Rock Scribes in Wonderland: A tsunami of music-related memoirs delivers few hits

Reviewing

There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll by Lisa Robinson (Riverhead Books: New York, NY, 2014 - 361 pp.); and especially
Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson by Kevin Avery (Fantagraphic Books: Seattle, WA, 2011 – 495 pp.).

 "Every honest man is a prophet. He utters his opinion on private and public matters."

- William Blake (1757-1827)

"You're looking at a small time operator in a small time business . . . All writers are punks and I am one of the punkest." 
- Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953)

Part One: The Ongoing Tsunami of Musical Memoirs

In sync with general nonfiction publishing trends, over the past decade a tsunami of memoirs by rock stars - and now rock critics - have flooded the bookstores and libraries of America. A precious few of them almost qualify as literature, such as poet/singer Patti Smith's Just Kids, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Others range from the insightful, such as Pete Townshend's memoir Who I Am (2012), to the amusing, including Keith Richards' Life (2010, co-authored by James Fox).

Most of these books, however, are either dull, self-aggrandizing or superficial, such as Rolling Stone writer/editor Rob Sheffield's 2010 teenaged reminiscences, Talking with Girls about Duran Duran. A curious music fan, I've strained my eyes and bored my brain on too many of them already. Roaming from A to Zevon (Crystal Zevon published a generous biography of her ex-husband Warren called I'll Sleep When I'm Dead in 2007), I've bought or borrowed a bookshelf load of these titles. I've read or scanned them eagerly, hoping to glean some nuggets of wisdom.

Yet I rarely find even a surprising turn of phrase between their pretty covers. Save yourself the disappointment: in most cases your time would be better spent listening to a good record instead. Lisa Robinson's There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll, for example, was a slog. I lost interest in that one early on. Mercifully, however, there are exceptions, including Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson, Kevin Avery's hybrid biography & annotated anthology.

Titles calculated to grab attention are surefire signs of desultory content. Willie Nelson passes a thin weak joint in Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die: Musings from the Road (2012 - sample aphorism: “If it ain't broke, break it!”). Parliament/Funkadelic icon George Clinton offers Brothas be, yo like George, ain't that funkin' kinda hard on you? (2014, written "with" Ben Greenman), a title that pushes this mercenary trick into the realm of the clownish and absurd. Most musicians and publishers, however, play it safe. For example, ex-Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon calls her freshly released memoir Girl in a Band (February 2015).

Even the enigmatic Bob Dylan and that busy Pono-inventor Neil Young got in the game. Both Young and Dylan arguably illuminate less about themselves in these pages than their best songs and recordings do. The magic conjured by the music is gone. Too many stories lie dead on the page, roadkill on the authors' Lost Highway of memory. Comparing a late passage from Young's prosaic Waging Heavy Peace (2012) to one from Dylan's more poetical Chronicles, Volume One (2004) gives a flavor of each author's approach. Using the weather as metaphor, they explain incidents from their rambling lives:

"We played Panama City, Clearwater, Hollywood, Biloxi, Mobile, Pensacola, then we headed north to Farm Aid in Milwaukee. Farm Aid was a departure from our normal shows on that tour because of the forty thousand people and a stadium, but it was a good 'un! It's all about the music. If the music soars and you feel good, then the show is good. If for whatever reason the music does not soar, then it is not a good show. There is no way to tell what it will be like. It's like the weather." (- Neil Young)

"The folk music scene had been like a paradise that I had to leave, like Adam had to leave the garden. It was just too perfect. In a few years' time a shit storm would be unleashed. Things would begin to burn. Bras, draft cards, American flags, bridges, too -- everybody would be dreaming of getting it on. The national psyche would change and in a lot of ways it would resemble the Night of the Living Dead. The road out would be treacherous, and I didn't know where it would lead but I followed it anyway. It was a strange world ahead that would unfold, a thunderhead of a world with jagged lightning edges." (- Bob Dylan)

Given all the speculative hogwash and outright bullshit that's been written about them, you can't blame Young and Dylan for trying to set the record straight. But by offering their own versions of events, their own artistic interpretations, they nevertheless can't stake a claim to the whole truth. Readers, like sceptical detectives, have no obligation to buy anybody's story. Besides, we music fans are complicit in the bamboozlement that surrounds all popular art. Betrayed by our own psychological needs, we're trapped in a process of archetype-sharing that C.G. Jung called the collective unconscious. As a result, we persistently prefer the mythology surrounding our favorite rock 'n' roll gods to the less glamorous truth.

Adding to the degradation of pop culture, casual rock fans nowadays are mostly fed poisonous pablum by the corporate drones and media flacks who hawk the predictable music and promote the disposable stars (viz. the hit televised debacle American Idol and its ilk). Like drunken ancient Greek devotees of the party-god Dionysus, too many fans swallow the lullaby lies perpetuated by those who run Big Media and their partners, mainly the few remaining major record label groups.

Viv Albertine, co-founder of the pioneering all-female British punk band The Slits, opens her frank memoir Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys (2014) with a refreshing admission: "Anyone who writes an autobiography is either a twat or broke. I'm a bit of both." Indeed, the drastic decline in revenue from compact-disc sales and print magazine advertising in the early 21st-century Internet economy may have driven musicians - as well as music journalists - to this. Their agents probably advised them that it's more lucrative to write tell-all books rather than cheaply downloaded songs or meager articles and reviews.

Times are tough in Old Media Land. The popular video website YouTube and the classified-ad behemoth Craigslist have drawn millions of young eyeballs away from television and print newspapers. Radio broadcasting has morphed into online custom jukebox services such as Pandora, while "narrowcasting" services like SiriusXM has a satellite that beams out hundreds of channels to Earth from space. The ever weirder World Wide Web has become a data-gathering electronic flea market of global proportions.

The once ubiquitous Top Forty pop radio format collapsed in the Nineties, fragmenting into a dozen demographic pieces that Clear Channel Communications was happy to buy up and monopolize. Aside from broadcasting a few music awards shows on network television, no traditional broadcaster can draw an audience of millions together simultaneously to hear a variety of music anymore. That may be democratic progress of a sort, but much has been lost along the way to the Big Brotherly digital Shangri-La that plagues us today.

Nostalgia among Baby Boomers and, increasingly, Gen-Xers, may be impelling publishers to glut the market with lightweight tomes by musicians and other members of the music-industrial complex. By contracting ghostwriters to do the heavy lifting, semi- literate or simply lazy rock stars can avoid embarrassing themselves. So what did I expect? To hope for more from musicians, too few of whom qualify as poets or even wordsmiths, seems naive of me in retrospect. Writing creative non-fiction, after all, is a mode of storytelling less suited to myth-making than is songwriting.

Good songs - like good poetry - evoke associations, whereas good prose must describe things in detail. Singers can exploit listeners' natural tendency to fill in the gaps via the miracle of imagination in a way that writers cannot. Prose is a different species of language than poetry. Effectively communicating and interpreting facts, as good journalism always does, demands linguistic discipline and a devotion to the perceptible truth that even few writers possess. Stirring emotions through symbol, sound, rhythm and metaphor - as good poets and songwriters do - is a rarer skill still.

Now that some accomplished music writers have joined the burgeoning parade of memoirists, things are getting interesting. The results run the gamut, of course, because some journalists and critics are more probing, more self-revealing than others.

On one end of the spectrum, we have Lisa Robinson's gossipy yet dull There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll (2014). Raised by leftist Jewish parents in New York, Robinson claims that she fell into writing about rock 'n' roll in the late Sixties primarily because her husband Richard was in the business. Robinson may be playing modest. After all, she had the chutzpah to pull off a career writing - on both sides of the Atlantic - as well as talking (she once hosted a syndicated radio show) about rock music.

Even so, you don't get the sense that a lowbrow gig publicizing pop stars was her dream job. Robinson's work lacks a sense of mission. Her memoir betrays a perfunctory, at times deadpan, distance from her subjects. She lacks dimension and depth when discussing even the music that moved her. This is about as engaged and profound as Robinson gets in There Goes Gravity:

"The Clash came along and musically smacked me in the face. Joe Strummer was the most exciting live performer I'd seen in ages. He was manic, hoarse, angry . . . [T]he Clash, at that moment, made everything that came before seem obsolete. This band mattered. And, as is always the case with any new music, it fulfilled a need that no one even realized was there until it was there, in front of them. Right band, right place, right time."

This string of cliches and hyperbole sounds so insincere, so devoid of gravitas, that her words just drift away. Her blasé tales of monster rockers on the road, especially Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones in the Seventies, failed to ignite anything in this reader's head. It comes as no surprise, then, when she admits that her favorite singer is Frank Sinatra, a safe retro choice beloved by dwindling millions.

Although a gifted jazz vocalist, Sinatra became a purveyor of sentimental schmaltz-pop, a musical sound that rock 'n' roll had rendered obsolete by 1965. Desperate to maintain his cool image during the post-JFK demise of his throwback Rat Pack, Ol' Blue Eyes married a much younger Mia Farrow that year. But that move just made him seem creepy.

Yes, the 80-something Tony Bennett, Sinatra's old rival, can make a Grammy-winning album of standards with 20-something Lady Gaga. But Bennett still stopped being hip circa 1963. Like the now pamphlet-thin Rolling Stone magazine that touts his and Gaga's recordings, Bennett has experienced severe artistic shrinkage in recent decades.

When will music journalists, editors and demanding fans awaken? Are we too far down the gadget-strewn road to ruin to witness a renaissance of rock-music culture? This stuff is too important to be relegated to obscure blogs and scholarly journals, where most of the serious writing about popular music has migrated. Footnoting academic enthusiasts rarely write in a way that's accessible to most rock fans.

So what was it like in the old days? Were things really any better in the Sixties and Seventies? In many ways, they were. And the saga of Paul Nelson provides the proof.

Part Two: Paul Nelson & the Hipster Revolution in American Culture (1960-72)

Spread into the mainstream by jazz players Miles Davis and Chet Baker; film actors Marlon Brando and James Dean; Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg; social satirists Lenny Bruce, Mike Nichols & Elaine May; and especially by such soul, folk/rock and pop musicians as Ray Charles, Bob Dylan and The Beatles, the intelligent hipster revolution represented a vital cultural metamorphosis.

Hip artists pushed America from the uptight early Fifties towards the groovy late Sixties. Exported through such cultural products as Hollywood movies, hit records and subversive books, the cool revolution spread around the globe. In his seminal 1994 study of the Fab Four, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties, British author (and onetime New Musical Express editor) Ian MacDonald presents his thesis about the social ramifications of that band's unprecedented popularity:

"The true revolution of the Sixties -- more powerful and decisive for Western society than any of its external by-products -- was an inner one of feeling and assumption: a revolution in the head. Few were unaffected by this and, as a result of it, the world changed more thoroughly than it could ever have done under merely political direction. It was a revolution of and in the common man; a revolution (as Aaron Copland, author of the eponymous fanfare, observed) whose manifesto -- its vices as much as its virtues, its losses as well as its gains, its confusions together with its lucidities -- is readable nowhere more vividly than in The Beatles' records. In effect, the 'generation gap' which opened in the Fifties turned out not to be a quarrel between a particular set of parents and children but an historical chasm between one way of life and another."

One person whose mind was blown into enlightenment by this cultural revolution was a critic named Paul Nelson. Like his hero Bob Dylan, he was a small-town Minnesotan, born in January 1936 in Warren, a remote Red River Valley town of 1,500 near the Canadian border. His father was a Ford automobile and J.I. Case tractor franchise dealer; his mother steeped him in a strict hellfire-based evangelical Lutheranism. Young Paul loved books, movies and music, but his hometown had neither a bookstore nor a record store.

Nelson started writing for his high school newspaper, turned on by journalism teacher Mary Lou Sullivan. He received a scholarship to St. Olaf College in 1954, but got expelled for anti-ROTC passivity. Already a rebel, he sabotaged his psychological screening exam for the military draft by emphasizing his folknik alienation from Eisenhower-era American militarism. Moving to Minneapolis in 1956, he soon met his fate.

In 1959 Nelson befriended a mediocre Twin Cities coffeehouse musician named Bobby Zimmerman, apotheosized in New York just four years later as the blue-eyed Jewish genius Bob Dylan. In 1960 Nelson co-founded The Little Sandy Review, a tiny yet influential folk-music proto-fanzine turned journal. The publishers eventually sold it to Barret Hansen, whose post-folkie radio-show host alter ego was the satirical Doctor Demento.

You can watch the mustachioed Paul Nelson in a 1995 interview featured early in No Direction Home (2005), Martin Scorsese's riveting documentary about Dylan's rise to fame. Nelson tells a funny story about a bizarre confrontation with the 19-year-old Dylan, who'd stolen a couple dozen rare folk records from him one weekend.

Nelson got his start in professional commercial journalism in 1962 by writing film and other arts reviews for the Minneapolis Daily Herald. He produced Blues, Rags and Hollers (1963), the first album by his friends Koerner, Ray & Glover. Paul migrated to New York City in '63, riding the crest of the Folk Revival wave by landing a job as managing editor of the authoritative folk-music magazine Sing Out!

Two years later, Nelson broke with the hidebound folk traditionalists by applauding Dylan's abbreviated electric set at the July 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Nelson's next article for Sing Out! was written just four days after that legendary performance. In a sort of personal manifesto, he explained his sudden resignation as editor: “I choose Dylan, I choose art. I will stand behind Dylan and his 'new' songs, and I'll bet my critical reputation (such as it may be) that I'm right.”

Decades later Nelson echoed his high opinion of early Dylan when discussing with Americana singer/songwriter Lucinda Williams his disdain for topical songwriting. Nelson praised "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," a topical (or so-called protest) track from The Times They Are A-Changin' (1964): “That's my favorite because he really makes you feel for that person rather than preaching at you. Those are the best kind, where you feel the person and then you feel the larger picture, as well.”

An ambitious and respected critic, Paul Nelson started freelancing for periodicals ranging from The New York Times to The Village Voice to Penthouse. He became the New York representative for Rolling Stone (RS) circa 1969, when that quasi-counter-cultural biweekly was still based in San Francisco. Nelson later served as RS's record-review editor (1979-83).

Then his career took an odd detour. He toiled as an East Coast publicist and A&R man for Mercury Records from 1971 to 1975, signing and promoting such artistically successful yet unprofitable acts as The New York Dolls. "Five good years, five bad years. The same five years," Nelson quipped. “My heart goes out to the hopeful sounds,” he said apropos of the Dolls. Nelson gave this laconic summary of his dilemma at Mercury Records: “Two rock & rollers in New York against twenty bookkeepers in Chicago.”

In a published piece about The New York Dolls, Nelson rails against the growing trend of empty corporate rock. Though written in the mid-Seventies, he might be talking about today: 

“Corporation rock & roll, wherein musicians like Bachman-Turner-Overdrive are more gray-flanneled than the businessmen who kowtow to them, is so formularized, homogenized, and impersonal it must surely cause the death of anything that is at all out-of-bounds, mythopoeic, and rebellious.”

A soft-spoken gentleman bachelor (after his 1966 divorce), Nelson chain-smoked Nat Sherman cigarillos and owned handguns. He concealed his baldness with a brimmed woolen cap and always wore tinted glasses. Nelson became a trusted friend to some of his favorite subjects, an impressive array of artists including writer Kenneth Millar (better known as hard-boiled detective novelist Ross Macdonald), musicians Jackson Browne, Rod Stewart (Paul co-authored a book about him with Lester Bangs) and the inimitable Warren Zevon.

“[Zevon] said to me at one point [in the mid-'80s] that he thought that some of the things that Paul Nelson had written about his songs were better than the songs themselves. It so struck me that a performer would say this about a critic,” notes music journalist Jim Farber. “Not only was [Nelson] the last person, I think, at the magazine [i.e. Rolling Stone] who was speaking from his own voice, but each of his writers was speaking with his own voice. Later [i.e. after 1983] it just became the voice of Rolling Stone . . . a magazine that was becoming increasingly corporate.”

In a 1979 letter to Warren Zevon, Nelson complained bitterly about the enervated state of popular music: “If rock once stood for some sort of a rebellion . . . really it now stands for complete conformity, it seems to me—outside of ten, twelve artists: Jackson [Browne], Bruce [Springsteen], [The] Clash, you, Neil Young . . . Power pop has proven to be the most dismal line of Campbell Soup cans in existence. Punk rock soon became power pop and became exactly what it was that it started out to be against supposedly.”

What kind of a rock journalist was Nelson? Avery puts it this way: “[Charles M.] Young cites Hunter S. Thompson's definition of gonzo journalism as having 'intense, demented involvement' with what you're writing about. Paul was a guy who achieved total, demented involvement with his subject matter in that piece. Paul was the true master of gonzo, if that's a definition of gonzo.”

But Nelson also suffered from terrifying bouts of writer's block, stemming from his merciless perfectionism and emotional insecurity. He felt guilty about getting sizable advances for proposed books (including one on Clint Eastwood), most of which were never delivered to the publishers. Obsessed with the songs of Leonard Cohen, Chet Baker and Ralph Stanley, Nelson listened almost exclusively to bluegrass records in the end.

He had severe limitations – even blind spots – in his taste. For example, he couldn't relate to African-American musicians and he despised hip-hop/rap music. He did at least champion many obscure white artists when he had influence in the Seventies, including Elliott Murphy, Captain Beefheart, Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers, Richard Thompson, and Doug "the Texas Tornado" Sahm. Nelson feared getting arrested while traveling with Sahm as a minder/manager due to the musician's penchant for smoking cigar-sized spliffs in public.

“He was never snobbish or high-handed or pretentious about his tastes,” said novelist Jonathan Lethem, another noteworthy friend, “but he was always absolute about it. For him, if the magic wasn't there, end of conversation. But when he detected the true spirit, his persistence and patience in locating every possible manifestation was incredible . . . Paul Nelson's life was a fierce quiet drama of devotion to culture, with a run of triumphs along the way to a slow-motion tragedy.”

Nelson's final years were a sad coda to an eventful life. His last freelance record review in Rolling Stone was of a Waterboys album in 1990. He retreated from the world of rock 'n' roll in that decade, choosing to work instead as a curmudgeonly clerk at Evergreen Video in Manhattan. A haunting figure that Avery aptly describes as a sort recalcitrant Bartleby the Scrivener, the eponymous Herman Melville short-story character whose indolent catchphrase is simply "I would prefer not to."

Having sold his treasured first editions and accepted charity from friends in order to survive, a sometimes paranoid Paul Nelson declined to apply for Social Security - out of fear of being tracked down by creditors. He tried psychiatric counseling, to no lasting effect. Like his heroes Billy the Kid and Muhammed Ali, Nelson became a mysterious anti-Establishment icon to the rock 'n' roll cognoscenti.

And like his beloved fellow Minnesota-born writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, he died in obscurity, a relic of another epoch. But Nelson died alone, fending off eviction from his East 74^th Street apartment in Manhattan, in the summer of 2006 at age 70. The coroner listed heart disease as the cause of death, a condition exacerbated by malnutrition. His body was discovered only after decomposition had set in and neighbors complained about the stench.

As Mikal Gilmore, another accomplished friend and colleague, noted: “On the level of a friendship, he may well have been the purist artist I've known. I think about Paul fairly often these days, and about how deepfelt his writing was. Maybe, like Dylan, it was in those moments and places that Paul was best able to find his heart and express it unflinchingly. I can only wonder where all that went after he stopped writing.”

He died nearly a decade ago, an impoverished recluse in New York City. His story sounds incredible: the saga of a folk-music scholar turned A&R man for Mercury Records, a writer for Rolling Stone who explained his limited tastes with such eloquence and conviction that you could read him for pure pleasure. You deserve to know about him, and Kevin Avery's fine book is both overdue and unexpected.

“His writing was flinty, elliptical, and romantic, an unusual combination. He was drawn to loners and the excluded. There was something seductively hermetic about his work, an invitation to a closed room,” wrote rock critic Greil Marcus about Nelson.

“I not only accept loss forever, I am made of loss.” wrote Jack Kerouac. Nelson cites that line in a 1979 desert-island-disc tribute to Jackson Browne's album The Pretender (1976). “Every time I hear The Pretender, it makes me feel that it just might be possible to get out of this place.”

Paul Nelson shared many offbeat insights with readers, such as this suggestion about pre-concert soundchecks: “During the soundcheck, the band is perfectly relaxed, and the playing always seems to have that something extra—perhaps lacks something extra—that invariably strikes me as being more natural and private and revealing (i.e. better) than the official version. I think someone should start making live soundcheck LPs.”

Nelson's passion for good music shines through his words. In the unedited version of his ecstatic Rolling Stone review of Bruce Springsteen's 1980 album The River (alluding to a book of Walker Evans photographs of Alabama sharecropper families during the Great Depression, with a text by James Agee, the piece is headlined “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”) he offers this startling comparison:

“Both Springsteen and the Clash are morally and historically committed to the directness and honesty of rock & roll—and to what this music can mean to those whose hearts are smoldering with anger or shame. In their Apocalypse Now manner, the Clash come right out with it. [. . .] Next to Bruce Springsteen, however, they sometimes seem very innocent: they still believe in total victory.”

In his 1975 Rolling Stone review of the country & western concept album Red Headed Stranger (headlined “Willie Nelson's Phonographic Western"), Paul Nelson uses a historical reference to make his point, one that apparently had a particularly personal resonance for him:

“When Teddy Roosevelt claimed loneliness a quintessential ingredient of our national character, he hit the psychic bull's-eye, ringing up images of pragmatic pioneers, existential outlaws, and a long line of heroes who dreamt of the purity of their youth even as they drew guns to eliminate it.”

Paul Nelson deserves to be remembered - and read- by music fans. Like Bob Dylan, he was a musical expeditionary with formidable powers of expression. As Dylan said of Woody Guthrie: "You could listen to his songs and learn how to live." And now, thanks to Kevin Avery (and Paul's son Mark), Nelson's learned and instructive writing on music can be read by future generations.

[© 2015 by J.C. Mrazek]