E-Mail This Article to a Friend RIP Goodbye to rock’s matchmaker BY MIKE MILIARD

Al Aronowitz, the man who forever changed the history of rock music, died of cancer Monday at a hospital in Elizabeth, New Jersey; he was 77.

That’s the lead sentence Al would have wanted for his obituary. And, in truth, it’s the one he deserved. When I traveled to New Jersey to profile him last fall (see "The Go-Between," December 3, 2004), I found a grizzled old codger living alone in a dimly lit shithole of an apartment. I also found one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met.

If he were only remembered for being a pioneering rock critic in the early 1960s and a pioneering cyber journalist in the mid 1990s, Aronowitz’s importance to music and how it’s written about would be cemented. But it was his role as a friend and facilitator — "Uncle Al, the man who introduces everybody to everybody," as Art Garfunkel called him — that was his true legacy.

On August 28, 1964, Aronowitz brought a skinny kid named Bob Dylan up to the Hotel Delmonico on Park Avenue, in New York, and introduced him to four guys named John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Then he rolled the five of ’em a joint of his own "evil weed" — a first for the lads from Liverpool. The meeting was "very awkward, very demure," he told me. "Nobody wanted to step on anybody’s ego." But he knew right away that he "was brokering the most fruitful union in the history of pop music," Aronowitz later wrote. "After they met, the Beatles’ words got grittier, and Bob invented folk rock."

Aronowitz’s force of personality meant that, more than simply his subjects, these stars became his friends. Dylan wrote "Mr. Tambourine Man" in his kitchen. John and Yoko photographed him without his pants. George Harrison and Allen Ginsberg were his friends until their deaths. But Aronowitz could never treat them as equals. "I worshipped these people," he told me. "I immediately recognized them as immortal, as giants, as icons."

The years after the ’60s weren’t kind. Aronowitz’s wife died of cancer in 1972. He lost his column at the New York Post. He descended into seclusion and severe drug addiction. Before long, this one-time scenester was all but forgotten. But in 1995, his daughter introduced him to the Internet. If the newspapers wouldn’t hire him anymore, here was a limitless space this self-described "compulsive writer" could fill with his endless anecdotes. Aronowitz cleaned up his act and in the intervening decade wrote daily for his online ’zine, The Blacklisted Journalist. Two self-published books, Bob Dylan and the Beatles and Bobby Darin Was a Friend of Mine, collected many of those articles. (It’s unclear whether Mick and Miles, the Jagger/Davis bio he was working on when he died, will be published.)

"He was a pivotal character," says Aronowitz’s friend, poet and former White Panther John Sinclair, by phone from Detroit. "He opened the doors for so many people who wrote about popular music. And Bob Dylan turning on the Beatles was one of the cataclysmic events of our time. It had so much impact on modern life."

"I was just a proud and happy shadchen, a Jewish matchmaker, dancing at the princely wedding I’d arranged," Aronowitz wrote of that night. "I hate to think that putting Bob together with the Beatles is the only thing I’ll ever be remembered for, but I think it certainly was the right thing to do. Hasn’t the whole world benefited?"