogs.citypages.com/ctg/2006/07/paul_nelson_wro.asp

An anthology/biography is forthcoming:

With Paul Nelson’s posthumous blessing, Kevin Avery spent four years researching and writing Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writing of Paul Nelson. This unique anthology-biography compiles Nelson’s best works (some of it previously unpublished) while also providing a vivid account of his private and public lives.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.

Quick bump for the morning.

Thanks, will look forward to reading that.

Just put a copy on reserve.

Also, what's up with this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqp1UniojtY

Just read Greil Marcus's tribute to Ed Ward: http://www.furious.com/perfect/edward-marcus.html

I'll include this excerpt because it connects Ed to Paul at the end. Just enormously sad.

Ed was a tremendously imaginative writer. He wrote some marvelous fiction, both in the piece on the "5" Royales that he did for my book Stranded and a short story about blues record collectors in the late '50's and the early '60's that was just stunning. I remember that when I read Ed's fiction, I always thought it was real. It was just so convincing. I never had any idea that he made anything up, let alone all of it.

He's got this story about the blues collectors and it's just about all the kind of things that Bill Barth and John Fahey and Joe Bussard and R. Crumb all did [in the '60's]. They would travel through the South, starting with North Carolina, going down to Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia. And they would go to black neighborhoods and knock on doors and say "do you have any old records? I'm looking for old records and I'll pay you 10 cents, and if it's something I really want, even 25 cents." And they would find people who had lots of old 78's that they hadn't played for years and years. And most of it would be stuff that they had no interest in. But (musicologist) Dick Spottswood, doing this in neighborhoods in Washington DC found two Skip James records that have never been found and haven't been found since. He stumbled upon these two records which are now a large part of our knowledge of Skip James, just by knocking on doors. So these things would happen.

So Ed was writing a story about a person who does this with his life. So this person comes to a house and there's an old woman there and she answers the door and he tells her what he's interested in and she lights up. She says "Oh, I used to love Charlie Patton and Skip James and Robert Johnson. I'd love to listen to them. I'd sit next to my Victrola for hours and just play those records." And the guy's trying to be cool- he doesn't want to give away what these things are actually worth. He might have to pay a dollar instead of quarter and two dollars is his limit- he never goes above that. So he says "do you still have these records?" She says "oh, of course I have them. Come on- I'll show you." And he goes into the house and she takes him into her backyard and he's wondering, 'why are we in the backyard...?' And she's got this beautiful vegetable garden and behind each planting, there is a 78 shoved into the ground to protect the plants from excess sun. And so there they are- there's Charlie Patton and there's Skip James and there's Willie Brown and there's Son House, and these 78's are all in dirt and some of them are all curled from the sun. They're all ruined. And she says, "after I found the Lord, of course, I wouldn't listen to these records any more. But I didn't want to throw them away so I still kept them." And the guy is practically having a heart attack. And Ed just made that up! And he really didn't find the field to publish things like that, to be encouraged, with someone saying, "you got to write a novel. You got books in you that you're not writing." And I don't know if that story was ever published I just can't remember. Ed showed it to me but I don't know if it was put out or not.

And he could be incredibly funny. He was a wonderful satirist. He had a great bullshit detector. You couldn't fool him. You couldn't get him to say something that he didn't believe. People can talk themselves into liking stuff that they don't like because they're supposed to. That's something that critics have to learn to fight against. I certainly did. But Ed didn't- you could not get Ed to say that something was good when he knew that it wasn't. And of course, he would know why it wasn't. Obviously, part of it was his fault but part of it was just the stupidity of the world and its inability to recognize talent when it's coming from a place that you don't expect. Here's Ed- he's just supposed to be a music writer, he's just supposed to be a reporter, he's just supposed to cover the scene in Austin. And nobody wants to read his fiction.

And nobody wants to know the long and tangled stories that involved different musicians or managers or whatever that he could tell. He was a great raconteur. We would go over to his place in Sausalito and he could start cooking and it would take two hours or more and we would just sit around and talk about everything under the sun. Ed was never boring. And I don't think Ed was ever bored- he was full of hate, he was full of fear, he lived his life in jeopardy.

Right after he died, I got an email from a friend who said that he was feeling absolutely horrible because not even a month before, he had been in touch with Ed who said that he was thinking about selling his books to buy food. And my friend did not send him any money. And I said, "you don't need to feel horrible. This is a theme in Ed's life. This is a repeating note." I can't tell you how many times I heard that over many, many, many years. And I learned not to take it seriously after any number of times loaning him money because that was the way he had to live his life, with a sense of jeopardy.

And you know, maybe it says something about the loneliness of being a music writer, whether it's an identity that's forced on you or maybe he felt that it was forced on him or it's something you choose. Once you're identified as a 'rock critic' (that's the way that Ed would put it), then nobody will let you do anything else. Nobody believes you can do anything else and they think that what you do is worthless and degraded and moronic and juvenile. And so what you do is not worth anything anyway. So how could you do anything worth something? That sense of being isolated and being shoved to the side of the road.

Ed is now the second rock critic of real distinction, of real importance to die in the way that so many people fantasize in their worst moments that they might die alone and nobody knows and nobody cares. And simply to be found dead, days later because you're not answering your door, the papers are piling up, there's a smell coming from down the hall, whatever it might be. That's how Paul Nelson and it's how Ed died.

Will have to read that. Kevin Avery's biography of Paul Nelson also very sad.

Thanks! Scary, compelling. Wonder if any of the fiction is online somewhere, or will be?
from Rolling Music Writers, in case any of yall missed it:
RIP Ed Ward---good interview from the Fresh Air archives, replayed this week: can read, stream, download (incl.one of his early faves, by the "5" Royales)https://www.npr.org/2021/05/06/994267788/fresh-air-remembers-rock-historian-ed-ward
He was our rock historian from 1987 until 2017, sharing music he loved. Asked if he listens to much recent music, he replies,Oh, I listen mostly to contemporary rock music. It's only when I have to do these shows that I pull out...

GROSS: (Laughter) We make you go back to those old records.

WARD: I pull out the old records and go, geez. This happens to other people too,

― dow, Saturday, 8 May 2021 18:22 (three weeks ago) link

Oh, somebody just sent me this:
John Wojtowicz

hey there

There's a discussion about the recently deceased Ed Ward, along with links to obit here:

https://www.metafilter.com/191367/This-year-I-have-made-just-over-1000-from-writing

So now here's my question, which is an issue taken up in the discussion:

In this article:

https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/music/2021-05-05/the-table-ed-ward-built

There's this passage:

I asked whether the first volume of his remarkable rock history – which reported events sequentially, annually, starting with the advent of the phonograph and popular music, rather than a series of profiles of the major artists – had sold.
“No, it was sabotaged,” he reported from across the table. “Fresh Air refused to have me on after 30 years of talking about this particular subject on the air for very little money for them. It killed the book and killed my career. No idea if this is true or how true except lack of their coverage no doubt didn't help the book. But: there are a lot of rock music histories, and 30 years of using his stuff, even for very little money (it being NPR), seems like it would have helped some re exposure, during the decades in which his byline was no longer often spotted(but as noted in the Mike Bloomfield thread, his already-good bio of MB was refreshed w updates by ilxor eddhurt a few years ago).

― dow, Saturday, 8 May 2021 19:25 (three weeks ago) link

Obit in the NY Times today:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/09/business/media/ed-ward-dead.html?action=click&module=Features&pgtype=Homepage

― o. nate, Monday, 10 May 2021

Also, xgau's "Pioneer Days," about Nelson and Ellen Willis. seems pretty fair-minded: https://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bn/2011-11.php

thanks dow, and re: NPR, ugh. I'm not sure how much you can lump NPR programming with PBS programming (it's all public broadcast, albeit in separate divisions) but the few people I know who've worked on programming for PBS were heavily exploited and lied to. It was shocking but somehow not surprising. To be fair, they weren't working directly for PBS, which to my understanding is more about the broadcast network and not the actual production of content. They were working for companies PBS always tapped to produce episodes of their flagship shows, all of which had budgets of a million plus dollars per episode, but they were no different than any other company that took advantage of freelancers paying off student loans or looking to get started.

Also a lot of lively pro-Nelson talk over on Jackson Browne - C or D? early this year, where I learned a lot, like this:
I want to see this documentary:
https://paulnelsonfilm.com/trailer

― The Ballad of Mel Cooley (James Redd and the Blecchs]
And that at least some vintage PN is on rollingstone.com, like this:

Ramones
By PAUL NELSON

If today’s Rolling Stone were the Cahiers du Cinema of the late Fifties, a band of outsiders as deliberately crude and basic as the Ramones would be granted instant auteur status as fast as one could say “Edgar G. Ulmer.” Their musique maudite — 14 rock & roll songs exploding like time bombs in the space of 29 breathless minutes and produced on a Republic-Monogram budget of $6400 — would be compared with the mise en scene of, say, Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly or, better yet, Samuel Fuller’s delirious Underworld U.S.A.

And such comparisons would not be specious. The next paragraph is an almost literal transcription of something the American auteurist, Andrew Sarris, wrote about Fuller in The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968. I’ve just changed the names and a few terms.

The Ramones are authentic American primitives whose work has to be heard to be understood. Heard, not read about or synopsized. Their first album, Ramones, is constructed almost entirely of rhythm tracks of an exhilarating intensity rock & roll has not experienced since its earliest days. The Ramones’ lyrics are so compressed that there is no room for even one establishing atmosphere verse or one dramatically irrelevant guitar solo in which the musicians could suggest an everyday existence…. The Ramones’ ideas are undoubtedly too broad and oversimplified for any serious analysis, but it is the artistic force with which their ideas are expressed that makes their music so fascinating to critics who can rise above their aesthetic prejudices…. The Ramones’ perversity and peculiarly Old Testament view of retribution carry the day…. It is time popular music followed the other arts in honoring its primitives. The Ramones belong to rock & roll, and not to rock and avant-garde musical trends.

How the present will treat the Ramones, proponents of the same Manhattan musical minimalism as the New York Dolls who preceded them, remains to be seen. Thus far, punk rock’s archetypal concept of an idealized Top 40 music — the songs stripped down like old Fords, then souped up for speed — has unintentionally provoked more primal anger from than precipitant access to the nation’s teenagers, and the godheads of AM radio don’t seem to be listening at all. Why? Do you have to be over 21 to like this stuff? Doesn’t “Blitzkrieg Bop” or the absolutely wonderful “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” mean anything to anyone but an analytical intellectual? Until now, apparently not.

Where’s your sense of humor and adventure, America? In rock & roll and matters of the heart, we should all hang on to a little amateurism. Let’s hope these guys sell more records than Elton John has pennies. If not, shoot the piano player. And throw in Paul McCartney to boot.

I understand why they have to do this, but that library alone would be a major score for a University or Museum archive.

https://www.estatesales.net/TX/Austin/78745/2927055

^^Ed Ward's stuff, BTW.

Wow

Just came across this article from 2014

Amazing read. Some stuff that was new to me:

More often than not, though, the Mercury brass didn’t hear things the way Nelson did. He was unable to convince them to sign many of the artists whose music spoke to him – among them Elliott Murphy, Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers and Richard Thompson. Murphy says, “Paul had a firm belief that if the music he liked was exposed to the public, then they would like it, too.”

---

Two years as record-reviews editor at Circus led to his being offered the same position at Rolling Stone in 1978. Paul’s four years at the magazine were his most prolific and produced some of his best writing, but his squabbles with publisher Jann Wenner eventually took their toll. Paul loved punk; Jann hated punk. Paul liked writing long, probing pieces; Jann wanted them shorter and shorter. When Wenner instituted a formulaic record-review system that favoured what was hot on the music charts, it was the beginning of the end for them.

“The first three years I was there,” Nelson said, “I won, I’d say, about two-thirds of my fights with him. If I could argue with him in a reasonable manner and not get angry, I would usually win. The last two years I didn’t win any fights.”

---

He took on a variety of odd jobs before finally landing at Evergreen Video in the West Village, where he would spend the next 14 years surrounded by old cinema, which he loved even more than music. Evergreen was his sanctuary from writing about music, which, for all its demands on his psyche, proved more a passion than a love, something to be wrangled rather than embraced.

In the last week of June 2006, eviction from his illegal sublet imminent and his mind and body failing, Paul Nelson, 70, died in his Upper East Side apartment. His body wouldn’t be discovered until the following week, on July 4, well after the rats had found him. Though the New York Times amended his obituary to say that the cause of death was not starvation as originally reported but, per the medical examiner’s findings, heart disease, he in fact hadn’t eaten in more than a week. “He just stopped eating,” bookseller Michael Seidenberg says. “When they say he died of starvation, it wasn’t that he didn’t have food – it’s that he chose not to.”

On a shelf nearby the mattress on which he lay were toddler shoes belonging to a son he had only seen a handful of times in his lifetime. The son, like the high school sweetheart Paul had married and divorced, and the woman for whom he had left them, had become footnotes in a life devoted instead to those things that consumed and transformed him. He died surrounded not by friends and family but by videotapes, books and CDs. They filled his cluttered apartment wall-to-wall, floor to-ceiling, along with clippings, manuscripts and old magazines. And in one of them, a 1978 issue of Rolling Stone, a picture of the man himself, looking nothing like you’d expect him to.

the bio / anthology is a good read — though the bio part is very depressing, as that article suggests.

He turns up in Scorsese's Dylan documentary a few times; very wry and soft-spoken. Supposedly Dylan borrowed a bunch of LPs that he never returned.

xxp That is really fucking grim.

I remember that. I remember him being at Evergreen too, I can tell you a tiny story if I haven't already.

And yeah, that article, read it when it came out, don't know if I could read it again.

re xxxetc. post Ed Ward saying how Fresh Air killed his book by not covering it: just now occurred to me that Kevin Whitehead and Francis Davis had books published while reviewing music for FA, books which were mentioned in passing---"Album such and such by so and so was released today; our regular contributor Kevin Whitehead, author of the recent thingie, follows the sounds around and round"---but that's it. Same was true for Terri Gross's book, and when she married Davis, he left the show: couldn't be her nepo baby. So policies.

Rats! My god.

didn't notice that about the rats---yeesh---

Speaking of Ed Ward, and to counter some of the necessarily negative aspect of this thread, here's a good example of what he could do, on the case and otm (I first posted it on the main Little Feat thread):

First contact:
"Hamburger Midnight" b/w "Strawberry Flats"
Little Feat (Warner Brothers 7431)
This is the masterpiece. This is perhaps the best record I've heard in several months. As usual, Warner's has picked the wrong side as the A-side. "Hamburger Midnight" is indeed a fine song, reminiscent of Johnny Winter, crackling and sizzling through two minutes packed with incredible energy. Yet it pales against "Strawberry Flats," which must be one of thr definitive statements of "where youth is at today." Dig these {partial) lyrics:

Ripped off and run outta town/Got my git-tar burned/When I was clownin'/Haven't slept in a bed for a week/And my shoes feel like part of my feet/ Let me come down/Where I won't be burden to no-one/Let me around/Give me a hole to recline in...
Knocked on my friend's door in Mooody, Texas/Asked if he had a place for me/His hair was cut off and he was wearin' a suit/ He said,/
"Not in my house! Not in my house!"
/It seemed like part of a con-spir-a-cy.

The singer is "six hours out on Strawberry Flats" and trying to get past the school bus Texas roadblock where they're "stoppin' everybody who looks too weird." The music sounds like the Band taken one step further. and it is difficult to believe that they generate so much excitement in two minutes and 21 seconds. This anthem of the Age of Paranoia deserves to be in your collection and on every radio station in the country, although I realize as I write that it is wishful thinking. The group Little Feat seems to have ex-Mother Roy Estrada, a guy named George, and another guy named Payne in it. Warner Brothers says that they have an album coming. but they're not too sure when. Watch for it, and if you don't believe me, invest 77¢ or whatever in the single.
---Ed Ward 11-26-70 from The Rolling Stone Record Review(Pocket Book edition, August 1971)