Paul Nelson R.I.P.

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)