John Mendelsohn (musician)
John Ned Mendelsohn is an American writer, journalist, musician and graphic designer. Biography Mendelsohn, who has sometimes spelled his name as Mendelssohn with two s's, was born in Washington but moved with his parents to southern California aged six months. He lived briefly in the San Fernando Valley, but mostly on the coast, first in Playa del Rey, and later above Pacific Coast Highway just south of Topanga Canyon Boulevard. He studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, thus avoiding military service in the Vietnam War. Mendelsohn began contributing music criticism to the Los Angeles Times and Rolling Stone while still a student. Although he was an ardent champion of the Kinks and David Bowie, the best known of these early contributions are his unfavorable reviews of the first two Led Zeppelin albums, which were published in Rolling Stone in 1969. His review of Led Zeppelin II displayed the sarcastic wit that became a characteristic of Mendelsohn's writing style, exemplified by his assertion that "Jimmy Page is the absolute number-one heaviest white blues guitarist between 5’4" and 5’8" in the world." Mendelsohn cited the British critic Nik Cohn as a major influence on his own writing, calling him "screamingly