Late in August of 2006, almost two months after Paul Nelson's death, I met with  Robert Christgau. It was one of my earliest interviews for a book that, at the time, still didn't have a name or a publisher. What I did know, however, was this: the project was mine, it was something I had to do. In a sense, I'd grown up with Paul Nelson's writing and ( Read more... )

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, ( Read more... )