Michael Lydon

Michael Lydon

9/14/42 – 7/30/25

REMEMBRANCE by Fred Bamber: Michael Lydon died on July 30 in Manhattan of complications from Parkinson’s disease. He was born on September 14, 1942 in Newton Center, Massachusetts, one of six Boston-Irish children born to Patrick and Alice Joyce Lydon. In 1961, he graduated from the Roxbury Latin School, the oldest US school in continuous existence, and entered Yale University. In his Yale Daily News column, In A Mellow Tone, Michael wrote one of the first published articles on the Beatles, who were then unknown in the US. In the summer of 1964 working as stringer for the Boston Globe, he went to Mississippi to cover the civil rights struggle including the violent KKK murders of three civil rights activists. On graduation from Yale, Michael joined Newsweek in “Swinging London,” interviewing the Beatles’ John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Newsweek transferred Michael to San Francisco just in time for the Human Be-in, the prelude to the Summer of Love, and the emergence of hippie rock. In 1967, he became the founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine. Following this, working as a freelance journalist, he went on the road with musical heavyweights BB King, Johnny Cash, the Grateful Dead. He was part of a long tour with the Rolling Stones ending in the wild Altamont Free Concert. These dramatic experiences became the basis for his first book, Rock Folk.

After his years of listening and writing about music, Michael learned to play the guitar, the harmonica and to whistle at the competitive level. He met and started performing with his future wife, Ellen Mandel. They climbed every stage they could find, including a San Francisco talent show with Robin Williams. Still, he found time to write his second book, Boogie Lighting, How music became electric. In the early seventies, Michael and Ellen moved from California to New York’s East Village, joining many young hopefuls trying to get ahead in the music business. They played when and wherever there was an audience – Michael in the subway, and as a duo in colleges and rock clubs. They opened for Muddy Waters, Manhattan Transfer, Mose Allison among others. In the ’90s, Michael researched and wrote the definitive biography, Ray Charles, Man and Music.

Michael’s books span an enormous range: Writing & Life (the Bible to Nabokov), Real Writing (Balzac, Dreier et al), How to Play Classic Guitar, How to Write Songs for Fun (and maybe) Profit. Among his many songs are And So It Goes, Love at First Sight, Paris in the Rain, Do You Remember.

Michael lived for over fifty years with the love of his life, Ellen Mandel, lieder, stage composer and singer. In addition to Ellen, he leaves behind his daughter Shuna and her partner Charles, and his brothers Peter of Berkeley and Christopher of Boston.

Michael Lydon was an accomplished performer, writer, composer and music critic. He was a lifelong seeker and loving person who will be greatly missed by his many friends and extended family members.

“Songs, I like to think, are the unfinished symphonies of daily life, works of art, both lovable and profound, that we hum as we walk here and there on soon-forgotten errands” — Michael Lydon

P.S. An appreciation of Michael by T.S. Phillips at the site, One Man’s Guitar (including a wonderful performance by Michael of “What a Lovesick Fool was I”). Click here.

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OBITUARY

Michael Lydon, Writer Who Rocked With the 1960s, Dies at 82

A founding editor of Rolling Stone and a seasoned music journalist, he spent time with the Beatles and toured with the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones.

By Alex Williams, New York Times



Michael Lydon, who recovered from a galling pan of the Beatles for his college newspaper to become a founding editor of Rolling Stone and a pioneering rock journalist, capturing the pinwheel vibrancy of Swinging London and flower-power San Francisco, died on July 30 in Manhattan. He was 82.

His wife, Ellen Mandel, said he died in a hospital of complications from Parkinson’s disease.

Writing for publications such as Newsweek, The Boston Globe and The New York Times as well as Rolling Stone, Mr. Lydon mingled with the towering figures of the rapidly evolving rock era: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones.

As a young Newsweek correspondent fresh from Yale University, Mr. Lydon 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,” he 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 and Dylanesque shadings. 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.”



Newsweek transferred Mr. Lydon to San Francisco in 1967, when the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene was in full flower. “The Fillmore and Avalon Ballrooms were my beat,” he recalled on his website, “Janis Joplin and Jerry Garcia my inside sources.” He bore witness to rock history that same year when he covered the Monterey International Pop Festival, now remembered as the apotheosis of the psychedelic era.

From the press section, Mr. Lydon took in Hendrix, the Who and dozens of other luminaries and “let my mind be blown,” he recalled. “Exciting days — kids my own age beaming big ideas through electric music. At concerts and communes I heard friendly encouragement to be myself. I let my hair grow long and quit Newsweek.”

He also met Jann Wenner, who was starting a new magazine for and by the rock generation, to be called Rolling Stone, and soon offered Mr. Lydon a job as one of his top lieutenants.

“You could look at the guy” and see “gears moving in his head,” Mr. Lydon was quoted as saying of his onetime boss in Joe Hagan’s “Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine” (2017).

For the magazine’s first issue, dated Nov. 9, 1967, Mr. Lydon wrote an investigative article on the wobbly financial underpinnings of Monterey Pop, which had yet to direct much of its proceeds to philanthropic causes, a stated goal. “In ironic fact,” he wrote, “what happened at the Festival and its financial affairs looks like the traditional Charity Ball in hippie drag.”



Succumbing to the turn on/tune in/drop out spirit of the times, Mr. Lydon left his post at Rolling Stone after a few issues and moved to a hippie hut near Mendocino, the storied bohemian coastal hamlet north of San Francisco.

He nonetheless continued to write for Rolling Stone, including a 1969 Grateful Dead tour chronicle in which he noted the bummer vibes spreading through the counterculture: “What San Francisco started has become so diffuse, copied, extended, exploited, rebelled against, and simply accepted that it has become nearly invisible.”

That article, dated Aug. 23, 1969, was published just weeks after the Manson “family” murders in Los Angeles — an event often cited as the end of the ’60s dream.

Later that year, Mr. Lydon wrangled an invitation to travel with the Rolling Stones during its seismic American tour, which culminated with the violence-marred Altamont Speedway Free Festival near San Francisco, another terminal blow to the peace-and-love ideal.

“The only common emotion is disappointment and impotent sorrow,” Mr. Lydon wrote of the Altamont festival’s legacy in his 1971 book, “Rock Folk: Portraits From the Rock ‘n’ Roll Pantheon.” “‘If only… if only…”



Michael Clery Lydon was born on Sept. 14, 1942, in Boston, the fifth of six children of Patrick and Alice (Joyce) Lydon. His father was a foreman at the local telephone company.

He earned a scholarship to the prestigious Roxbury Latin School and, after graduating in 1961, won another to attend Yale, where he received a bachelor’s degree in American history in 1965.

Early in his career, Mr. Lydon covered hard news, including the aftermath of the grisly 1964 murders of three young voter registration activists in Mississippi, a signature event in the civil rights movement.

Swept up in the times, he turned his attention to writing about music — and, by the dawn of the 1970s, to writing and performing music himself, learning the trade with a flat-top Gibson guitar and a Bob Dylan songbook. “As soon as I could play the two chords of Bo Diddley’s ‘I’m a Man,’ I was launched,” he recalled.



With his eclectic musical tastes, he formed a cabaret act with Ms. Mandel, who played piano and sang, and whom he began dating in 1970 and married in 1981. Starting in the late 1990s, Mr. Lydon released four albums of pop-jazz on Brite Records, a label he started with his wife. He also developed a nightclub comedy act called “The Handsomest Man in the World.”

He never abandoned writing; he published nearly 20 books over the years, including “Ray Charles: Man and Music” (1998) and “The Rolling Stones Discover America” (1970), his account of the band’s star-crossed 1969 tour.



In addition to his wife, Mr. Lydon is survived by his daughter, Shuna Lydon, from his first marriage, to Susan Gordon — a writer who worked with him at Rolling Stone and, as Susan Lydon, became a noted feminist author — which ended in divorce; and two brothers, Peter and Christopher.

In a 2015 interview with The Wooster Blade, a high school newspaper in Ohio, Mr. Lydon recalled how the music he covered during the 1960s led to his own evolving creative sensibility.

“Bob Dylan put out a song that said, ‘He not busy being born is busy dying,’ and I was trying to apply it to myself,” he said. “So it was not just the sound in the music, but the ideas in the music that I found really, really interesting and challenging.”

Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.