Nik Cohn

The opening paragraphs of a New York Times article about Nik Cohn one of the first and still one of the best chroniclers of rock music. The rest of the article is here.

Nik Cohn’s Fever Dream

By MARK ROZZO

 

Published: December 2, 2011 Comment

Amy Arbus for The New York Times

 

             Barely a month after his 22nd birthday, the British reporter, novelist and pop critic Nik Cohn hunkered down in a cottage in Connemara, on Ireland’s craggy western coast. It was the spring of 1968. Political storms were whipping up in Prague and Paris and America. Connemara couldn’t have been farther away from it all, and that was the idea: writing 10 hours a day, no distractions and no breaks, and, at the end of a mere seven weeks, a book.

      

          But the local conditions turned out to be tempestuous in their own way. With a view out a large picture window of the Atlantic Ocean, tossed into a white chop by howling gales, and with Beethoven’s A-minor string quartet playing at top volume on a phonograph, Cohn banged out chapter after chapter on a manual typewriter. What resulted, “Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom,” is a monument to speed writing. It is also the defining text of what its subtitle calls “the Golden Age of Rock.” Spun out in a series of perfectly turned, pocket-size biographies — Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, James Brown, the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, the Who — “Awopbop­aloobop Alopbamboom” is the closest thing there is to a rock version of Vasari’s “Lives of the Artists.” (Like Giorgio Vasari, Cohn was a contemporary — or friend — of many of his subjects.) It is a book full of attitude, shrewd (and sometimes cruel) judgments, youthful cynicism and aching love. At the level of style, perhaps no other writer has evoked the power and rhythm of rock ’n’ roll so well: “What I was after was guts, and flash, and energy, and speed,” Cohn once wrote. The book’s rapid-fire creation in a lonely cottage in Connemara is — like so many chapters of Cohn’s five-decade career — both larger than life and under the radar, the kind of tall tale eagerly shared by the cultlike community of readers, writers, editors and pop stars who count themselves devoted Cohnheads.

 

      

Cohn’s own estimation of “Awopbop” is absolutely Cohnlike in its flair for artful hyperbole and delivering a knockout punch: “What my writing had in those days was spontaneous combustion, terrific forward thrusts of energy,” he told me not long ago when I went to visit him on Shelter Island in New York. “Even if it was rubbish — vast, loud, strong rubbish.”