Ken Tucker’s Pop Culture

Unlike many who will pay tribute to Paul Nelson, the great rock critic and editor who died earlier this week, I can’t claim a close friendship, but I knew Paul well enough–in print and in person–to know these things.

First, he was a remarkable writer; his prose had a quality of lucid calm with an undercurrent of deep passion. You never read even the smallest capsule record review by Paul without knowing immediately that he had listened to that music over and over, had given it the full benefit of his concentration, and had attempted to figure out the artist’s best intentions and come to some conclusion as to whether he or she had achieved them. He treated music the way he treated people—with great respect and a sharp instinct for understanding motives and dreams.

Second, he was a brave and kind man who managed to be serious and funny in equal measure. He was one of the first editors who took my rock writing seriously and published it in Rolling Stone and Circus Magazine when he was record-review editor there. I will always remember hearing his voice on the phone, that tone he had in which words seemed to be emerging from a simultaneous sigh of worldweariness, a groan of barely-suppressed shyness, and a surge of enthusiasm, saying to me, “Soooo, you wanna write a review about Television and the Ramones?” I dropped my reviews off in person at the Stone offices whenever I could, just to talk with Paul for a little while, hoping to pick up some advice, hear some stories, get some recommendations on what I should be listening to and reading. It wasn’t until years later that I realized what a heroic battle he was constantly waging against other forces at Rolling Stone who didn’t often agree with his choice of lead reviews, reviewers, or their opinions. Paul fought for all of that, for all of us, yet he rarely let on how besieged and lonely his battle could be. He lived by a code of honor that he applied to himself and no one else, and it was as steadfast as that of any fictional character he admired, and usually stronger than most of the artists he profiled.

I knew him well enough to visit his small apartment a few times, to watch Sam Peckinpah’s “The Killer Elite” with him (we shared a fondness for even Peckinpah’s supposedly minor work), and browse through his collection of first-edition hardboiled fiction. I was one of countless people who went out to restaurants with Paul, excursions that were characterized by his ordering two Cokes at the start of every meal and a steady amount of smoking before, after, and sometimes during the eating. When I lived in L.A. in the late ’70s, Paul stayed with my wife and I in our small West Hollywood apartment, and my wife remembers that he made a point of not just talking music-and-detectives; the rock-critic version of fan-boy communication–but of finding out what she was interested in and talking about that as well.

I’d say that the pieces Paul wrote about the artists he admired most about Jackson Browne and Ross Macdonald and Warren Zevon and Bob Dylan and numerous others, as well as the first-rate work he did to pay the bills, will live on forever, but that may be a foolish hope. Paul was working in the most evanescent of pop-culture genres at a time when few people thought to recognize and preserve such work. An anthology of Paul’s work now would be of immense value to current and future pop-music writers; there is so little of his sincerity, his measured generosity, and his intense working-out of aesthetic arguments in rock criticism these days that I cannot help but believe Paul’s example would help serve as both edification and encouragement to many writers and readers, now and forever.