Michael Lydon, a veteran music journalist who served as the original assistant editor of Rolling Stone when it ran out of a tiny San Francisco loft by a skeleton staff overseen by co-founder Jann Wenner, died on July 30. He was 82.
Lydon’s wife, Ellen Mandel, confirmed his death to The New York Times, adding that the cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease.
When the inaugural issue of Rolling Stone hit newsstands on Nov. 6, 1967, an investigative article by Lydon about missing funds from the Monterey Pop festival ran on the first page. “Months after the Mamas and Papas closed the show early Monday morning, a slightly bad taste still remains,” he wrote. “What was a festival to some, was a free ride for others. Most artists got there with talent, some with pull. A festival which should, and could have been all up front still leaves questions asked and unanswered.”
“Jann did not want to be just a fanzine,” Lydon told Rolling Stone in 2017. “It wasn’t gonna be all just, ‘Oh, every star is wonderful and every business deal is beautiful’ and all that. This was the little investigative journalism reportage that Jann wanted. He wanted it in the first issue to say the Matt Taibbi stuff and the whole world of Rolling Stone, in a way, comes from that.”
Before he met Wenner and joined the original Rolling Stone staff, Lydon was a pop music writer for Newsweek. In January 1967, he was transferred from the London office to San Francisco, just as the music scene was exploding there thanks to the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, and all the events at the Fillmore.
“One of the first things that I went to was the Human Be-In,” he said in 2017, referencing the famous 1967 event at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, featuring live performances by Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Blue Cheer. “That was one of the steps that got the whole hippie thing rolling, a gathering of the tribes, as they called it. And I was constantly looking for stories in that field.”
Lydon’s memory of exactly when he met Wenner was slightly blurry, but he believed it took place in the press area at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967. A few weeks later, Wenner invited him to a coffee house to tell him about his plans to start a new rock magazine. “He basically said to me, ‘Esquire‘s day is over. There’s a new sensibility that needs a point of view. There are really interesting artists to be interviewed. There are social issues to cover,’” Lydon recalled. “He had the Rolling Stone name and logo at that point. Baron Wolman signed up as a staff photographer, and Jann asked me to essentially serve as the Managing Editor.”
It was a risky proposition, especially since Lydon had a solid gig with Newsweek. But he was exhausted by the grind, and working on articles where he didn’t receive a byline. “At Newsweek, I would write a report from San Francisco, and then that was just raw material for the editor in New York,” he said. “He’d just work it into his own piece. I was really dissatisfied with that. I wanted my own byline.”
Rolling Stone was a chance to help build something from the ground up, and receive proper credit for his work. And even 50 years after the fact, he was still able to visualize his first days there in the loft on San Francisco’s Brannan Street. “We worked above a printing press,” he said. “And there was nothing on the outside that told you it was anything. We entered by the side door and went up a flight of stairs. There was just a classic attic/loft. It was dusty, hardly anything up there at all. But we had a feeling that this was a tabula rasa, a clean slate. We build it from here, and that was an exciting feeling.”
In addition to the Monterey Pop investigation, Lydon wrote a pocket profile of Fifties rock pioneer Bill Haley in the first issue. “I was in Reno doing a piece on an air festival for Newsweek,” he said. “I saw that Bill Haley was playing around the corner. And so I just walked over there and got a little story on him. It was just happenstance.”
Many of the articles in that first issue ran without a byline, including a report on the Grateful Dead getting busted by narcotics officers at their San Francisco house. “I might have written that,” Lydon said. “We didn’t want to put our names on everything because that would show how few people were working for the paper.”
When the issue was finally ready, Lydon, Wenner, and much of the staff climbed down to the printing press to watch it emerge from the machines. At first, nothing happened as technicians tightened bolts and adjusted the metal plates. “All of a sudden, the machine started to go ‘kabunk, kaubnk, kabunk,’” he recalled. “And with every ‘kabunk,’ there was a Rolling Stone, still wet. We popped some champagne and toasted it. It was very, very exciting.”
Within days, they received feedback from Eric Clapton, John Sebastian, and people from all over the country. And in the weeks that followed, Lydon wrote a brutal takedown of Jimi Hendrix’s Get That Feeling LP (“This record is barely representative of what Hendrix is doing now and is an embarrassment to him as a musician”), a profile of Smokey Robinson (“Since the Beatles and the Beach Boys dropped out of the single-then-follow-up album pattern aimed at the AM teenage listener, William ‘Smokey’ Robinson has had the field to himself”), and a feature about rockabilly icon Carl Perkins (“Carl, now 36, his extensive bald spot now covered by a toupee, and his front teeth replaced with a plate”).
But his time at Rolling Stone was relatively brief. “I really wanted to go freelance,” he said. “I didn’t want to just work for Jann Wenner. I wanted to write for whoever would buy my articles. I wrote for Rolling Stone several times after the Christmas break [of 1967], but I was no longer on staff.”
In the early Seventies, Lydon released the book Rock Folk: Portraits from the Rock ‘N Roll Pantheon, a collection of articles about Chuck Berry, Perkins, Robinson, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, and the Rolling Stones. He also started playing folk clubs as a duo with Mandel, whom he married in 1981.
“After years of avid listening, I figured I’d add my voice to pop’s worldwide chorus,” Lydon wrote on his official website. “Ellen and I made our coffeehouse debut in Berkeley, then started climbing on every stage we could find, one an unpaid San Francisco talent show with Robin Williams. … We moved to Manhattan, joining all the ambitious kids putting their acts together in the Big Apple. We opened at colleges and rock clubs for Muddy Waters, Manhattan Transfer, and Mose Allison. Ellen started composing for theater; I played for years in the subway.”
In the Nineties, Lydon wrote the book Ray Charles: Man and Music. “Music’s opened me up to gorgeous sounds and challenging ideas,” he wrote on his site. “In every note I play, I try to sum up all I’ve heard and send it back as me to anyone who’ll listen. When I get back silly grins from couples dancing to my beat and singing in on the chorus, I thank my inspirations, but I’m also thinking, ‘Look out world, here comes Michael Lydon!’”