Rock journalism pioneer Aronowitz dies aged 77

Al Aronowitz, a US pioneer of rock journalism who introduced Bob Dylan to the Beatles, died yesterday in Elizabeth, New Jersey, his son said. He was 77.

Aronowitz died of cancer, said his son, Joel Roi Aronowitz.

Al Aronowitz became a journalist after studying at Rutgers University in the mid-1950s. In 1959, at the New York Post, he wrote a 12-part series on the “beat” movement.

In reporting the series, he became a friend of such early counterculture luminaries as poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist Jack Kerouac. “He really fell into the whole lifestyle,” said Gerry Nicosia, author of the Jack Kerouac biography Memory Babe.

The pieces have been described as early examples of participatory journalism, a technique perfected by better-known writers such as Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson.

The 1964 summit of the Beatles and Dylan came about as Aronowitz was covering the British band for the Saturday Evening Post. He also claimed Dylan wrote Mr. Tambourine Man in his kitchen.

In his last years, Aronowitz self-published two books, Bob Dylan and the Beatles and Bobby Darin Was a Friend of Mine. He was working on another, Mick and Miles, about Mick Jagger and Miles Davis, when he died.