Michael Lydon, a writer and musician "who recovered from a galling pan of the Beatles for his college newspaper to become a founding editor of Rolling Stone and a pioneering rock journalist, capturing the pinwheel vibrancy of Swinging London and flower-power San Francisco," died July 30, the New York Times reported. He was 82.
As an author, his nearly 20 books include Ray Charles: Man and Music; Rock Folk: Portraits From the Rock 'n' Roll Pantheon; Boogie Lightning; The Rolling Stones Discover America; and How to Play Classic Jazz Guitar.
Writing for several publications, Lydon "mingled with the towering figures of the rapidly evolving rock era," the Times wrote. As a young Newsweek correspondent in London during the mid-1960s, having just graduated from Yale University, he met the Beatles, whom he had previously derided as "poor foreign imitations" of the American rock 'n' roll originals in a 1964 article for the Yale Daily News. But his view altered after the release of their 1965 album, Rubber Soul.
In 1967, Newsweek transferred Lydon to San Francisco. "The Fillmore and Avalon Ballrooms were my beat," he wrote on his website, "Janis Joplin and Jerry Garcia my inside sources." He called the time "exciting days--kids my own age beaming big ideas through electric music. At concerts and communes I heard friendly encouragement to be myself. I let my hair grow long and quit Newsweek."
In San Francisco he met Jann Wenner, who was starting Rolling Stone and offered Lydon a job. The Times noted that for the magazine's first issue in 1967, Lydon wrote "an investigative article on the wobbly financial underpinnings of Monterey Pop, which had yet to direct much of its proceeds to philanthropic causes, a stated goal." He left Rolling Stone after a few issues and moved to a hippie hut near Mendocino, though he continued to write for the magazine.
Lydon wangled an invitation to travel with the Rolling Stones during their U.S. tour that same year, culminating "with the violence-marred Altamont Speedway Free Festival near San Francisco, another terminal blow to the peace-and-love ideal," the Times wrote.
"The only common emotion is disappointment and impotent sorrow," Lydon recalled in his book Rock Folk. "If only... if only...."
In a 2015 interview with the Wooster Blade, a high school newspaper in Ohio, Lydon observed: "Bob Dylan put out a song that said, 'He not busy being born is busy dying,' and I was trying to apply it to myself. So it was not just the sound in the music, but the ideas in the music that I found really, really interesting and challenging."