Posted 7/12/2006 07:20:00 AM by barbara flaska

I don't know anything about Paul Nelson. But I tell you I was glad to find what Scott Woods described as a loving tribute. The only thing of Nelson's I'd ever read was his defense of Bob Dylan going electric, and I'd happened across that years after it was published, in a friend's memorabilia stacks, those nostalgia relics or collectable items or historic significants from the olde folke daze. But I knew a little something about Nelson's connection with Dave Snaker Ray, Tony Little Sun Glover, and Spider John Koerner and that was probably only because I'd glommed onto their record when it first came out, so I'd read and heard about him in the misty past as things were happening.

But over the past few days, I've been reading here and there about Paul Nelson's long tenure writing for Rolling Stone magazine, and him splitting a hamburger (maybe cutting it right down the middle, I thought) to share with fellow writer Dave Marsh in the old days, and how he might have really gone off to pasture and work for meager wages at a video store in Greenwich Village, which is where he was when he was the first rock critic interviewed and published about at rockcritics.

His demise "apparently from starvation" doesn't mean to me that because he was suffering "memory loss" recently he forgot to eat. And while everyone else is talking "Beautiful Mind" though maybe meaning it (still, you know there's that book by the same name about an eccentric mathematician), and sometimes it seems the people in the know are implying but not saying "sensitivity" or "writer's block" or even something else.

I didn't know the guy or follow his career, but today, to me, his death ... I don't know how to say this right .... You know what I think? I think he was murdered by capitalism.

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