David Dalton, who recorded the rock scene as an early writer of Rolling Stone and brought direct knowledge to rock star biographies from living wildlife with them, died in Manhattan on Monday. He was 80 years old.
His son, Toby Dalton, said the cause was cancer.
Since the 1960s, Dalton has shown tips for a cultural moment and a place where evolution is taking place. Before the age of 20, she was dating Andy Warhol. In the mid-1960s, he filmed The Yardbirds, The Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, and other rock groups that were part of British Invasion. He was behind the scenes at the Rolling Stones’ 1969 infamous concert at the Altamont Speedway in California. He was hired with Jonathan Cot to write a book that accompanies the box set release of The Beatles’ 1970 album “Let It Be.” He traveled with Janis Joplin and James Brown to talk about The Beach Boys Dennis Wilson and Charles Manson.
As his career progressed, he was drawn to writing biographies and helping celebrities write autobiographies. His book included “Janis” (1972) on Joplin, revised and updated as “Piece of a Broken Heart” in 1984. “James Dean: Mutant King” (1975); and “Who is that guy? In search of the real Bob Dylan” (2012). Autobiographies that helped him write their subject include Marianne Faithfull’s “Faithfull: Autobiography” (1994), “Meatloaf: Hell and Back” (1999), and Steven Tyler’s “My Head”. Does the noise in you bother you? ”(2011) and Paul Anka’s“ My Way ”(2013). He collaborated with Tony Sherman in “Pop: Andy Warhol’s Genius” (2009).
Lenny KayeThe Patti Smith Group guitarist and writer who collaborated with Dalton in the 1977 book “Rock 100” was an early in his career when Dalton was in the music scene.
“In the era of rock journalism, there wasn’t a big gap between writers and artists,” he said in a telephone interview. “The writers were eager to create the same kind of artistic illumination as they wrote.”
“David has become very friendly to many people,” Kay added. He had a way to imagine the persona of the person he was writing. “
Dalton’s 44-year-old wife, painter and performance artist Kokopekeris, said Dalton fell into writing almost by accident. He read that Jan Wener started a new music magazine, Rolling Stone, in 1967, and began sending some of the band’s photos he was taking.
“He was taking pictures of groups like The Shangri-Las, and Jean wanted captions,” Pekeris said in an email. “So David started writing. And he wrote and wrote and wrote. The other day, when he learned that he was a writer, he asked him, and when his captions got longer and longer, he Said. “
Dalton evaluated his enormous achievements in unpublished autobiographical sketches and explained how his work changed over the decades.
“I was young when I wrote rock journalism,” he said. “I was involved in the scene when it was happening and evolving. I wore a hat and went everywhere. When I was in my thirties, I started writing about the past and it’s been there ever since. I live in. “
John David Dalton was born on January 15, 1942 in wartime London. His father, John, was a doctor, and his mother, Kathleen Tremaine, was an actress. His sister, Sarah Legong, grew up to actress Joanna Pete during the German air raid, and David and his cousin were put in a basket and protected under the stairs, or the London Underground system. He said he would be taken to. protection.
David grew up in London and British Columbia — his father was Canadian — and attended The King’s School in Canterbury, England. Later, when his parents moved to New York, he joined his parents, and he and his sister became Warhol’s assistants, Legong said, helping to edit his early film “Sleep.” In 1966, Dalton helped Warhol design the Aspen problem. Aspen is a multimedia magazine in a box or folder containing various traps.
“I came from England in the early 1960s,” Dalton wrote in “Pop: Andy Warhol’s Genius.” “I came across pop art with the same excitement and joy as when I first heard the blues. I was fortunate to meet Andy Warhol at the beginning of his career, and through his X-ray specs. I saw American flashy, weird and maniac ads, supermarket products, cartoons and kitsch flashing, overflowing and popping out-the life of their skin. “
In the mid-to-late 1960s and early 70s, Dalton spent time on the East Coast, West Coast, and England rubbing his elbows at the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. In California, he spent time with Dennis Wilson. He once said he had praised Charles Manson.
After Manson was charged with brutal murder in 1969, Dalton began investigating the Rolling Stone case with another writer, David Felton.
“Like most of my hippie buddies,” he wrote in an unpublished essay. A hippie of peace and love. “
His thinking changed when someone at the district attorney showed him a picture of the victims of Manson’s followers and a bloody message at the crime scene.
“It must have been the most horrifying moment of my life,” Dalton said in Joe Hagen’s “Sticky Fingers: The Life and Age of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine” (2017). It is reported that. “It was the end of the whole hippie culture.”
For Rolling Stone, Dalton also wrote about Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, Little Richard and more. By the mid-1970s, he had moved to books and focused on books, but still applied his completely immersive approach. “I actually started hearing Sid’s voice speak to me,” about the 1997 book “El Sid: Saint Vicious,” about Sid Vicious, a sex pistol who died of overdose in 1979. He is writing. David Nicholson, who reviewed the Washington Post book, found it compelling.
“A story similar to seeing someone standing on a rushing train road has some hypnotic nature,” he writes. “Writing throughout is graceful and intelligent, even when it’s on your face.”
Dalton once described his biographical technique as follows:
“Basically, you distill the subject into literary solutions and appreciate them, so to speak. Then you need a brain cleaner and you need to rewire your brain.”
Dalton lived in the Andes, New York. His wife, son and sister are his only direct survivors.
Kay said Dalton was present at both the sea changes and some of them.
“It was a fascinating time, and David was one of our most important cultural spokespersons,” he said.
