From the Archive: Paul Nelson

Review of Bob Dylan's The Basement Tapes (1975)
There was a desert wind blowing that night, and the hot breeze that sighed through the open window had just enough muscle to swirl the smoke from the ghosts of a hundred cigarettes a single time around the solitary desk lamp before giving it up as a bad job. I knew the feeling. I had been sitting in the office for days, thinking and rethinking the case. It added up all right -- hell, it had added up from the very beginning -- but I just couldn't figure out why. . . . [more]

Review of Jackson Brown's Running on Empty (1978)
As our finest practicing romantic, Jackson Browne has been stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again for so long that the road probably looks like a realistic way of life to him. Whether or not he knows it, he's been writing about highways and their alternate routes since his beginnings, so the subject matter and thematic concerns of "Running on Empty" aren't all that different from those of his first four LPs. But the approach is. This time, Browne has consciously created a documentary, as brightly prosaic as it is darkly poetic, with a keen eye for the mundane as well as the magical. . . . [more]

Review of Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps (1979)
" For anyone still passionately in love with rock & roll, Neil Young has made a record that defines the territory. Defines it, expands it, explodes it. Burns it to the ground.

"Rust Never Sleeps" tells me more about my life, my country and rock & roll than any music I've heard in years. Like a newfound friend or lover pledging honesty and eager to share whatever might be important, it's both a sampler and a synopsis?of everything: the rocks and the trees, and the shadows between the rocks and the trees. . . . [more]

"Warren Zevon's Ressurection: How He Saved Himself from a Coward's Death" (1981)
Alcoholism. That's what this article's supposed to be about. How Warren Zevon, after some heartwarming and colorful misadventures, licked the Big A and lived happily ever after. Zevon: a drinking-man's drinking man, someone who can talk about booze the way Pete Townshend talks about rock & roll. Starring Richard Dreyfuss as our wild and crazy hero, Diane Keaton as ex-wife Crystal, Warren Beatty as Jackson Browne, Gregory Peck as private-eye novelist Ross Macdonald (real name: Kenneth Millar), actress-girlfriend Kim Lankford as herself, with a special guest appearance by Jack Klugman as "the Doc." . . . [more]