Al Aronowitz: Al Aronowitz, a pioneer of rock journalism who introduced Bob Dylan to the Beatles, died on Monday aged 77.
As one of the first pop music journalists in the business - the godfather of rock journalism, he was often called - in the 1960s and 1970s Al Aronowitz knew everyone worth knowing. The Rolling Stones, Ray Charles, David Bowie, Johnny Cash, Pete Townshend - he either wrote about them, befriended them or both.
But though he gained some celebrity - he used to say without irony that the 1960s wouldn't have been the same without him - a life of drugs and arguments with editors helped to ensure he never achieved financial success.
"My father was instrumental in a lot of people's success, introducing the right people in the right combinations," his son Joel said. "He was never able to benefit from it financially himself. He always thought money would end up in his pocket, too, but it never did."
Aronowitz was born on his mother's kitchen table in Bordentown, New Jersey, in 1928. He was named, he said, after Al Smith, the Democratic candidate beaten to the White House by Herbert Hoover in that year's presidential election.
He grew up in Linden and Roselle, and at one stage ran away from home at the age of 16 to live with his sister and her husband in Florida. But he remained close to his mother Lena and later wrote how much he valued her advice.
"My wife had died and I was having nothing but romantic problems when my Ma advised me in her customary Yiddish: 'Ah, women! Women are like birds. They'll fly around your head and drive you crazy!'"
Aronowitz became a journalist after studying at Rutgers University in the mid-1950s. It was at the New York Post in 1959 that he wrote a 12-part series on the "beat" movement, work that friends say helped sway journalism and his life.
In reporting the series, he became a friend of such early counterculture luminaries as poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist Jack Kerouac.
The pieces have been described as early examples of "participatory journalism", a technique perfected by better-known writers such as Tom Wolfe and Hunter S Thompson.
Soon, Aronowitz was a regular part of the music scene. He claimed that Bob Dylan wrote Mr Tambourine Man in his kitchen. And there was the 1964 summit of the Beatles and Dylan, which came about as Aronowitz was covering the Beatles for the Saturday Evening Post.
Although Dylan and John Lennon were not at first keen to meet, Aronowitz persisted in trying to bring them together. When the Beatles went to the US in 1964, they stayed at the Delmonico Hotel in New York. Aronowitz received a call from Lennon. He was ready. Dylan came down from his retreat in Woodstock.
Aronowitz and Dylan didn't arrive empty-handed. The Beatles had never smoked pot until then, Aronowitz claimed.
Like a lot of people at the time, Aronowitz recalled in his essay on the event, the Fab Four didn't differentiate between marijuana and harder drugs, like heroin. At first, both Aronowitz and Dylan were incredulous. Wasn't Lennon singing "I get high! I get high!" on I Want to Hold Your Hand, they asked. Actually, it was "I can't hide! I can't hide!" Lennon would later explain.
The Beatles offered some champagne. Dylan asked for wine. Aronowitz suggested lighting up. Dylan rolled the joint, Aronowitz remembered, with some of the pot falling into a fruit bowl on the table. The policemen stationed outside the hotel room door to protect the Beatles from their fans were apparently oblivious.
Ringo inhaled first, according to Aronowitz's account, and was soon laughing so hysterically that everyone else joined in.
Not long after, the Beatles began a new creative phase, and a darker style that contrasted with their earlier hits. One book on the group summarised the change by saying the band now "started to compose under marijuana's spell". Aronowitz noted of Dylan's music too: "The Beatles' magic was in their sound. Bob's magic was in his words. After they met, the Beatles' words got grittier, and Bob invented folk-rock," he once wrote.
He would later become a music columnist for the New York Post, and he wrote for the Village Voice, among other publications.
But things fell apart. In 1972, Aronowitz's wife, Ann, died of cancer. He lost his Post column after a row with his editor.
He had managed middling, loss-making rock acts in the 1960s, and it cost him his house. The mid-1970s country-music concerts he promoted in New York City were failures. Soon he was all but alone, living in what one visitor described as a detritus-filled apartment in New Jersey. Newspapers and magazines did not want his writing and he lost his public profile until the mid-1990s, when the internet provided something of a reprieve. It provided a place where he could write and tell his stories without any editors' commission, styling himself "The Blacklisted Journalist" .
In later years he published two books, Bob Dylan and the Beatles and Bobby Darin Was a Friend of Mine and was working on another, Mick and Miles, about Mick Jagger and Miles Davis.
He is survived by son Joel, by children Brett Hillary Aronowitz, Myles Mason Aronowitz and longtime companion, Ida Becker.
Al Aronowitz; born May 20th 1928; died August 1st, 2005