RIP Michael Lydon

Photo by Steven 

Michael Lydon, a longtime East Village resident, musician, author and rock journalist, died on July 30. He was 82. 

According to The New York Times, he passed away from complications of Parkinson's disease.

Residents are probably familiar with him from recent years, as he and his longtime wife, Ellen Mandel, were active in the local community, performing as Lydon & Mandel at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, Third Street Music School Settlement, the Tompkins Square Park tree lighting, and various block parties.

However, for many generations of music fans, he was known for his writing about the top music events of the day and bands such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and the Rolling Stones.

He was an early top editor at Rolling Stone and wrote some 20 books, including "The Rolling Stones Discover America," "Ray Charles: Man and Music," and "Rock Folk: Portraits From the Rock 'n' Roll Pantheon." 

It's no surprise he chose a life surrounded by music. As he wrote on his website: 

I love music. We had a piano in my big Boston Irish family; my mother sang Handel, my father loved John McCormack. An aunt gave us the Benny Goodman's Carnegie Hall LPs — I flipped for "Sing Sing Sing." In high school, I wore out my Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington records, but convinced I'd never learn to play jazz, I became a writer instead. 

Here's an excerpt about his early career and a college-era pan of the Beatles ... via the Times: 

As a young Newsweek correspondent fresh from Yale University, he arrived in London in the mid-1960s — a time when the postwar generation, with its taste for avant-garde fashion and rafter-rattling rock, was aiming to blast the bowler hats from the heads of the country's traditionalists. 

It was there that he met the Beatles, whom he had derided as "poor foreign imitations" of the American rock 'n' roll originals in a 1964 article for The Yale Daily News. 

"Whenever the first strains of ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ begin to twitch my stirrup bones,” Mr. Lydon wrote, "I send out silent screams for help to Chuck Berry, Elvis" and others "who have long defended the American way of rock." 

His view changed after the Beatles' landmark 1965 album, Rubber Soul, with its nuanced and introspective songwriting. The album seemed to change the Beatles' view of themselves, too. "You don't know us now if you don't know 'Rubber Soul,'" John Lennon told Mr. Lydon in a 1966 interview. "All our ideas are different now."

Read more about his life at the Times here. 

Previously on EV Grieve: 

• Whistling in Tompkins Square Park with Michael Lydon