Paul Nelson; Times of London obit (Rock critic)

The Times (London)

August 18, 2006, Friday

Paul Nelson, rock critic, was born on January 21, 1936. He
died on July 4, 2006, aged 70.

Rock critic who championed Dylan and the New York Dolls

PAUL NELSON left his mark on rock music as a
passionate,insightful critic for Rolling Stone and other US
magazines.

He also contributed to musical history in other ways. He was
an early friend and supporter of Bob Dylan, and during a
spell with a record company in the 1970s, he helped to usher
in the punk era when he discovered and signed the New York
Dolls, later a seminal influence on the Sex Pistols.

Born and brought up in Warren, Minnesota, Nelson went from
high school to the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. He
was in the city when Dylan, 18, arrived there as a student
and would-be singer in 1959. The two became friends, and
Nelson, then 23, played Dylan songs from his large
collection of folk and blues records.

"He had a whole lot of records which probably couldn't be
found anywhere else in the Midwest," Dylan recalled in No
Direction Home, the TV documentary about his early years
made by Martin Scorsese in 2005. Once, when Nelson and his
roommate John Pankake were out, Dylan dropped by their house
and, as he admitted in the film, "helped myself to a bunch
more records". Nelson also appeared in the documentary,
recounting their vain attempt to recover the records.Several
songs on the purloined LPs soon found their way into Dylan's
early repertoire.

In 1961 Nelson and Pankake started Little Sandy Review, a
magazine about folk music. It published 30 issues and grew
to have 1,000 subscribers, but by 1963 Nelson's journalistic
ambition had outgrown it, and he followed Dylan to New York,
where he started writing for Sing Out!, a folk magazine with
a national circulation. When Dylan went electric at the
Newport Folk Festival and was booed by folk diehards, the
magazine turned against him and Nelson resigned. "The folk
music just turned into rock for me. When I heard Like a
Rolling Stone it changed everything," he later said.

By 1970 he was writing for the rock magazines Circus and
Rolling Stone, working for the latter, which was based in
San Francisco, as its New York reporter. In the early 1970s
he also worked with Mercury Records, and signed the New York
Dolls, a drug-soaked band of raucous glam-rockers who came
to be recognised as one of the progenitors of punk.

Stone, and promoted such singer-songwriters as Jackson
Browne, Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen. He fell out of
sympathy with Dylan, who was in the middle of his born-again
Christian period, and savaged his 1981 album Shot of Love.

He co-wrote a biography of Rod Stewart (1981) with Lester
Bangs but by the mid-1980s he had lost his enthusiasm for
contemporary music. He freelanced intermittently and had a
spell as a copy editor at Jewish Week, but spent his last
years writing an unfinished screenplay while working in a
New York video store. "I don't really want a job any more
where you have to think," he said in an interview last year.