Al Aronowitz, 77; Rock Writer Introduced Dylan to Beatles

The Beatles had just finished eating dinner when Bob Dylan’s blue Ford station wagon pulled up to the Hotel Delmonico in New York. With Dylan was Al Aronowitz, a pioneering rock journalist who was about to introduce the American folk singer to the British band.

“That alone should make you legendary,” said Dennis McNally, an author and Grateful Dead historian who met Aronowitz through singer Jerry Garcia.

Aronowitz considered the Beatles-Dylan introduction on Aug. 28, 1964, the “crowning achievement” of a career that had crested by the early 1970s.

Aronowitz, who brought renewed attention to his writing through his website, the Blacklisted Journalist, died Monday of cancer at Trinitas Hospital in Elizabeth, N.J., said his son, Joel Roi Aronowitz. He was 77.

Michael Lydon, a musician and a founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine, said Aronowitz’s early work was groundbreaking for its ability to connect developments in music and society.

“By the late 1960s, writing about rock music in a serious, critical way was just emerging, and Al was a pioneer,” Lydon said. “He had a definite importance, and he was hip.”

Called gruff and irascible by many, Aronowitz first received attention for writing about what were then considered literary outlaws.

In a 12-part series for the New York Post in 1959, he was among the first to seriously recognize the Beat movement of poets, said Gerald Nicosia, an author who sought out Aronowitz while researching the Jack Kerouac biography “Memory Babe.”

His Beat pieces also are considered early examples of New Journalism -- in which the writer becomes a central part of the story -- a style later made famous by Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson.

Aronowitz fell in love with the Beat poets and their lifestyle, and it shattered his life, said McNally, who met him in the early 1970s and wrote about his Beat connection in his Kerouac book “Desolate Angel.”

“He had no great bohemian leanings, yet he couldn’t make himself go back to the upwardly mobile fast track,” McNally said.

In 1972, he was fired as the pop columnist at the New York Post. His wife had just died and he was, by his own admission, struggling with drugs.

“He faded from view and became the forgotten man,” Nicosia said.

Aronowitz knew he would be remembered as the man who had engineered the meeting of the Beatles and Dylan, who had dismissed the band’s music as “bubble gum.”

In the 2000 “Beatles Anthology,” George Harrison, who remained a friend until he died in 2001, recalled what happened after Aronowitz brought Dylan to the hotel.

“It was a real party atmosphere,” Harrison said. “We all got on very well and just talked and had a big laugh.”

In “Let’s ‘Ave a Larf,” a diary-like recollection of the event posted on theblacklistedjournalist.com, Aronowitz recalled, “Bob and the Beatles all needed room to swashbuckle, but nobody wanted to step on anybody else’s ego.”

Aronowitz wrote: “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 also claimed that Dylan wrote “Mr. Tambourine Man” in his kitchen; Dylan quit speaking to him in the early 1980s.

His daughter, Brett Hillary Aronowitz of Los Angeles, recalls an “incredible childhood” that meant going to Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s farm in the summer, having the Grateful Dead over for dinner, and Harrison and his first wife, Pattie, showing up at their Englewood, N.J., house for Thanksgiving. (The strict vegetarians politely sat down to the turkey dinner that her mother, sick with cancer, had prepared.)

Alfred Gilbert Aronowitz, was born on a kitchen table in Bordentown, N.J., to Morris and Lena Aronowitz, who ran a kosher butcher shop.

By the time he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Rutgers University in 1959, Aronowitz had worked at the New York Post for two years.

In the 1970s, he also produced concerts at Madison Square Garden that featured such acts as Merle Haggard and Dolly Parton and managed artists that included folk guitarist David Bromberg.

Aronowitz retained a lifelong bitterness over losing his job at the New York Post. He said his editors fired him over what they viewed as a conflict of interest over his management of musical acts. He was headstrong and opinionated, his son said, and hated being edited. After his firing, his highly stylized articles rarely made it into traditional print venues.

More recently, Aronowitz self-published two books: “Bob Dylan and the Beatles” and “Bobby Darin Was a Friend of Mine.” He was working on one -- “Mick and Miles,” about Mick Jagger and Miles Davis -- when he died.

He also self-published “The Blacklisted Masterpieces,” signed editions of his rock ‘n’ roll memoirs. Yoko Ono was sent the first copy. The last will go to Steven Van Zandt, the musician and actor who repeatedly spoke about Aronowitz on his syndicated radio show. Van Zandt sent a portable DVD player and DVDs to the hospital for Aronowitz.

In a written statement, Van Zandt called Aronowitz “one of the great unsung heroes of rock and roll” who was “a tragically underappreciated American treasure.”

In addition to his daughter and son, Aronowitz is survived by another son, Myles Mason Aronowitz, and a longtime companion, Ida Becker.