Everything Is an Afterthought

I've been terribly remiss in keeping this journal current. Long story short, most of my time is occupied either in the PR arena or finishing the book. Regardless, I'll do my best to post here more regularly.

I remain committed to telling Paul Nelson's story. Right now I'm in the midst of editing and shaping the book (rewriting, basically—my favorite kind of writing). In addition to using, as much as possible, Paul's own writings, I'm including comments from those who knew him best: his friends, family, colleagues, and several of the artists whose work he wrote about and whose friendship and admiration he earned. The list of interviewees is close to 100.


In the course of neglecting this journal, I also failed to note the release last October of Greg Copeland's sophomore album, Diana and James. Twenty-six years earlier, Copeland had released Revenge Will Come, an album that Paul greatly admired but about which he never wrote (you can read more about Paul's interview with Copeland here).

The new album, which sounds so completely different from its predecessor that one might easily mistake the works as being by two different artists, possesses the kind of timelessness that Dylan sometimes captures, or Neil Young, or the music of the Band. It at once sounds old and new.

Every time I listen to Diana and James, I'm earstruck by its beauty.

Copyright 2009 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved.

In the latest issue of Rolling Stone, David Browne reports that in 1979 Paul Nelson was recruited as an advisor to a commission headed by legendary producer John Hammond to update the official White House Record Library. As a result of the commission's efforts, President Obama can enjoy vinyl versions of Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, Springsteen's Born to Run, Randy Newman's Good Old Boys, Led Zeppelin IV, the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed, the Ramones' Rocket to Russia, the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, the Flying Burrito Brothers' The Gilded Palace of Sin, as well as records by Santana, Neil Young, Talking Heads, Isaac Hayes, Elton John, the Cars, and Barry Manilow.

It's not difficult to surmise which selections were high on Paul's list of suggestions.

The entire article, "Obama's Secret Record Collection," can be found here.

Copyright 2009 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved. 

Last week, William Zantzinger, the murderer made famous not by his heinous act but by Bob Dylan having written a song about him, passed away. Michael Yockel's excellent article, "Willian Zantzinger's Lonesome Death," examines not only the man who inspired Dylan's classic "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," but also the truth behind the song. In doing so, he wraps up his article by quoting Paul Nelson.

The trouble is, as fitting as the quote may be in the context of Yockel's article, the words—critical of Dylan's having played fast and loose with the truth—do not belong to Paul. To the contrary, Paul had called the tune "Dylan's best protest song." 

The quote actually belongs to another fine writer, Clinton Heylin, from his 2001 book Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited. Circa 1999, he interviewed Paul and, in the book, writes about Paul's Dylan connection.

Copyright 2009 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved.

Writer Nick Tosches first met Paul Nelson in 1972, when Paul was working in publicity at Mercury Records. "A couple of times a month, if not once a week at times," Tosches remembers, "he would take me and my friend Richard Meltzer to lunch because we didn't have any money." Tosches wrote for Rolling Stone in the late Seventies when Paul was record reviews editor there—where Paul also rave-reviewed Tosches' Jerry Lee Lewis biography, Hellfire, in 1982. In Paul's later years, Tosches would often visit Paul at Evergreen Video. "And then I went off to Paris. I was looking forward to seeing him again after I came back. And then I heard that he died."


While the news out of Hollywood last week that Johnny Depp's production company has acquired the rights to film Nick Tosches' novel In the Hand of Dante (with Depp playing Tosches) is indeed big, I'm even more pleased that Nick has agreed to write the foreword to Everything Is an Afterthought.

I think his old friend Paul would be, too.

Copyright 2008 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved.

In 1972, Paul Nelson was promoted from publicity to East Coast head of A&R at Mercury Records. His first real signing was Blue Ash, a band from Youngstown, Ohio. The group's 1973 debut album, No More, No Less, earned a place on several critics' best-of-the-year lists but, as these things often go, didn't make a connection in the marketplace. Blue Ash's MySpace page remembers it this way:

Thirty-four years later, No More, No Less has finally been released on CD. As Blue Ash's bassist and vocalist, Frank Secich (now of the Deadbeat Poets), recalls in the CD's liner notes, "In June of 1974, Blue Ash was dropped by Mercury Records (under heated protest from Paul Nelson) for lack of sales. Paul was subsequently sacked from the label, too, in large part for signing Blue Ash and the New York Dolls."

While that has indeed been the legend of Paul's departure from Mercury, it's not quite that simple. Reasons for leaving seldom are.

Copyright 2008 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved. 

August of 1974 was a memorable month for singer/songwriter David Forman. A few days after being involved in the most benign and fanciful takeover ever of the World Trade Center—high-wire artist Philippe Petit's 45-minute walk back and forth on a steel cable strung between the Twin Towers—Forman penned his amazing song "Dream of a Child" and somehow, in some way now lost to memory and time, came to the attention of Paul Nelson at Mercury Records.

While Paul was unsuccessful convincing his higher-ups to offer a recording contract to the artist (Forman says, "They looked at him like he was out of his mind"), Forman ultimately was signed by Clive Davis to Arista, where he recorded one classic, self-titled, and now very collectible album (there's a used CD on Amazon right now going for $109.99).

Forman, who went on to forge a musical career and an alter-ego with Little Isidore and the Inquisitors, can currently be seen on the big screen in James Marsh's brilliant documentary about Philippe Petit, Man on Wire, where he even performs "Dream of a Child."

Copyright 2008 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved. 

In January of 1973, a few weeks after Elliott Murphy first played his demos for Paul Nelson, then an A&R guy at Mercury Records, Paul presented him the recently released debut album of another songsmith: Bruce Springsteen's Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. Later that same month, Paul invited Murphy to join him at Max's Kansas City, where Springsteen was playing with a very early incarnation of the E Street Band.

This week over at Wolfgang's Vault—which features free streaming of vintage live concert performances—the featured concert is, with relative certainty, the show in question. Recorded January 31, 1973, after the show Paul introduced Elliott to Bruce, thereby launching a friendship that continues to this day.

Copyright 2008 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved.

A few weeks ago, Paul Nelson's good friend and fellow critic Bud Scoppa, who worked with him at Mercury Records in the early Seventies, was going through a trunk in his garage when he came across a photocopy of Paul's list of the top ten albums of 1972. Scoppa posted the list yesterday on his blog.

At the risk of sounding like everybody's father, the ten LPs (as they were called back then) in question prove that, while we still continue to live in interesting times, the music was definitely better back then:

The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street
Jackson Browne, Jackson Browne
Rod Stewart, Never a Dull Moment
Mott The Hoople, All the Young Dudes
Randy Newman, Sail Away
Steve Young, Seven Bridges Road
John Fahey, Of Rivers and Religion
David Bowie, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars
The Kinks, Everybody’s in Showbiz
Wilderness Road, Wilderness Road

Paul, an inveterate list-maker on his own, compiled his list for Fusion, a Boston-based rock magazine. It's interesting to note that, because Paul's critical output was minimized during his Mercury years, he only wrote a full-fledged review for one of these albums: Wilderness Road. Paul loved the band and more than once flew from New York to Chicago, where they were based, on his own dime. His Rolling Stone review of the album reveals Paul at his most ardent and least trendy.

Copyright 2008 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved.
 

Rock journalist. PR guy for Led Zeppelin. Nirvana's manager. Good friend to Kurt and Courtney. Record company executive. These are but a few of the descriptions you might apply to Danny Goldberg, whose latest book, Bumping into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business, hits the bookstores next month. In addition to the appellations I've already dropped, among the many behind-the-scenes tales Goldberg tells are how he covered Woodstock when nobody else wanted to, when he talked Kiss into taking it all off (makeup-wise), and how he launched Stevie Nicks' solo career. What emerges is the profile of someone savvy enough to know that doing business is all about relationships—and that you can't succeed at either one at the expense of the other.


For our purposes here, Goldberg also writes about such Paul Nelson favorites as Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Ian Hunter (whom Goldberg now manages), and Neil Young. Most importantly, he writes about Paul.

Touching on Paul's five years at Mercury Records, when Goldberg was writing for Circus magazine, he also acknowledges Paul's role in the Warren Zevon saga in a lengthy and loving chapter about the singer/songwriter's final years (Goldberg was head of Artemis Records and released not only Zevon's last three studio albums but also the fine tribute album, Enjoy Every Sandwich: The Songs of Warren Zevon). He also reflects on Paul's memorial service at St. Mark's Church on September 7, 2006.

What emerges is Goldberg's admiration for both Paul the man and Paul the writer. As he wrote for RockCritics.com shortly after Paul's death:

Towards the end of Bumping into Geniuses, Goldberg realizes that "People like me were only valuable to record companies to the extent we could identify and sign commercial talent. And the way that the business world judged your talent for picking and signing and working with artists was not how smart you were, how much you loved music, how hard you worked, what skills you had, or what critics thought of your taste. To be taken seriously by the grown-ups you had to be associated with big hits. That was the coin of the realm."

Which pretty much sums up why Paul Nelson's record company career ended in 1975.

Copyright 2008 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved.

Paul Nelson wrote: "It is hard to claim too much for the man who in every sense revolutionized modern poetry, American folk music, popular music, and the whole of modern-day thought; even the strongest praise seems finally inadequate. Not many contemporary artists have the power to actually change our lives, but surely Dylan does—and has."

Paul wrote this in 1966, the year after Dylan "went electric" at the Newport Folk Festival and left behind a heretofore devoted audience of dyed-in-the-wool folk-music enthusiasts (an event that also contributed to Paul resigning his post as managing editor of Sing Out! magazine—but that's another story). 

Performing Tuesday night at Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Dylan remained just as artistically unyielding. 
 
The last time I saw Dylan live was 20 years ago and also outdoors, near Park City, Utah. His face was puffy and he was slightly hunched forward, as if he were being crushed by the weight of his own reputation. One of his surlier periods, he would just blast through song after song, each one almost indiscernible from the next. This wasn't Dylan gone electric—it was Dylan gone electrically bombastic.

But I was not surprised. I knew from recordings that Dylan performing live was a chameleonic chimera. There was the bellowing Dylan (with the Band) from 1974's Before the Flood; and two years later there was the punk-rock Dylan spewing fiery deliveries on Hard Rain. What we got at Prospect Park this week was a defiantly elegant Dylan, his voice at once ravaged and ravishing, as thin as a whip and just as dangerous. His band was sharp and exact—like a surgeon's knife, or Jack the Ripper's blade. He played his music the way he wanted to play it, everybody else be damned.

So it was with some amusement that, on our way out of the park after the concert, we heard grumblings to the effect that Dylan "didn't even know the words to his own songs," which "didn't sound the same," and (my favorite) "He didn't even play 'Mr. Tambourine Man'!" 

Forty-three years after Newport, he's still got it. And 42 years after Paul's words, even the strongest praise still seems inadequate.

Copyright 2008 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved. 

What with all the hoopla in the last week over Billy Joel effectively closing down Shea Stadium (not once but twice), it seems like a good time to revive Paul Nelson's review of Joel's 1980 album Glass Houses. Here is Paul at his most caustic and, not coincidentally, funniest. And while the vitriol in the piece is purely Paul's, the typos belong solely to RollingStone.com. 

Copyright 2008 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved. 

On Tuesday I had the pleasure of being interviewed on The Publicity Show. A weekly radio program that's broadcast out of Atlanta, Georgia, it's devoted to those "unsung professionals who usually spend their time in the background helping their clients get on the air." Not only did the hosts, Elizabeth Gordon and Lee Kantor, want to know all about what my company, Mere Words Media Relations, has to offer, they were kind enough to let me talk about Everything Is an Afterthought and why Paul Nelson was my mentor.

Feel free to listen in by clicking here. It may take a few seconds to load...

Also on the book front, it's mentioned in the May-June issue of Shindig! magazine, which is published in the UK but available here in the States at Barnes & Noble and other fine book and record stores. Therein you'll find a splendid five-page article about Blue Ash, the Youngstown, Ohio, band that Paul signed to Mercury in the early Seventies. And, thanks I'm sure to the good offices of bass guitarist/vocalist Frank Secich, both Paul and the book are given their due.

Check out the Wednesday, October 11, 2006, installment of the Blue Ash Blog for Mark Hershberger's retrospective of the band. You'll find Paul in there, as well as a 1973 photo of him with the group.

Copyright 2008 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved. 

It was two years ago today that the NYPD, prompted by a phone call from a neighbor, arrived at Paul Nelson's Upper East Side apartment and discovered his body.

In honor of Paul, the quietest of Americans—and in observance of the Fourth of July—today would be a good day to go back and read his brilliant review of Willie Nelson's Red Headed Stranger. Like the 1975 album about which he was writing, Paul's piece addressed the "mythic American hero," a subject that he returned to again and again: "the cowboy/desperado, the gangster/detective, the movie star/rock & roller—whose lifestyles generally suggest either early and unnatural death or obsolescence."
 
Copyright 2008 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved. 

Last night in Paris, France, 35 years after Paul Nelson first introduced the two men to one another at Max's Kansas City, Bruce Springsteen invited Elliott Murphy onstage to perform "Born to Run" with the E Street Band. While this has become something of a tradition—Springsteen, whenever he performs in France, asking Murphy to play along—last night he extended the invitation to the next generation, and Murphy's 17-year-old son Gaspard shared the spotlight.

Later, Springsteen called Elliott back onstage to join in on the last song of the night, "American Land."

Copyright 2008 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved. 

One of my all-time favorite records is 1982's Revenge Will Come, the debut album by a poet/songwriter named Greg Copeland. Produced by his good friend (since high school) Jackson Browne and released on the Geffen label, the album was at once critically embraced (along with Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, David Johansen's Live It Up, and Lou Reed's The Blue Mask, it landed on Time magazine's best-of-the-year list) and commercially forgotten. It has never been released on CD.

A few years ago, preparing for my move two-thirds of the way across the country and looking for ways to lighten my load, I sold off most of my vinyl collection, saving only those records that either had some sort of sentimental value or which were yet unavailable on CD. Revenge Will Come came to New York City with me.

Imagine my surprise, then, in January of last year when I discovered, among the hundreds of cassettes Paul Nelson had left behind in his apartment, two tapes in particular: a promo copy of Revenge Will Come and an interview that he had conducted with Greg Copeland. Surprise tinged with a little bit of confusion because, to the best of my knowledge, Paul had never written about the album.

Recorded over the telephone in late August of 1982, Paul began by telling Copeland how much he admired the album—that it was thus far his favorite of the year. He also divulged to the young songwriter that, though he indeed intended to write about the album for Rolling Stone (where he'd been record reviews editor since 1978), he had just resigned from the magazine.

When I spoke with Greg Copeland earlier this year, he told me: "I remember the room I was sitting in when it happened. I remember talking to him, but I don't remember anything about what he said or what I said. Until you reminded me, I'd forgotten about it." 

Unfortunately, Paul never wrote about Revenge Will Come—nor would he write much of anything else for the next seven years. His departure from Rolling Stone, combined with the upheaval that was his personal life, signaled the beginning of what his friend Michael Seidenberg calls "Paul's missing years."

The good news is that, twenty-six years later, Greg Copeland has recorded his sophomore album. "Now I'm back full circle," he says. "I work as a lawyer about half-time and write the rest of the time." The album is slated for release on Jackson Browne's label later this year. 

Copyright 2008 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved.

Paul Nelson didn't write a lot about the Doors--and he only briefly met Jim Morrison--but what words he did put to paper were poetic, to the point, and unashamedly revealing of a critic yearning to understand not only the the band's music but the nascent and far from established new art form called rock & roll. For instance:

And Jim. To see him sing is like witnessing a man dangling in some kind of unique and personal pain. Watching Morrison come face to face with some ultimate truth in song can be truly frightening. The shrieks and screams come from a subconscious layer under the conscious artistry: Morrison is levels, not all of them pretty.

                                     

When I learned that the intense and talented writer and director Tom DiCillo (Living in Oblivion, Box of Moonlight, and his most recent film, Delirious, are among his best) is feverishly at work on a Doors documentary, I forwarded him Paul's rare writings about the group, the best of which is "Perceiving the Doors," a piece written for the long out-of-print songbook We Are the Doors. "What an amazing writer," DiCillo responded. "It is pretty astonishing. I particularly liked his analysis of the Doors' sound":

When they play, they seem to be held together by both terrific, almost terrifying, strength and by sheer nervous tension. They expand, contract, and the song is stretched like a live thing to a point of birth or breaking or both. The passion is always contained within the control. Ray [Manzarek] plays the organ like a holy man, his thoughts almost as visible as smoke, while Robby [Krieger] oozes out those slow, melted flamenco notes as if he were shaking them from a slow-motion guitar. John [Densmore] is all speed and power on the drums, a perpetual-motion machine. And Jim. To see him sing is like witnessing...

"It is close to my own view of what distinguishes the group," DiCillo continued, "but he writes extremely eloquently and with real, knowledgeable detail. I thought his review of the first album showed real perception." In fact, so alive was Paul's forty-year-old prose that DiCillo had a request: "Can you please pass my admiration on to him?"

I informed him that Paul had passed away in 2006. "I had no idea," he replied, "It touches me deeply. It has much deeper meaning now." 

Copyright 2008 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved.

"You don't know me!" Dave Gahr shouted through the phone lines at me the first time we spoke back in November of 2006. "You know I knew Paul," he yelled, "and that's about it!" Indeed, Paul Nelson and Dave Gahr had been extremely good friends. 

It wasn't necessarily that I'd upset Gahr (though I probably had)--that pretty much constituted normal patter for Dave, who, then 84, was close to deaf and fairly fed up with the world as a whole. To speak with him on the phone almost required that you repeat everything two and three times and at the top of your own voice. I must admit that, because of this dynamic combined with Dave's constant reminders that publishers are only out to screw you, my initial calls with him usually left my hands shaking. 

When he learned that the Paul Nelson project was to be my first book, he said: "Well, you picked a doozy! The most beautiful man of all--and it won't sell!" Then, laughing at his own audaciousness, he allowed, "In Minnesota it'll sell a few." 

This morning Clinton Heylin e-mailed me from the UK to let me know that Gahr, who lived here in Brooklyn, had passed away over the weekend at his home in Park Slope. His health had apparently been deteriorating over the last several months. He was 85. 

When I finally met Dave in person last September (the 12th--Leonard Cohen's birthday), he was kind enough to invite me over to his huge, four-story house to pick up some photos he'd taken of Paul Nelson and which he'd agreed to let me use in the book. Over the next couple of hours, he escorted me floor-by-floor (and then down into the basement) and showed me just a fraction of his amazing photographs. Each floor was like visiting another era in American culture, with each room providing storage for photos organized by subject and year. 

Rolling Stone and Sing Out! are just a couple of the many publications that ran his work. He photographed Dylan (from the early Sixties until just a few years ago) and Malcolm X; he was the first photographer to shoot Bruce Springsteen--and had over 4,000 images to prove it (among them the cover shot for The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle); Miles Davis, Johnny Cash, and John Lennon were just a few of his more notable subjects.

 
Dylan by Gahr

Slowly leading me up the stairs to the next level, he'd encourage me to sit down and take a rest; in his kitchen, he poured us coffee and told me some of his tales. Like the time he was hired by Time magazine to photograph Arthur Miller in his apartment, but Marilyn Monroe, dressed in a terrycloth bathrobe, answered the door instead. Taken aback, he said not to worry about the camera around his neck--that he was there to photograph her husband, who, Gahr learned, was sick in bed with the flu. "You must grow very tired of photographers," he told her. "Well," she said, "there are some photographers I love." At that point, she revealed to him that she had a favorite photo of Miller that she carried with her always: she reached into the breast pocket of her robe and showed the photo to Gahr. It was one he'd taken of Miller many years before. 

Lennon by Gahr

About the many record covers he shot, he said: "Most of them aren't worth shit. They're just pictures. When I get a stunning one, it's so rare." He told me about one he'd taken of Gladys Knight that he was particularly proud of: "Every so often one or two things are really at the top of your toil." 

And about growing old, he promised me: "Fifty to seventy should be your best years." 

The last time I spoke with Dave was a couple of months ago. He said that he had a few more photos of Paul that he wanted me to see, but that he had to find them first. "Then I'll call you," he said. This morning I shared the bad news with Dave's old friend--and Paul's, too--Jay Cocks, who summed it up this way: "Gahr was terrific. I'll miss him. Music will miss him."

Springsteen by Gahr

Copyright 2008 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved.

Over at his website last week, Elliott Murphy delivered a heartfelt paean to the importance of pursuing our dreams and, when our dreams come true, the price we pay trying to live up to them. In the midst of it all, he writes:

Last night I dreamed again about Bob Dylan and he was very nice to me and we were talking about Paul Nelson, the rock-critic who discovered me and passed away a few years ago. In my dream Bob was very quiet when I mentioned Paul's name and asked me what I wanted to know about Paul. Don't know what that means. 

Earlier this year, Murphy released another fine album--his thirtieth--Notes from the Underground. (In a bit of Dostoyoveskian synchronicity, last summer another Paul Nelson protege, Frank Secich, founding member of Blue Ash, the Youngstown, Ohio, band that Paul signed to Mercury Records, released an excellent album with his new group, the Deadbeat Poets, also called Notes from the Underground.)

Copyright 2008 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved.

The backstory: In the early Seventies, Paul Nelson accepted a publicity job at Mercury Records. One of the artists with whom he worked closely, and with whom he became good friends, was Rod Stewart. During Paul's five-year tenure at Mercury (he eventually was promoted to A&R, in which capacity he would sign the New York Dolls to their first recording contract), Stewart produced some of his best albums, including Gasoline Alley, Never a Dull Moment, and one of the best rock & roll albums of all time, Every Picture Tells a Story.

In 1975, the same year Paul resigned from Mercury and returned to writing full-time, Stewart switched labels and landed at Warner Bros. where his first album was Atlantic Crossing. Writing in Rolling Stone, Paul gave the album a rave review, concluding: "If Atlantic Crossing isn't Rod Stewart's best record—and it isn't—it at least comes within hailing distance of earlier masterpieces."

In 1978, Paul wrote one of his best articles, a lengthy, praising piece that sympathetically depicted Rod at odds with his ex-lover, actress Britt Ekland, who was suing him for $12 million, at odds with the burgeoning punks, who had singled him out as their anti-poster boy, and at odds with the critical mass in general, who were of the opinion that he'd sold out and gone Hollywood (which he literally had, having relocated from England).

In 1981, Paul co-wrote a book with Lester Bangs that pilloried Stewart and his music, with Paul recanting much of his earlier praise. He wrote: "As a young man in his twenties, Rod Stewart seemed to possess an age-old wisdom: some of the things he told us we could've learned from our grandfathers. In his thirties, however, he suddenly metamorphosed into Jayne Mansfield."



Fast-forward to Thursday afternoon when I received a phone call that asked: "Can you meet Rod Stewart for drinks tonight?" I'd been trying to secure an interview with him for almost a year and a half. Four hours later, I found myself at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan, across the table from a very dashing and dapper-looking Rod Stewart. (Due to a miscommunication between his manager and publicist, he'd been waiting for me for twenty minutes there in the sedate Astor Court—while I'd been waiting for him for twenty minutes around the corner in the rowdy King Cole Bar and Lounge.) Looking still very much the young rogue on which he'd made his reputation, the 63-year-old Stewart was charming and funny and, of course, occasionally bawdy. My scheduled fifteen- to twenty-minute interview ended up lasting almost forty-five minutes.

Stewart fondly remembered Paul Nelson as I did my best to stir up his memories and remind him of incidents that had occurred more than three-and-a-half decades ago. As I sipped on my Bloody Mary (which, according to legend, had been invented by King Cole bartender Fernand Petiot, circa 1939) and he on his martini, we traded stories: his about the Paul he knew, me about what had happened to Paul in the many years since Stewart had seen him last.

I even quoted Paul's contention that Stewart had "metamorphosed into Jayne Mansfield" and asked him how it had felt having his friend savage him in book form. I asked him if there had been any validity to what Paul had written. And he answered every question honestly and to the best of his ability.

What he had to say will appear, of course, in the Rod Stewart chapter of Everything Is an Afterthought.

When Stewart's twenty-seven-year-old wife Penny Lancaster arrived, he announced that the interview was over and rose to greet her. When he introduced us, he told her, "We've been talking about a dear old friend of mine." And before we parted, he wished me luck with the book and added, "Thank you for just doing it."

Copyright 2008 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved.

From the time he encountered Bobby Zimmerman at the University of Minnesota, Paul Nelson's trajectory took him into many a luminaries' orbit. In addition to the dozens of artists whom he interviewed (striking up friendships with many of them), Paul also enjoyed relationships with some pretty heady individuals socially. Among them was director Martin Scorsese, whom Paul met via their mutual friend Jay Cocks. Scorsese also contributed the blurb that appears on the back of the book Paul cowrote with William MacAdams: 701 Toughest Movie Trivia Questions of All Time.

As for Cocks, who wrote with Paul at Rolling Stone, he went on to write screenplays for, among other films, The Age of Innocence, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Gangs of New York. As one might expect of a friend of Scorsese's, he is also something of a film scholar, as he demonstrates on several notable DVD audio commentaries.

Yesterday, I pulled Scorsese's The Last Waltz off the shelf and realized that I'd never listened to the second commentary track (the one labeled "The Band and Others"). Popping it in, I was pleased to find among the "Others" none other than Jay Cocks. When I heard what he had to say about Neil Young's incandescent performance of "Helpless," I couldn't help but think of Paul and his life and perhaps what went wrong:

. . . [T]hinking how he’s just held true all these years. He’s found a way not only to keep going with the music but found a way that the music could renew him. It’s a really, really hard thing to do--with writing or painting or any kind of creative activity. He’s a guy who, instead of getting burned out, seems to be ignited by the act of creation.

Copyright 2008 by Kevin Avery. All rights reserved.