Bumping into Geniuses

Rock journalist. PR guy for Led Zeppelin. Nirvana’s manager. Good friend to Kurt and Courtney. Record company executive. These are but a few of the descriptions you might apply to Danny Goldberg, whose latest book, Bumping into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business, hits the bookstores next month. In addition to the appellations I’ve already dropped, among the many behind-the-scenes tales Goldberg tells are how he covered Woodstock when nobody else wanted to, when he talked Kiss into taking it all off (makeup-wise), and how he launched Stevie Nicks’ solo career. What emerges is the profile of someone savvy enough to know that doing business is all about relationships—and that you can’t succeed at either one at the expense of the other.

For our purposes here, Goldberg also writes about such Paul Nelson favorites as Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Ian Hunter (whom Goldberg now manages), and Neil Young. Most importantly, he writes about Paul.

Touching on Paul’s five years at Mercury Records, when Goldberg was writing for Circus magazine, he also reflects on Paul’s role in the Warren Zevon saga in a lengthy and loving chapter about the singer/songwriter’s final years (Goldberg was head of Artemis Records and released not only Zevon’s last three studio albums but also the fine tribute album, Enjoy Every Sandwich: The Songs of Warren Zevon). He also reflects on Paul’s memorial service at St. Mark’s Church on September 7, 2006.

What emerges is Goldberg’s admiration for both Paul the man and Paul the writer. As he wrote for RockCritics.com shortly after Paul’s death:

Paul was hopelessly miscast as a PR guy. He was literally incapable of hyping an album or artist he did not believe in and was always apologetic when he called about a Mercury artist…. Paul was far more likely to go into a track by track analysis of the latest Leonard Cohen album on Columbia than even to mention a mediocrity on Mercury. I don’t know how he got himself into a position where he was able to sign the Dolls (not normally the kind of thing a PR person could do at record companies) but I suspect he just wore out his superiors. But he did enjoy the expense account that allowed him to take a long list of writers to La Strada and other Midtown restaurants.

Towards the end of Bumping into Geniuses, Goldberg realizes that “People like me were only valuable to record companies to the extent we could identify and sign commercial talent. And the way that the business world judged your talent for picking and signing and working with artists was not how smart you were, how much you loved music, how hard you worked, what skills you had, or what critics thought of your taste. To be taken seriously by the grown-ups you had to be associated with big hits. That was the coin of the realm.”

Which pretty much sums up why Paul Nelson’s record company career ended in 1975.

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