Robert Hilburn

• 1. Introduction

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  Robert Hilburn was born Charles Robert Nelms on the 25th of September 1939, in Natchitoches, Louisiana. He would go on to spend more than thirty years as the chief pop music critic at the Los Angeles Times, standing beside some of the most consequential musicians of the twentieth century. But his path to that desk wound through a cotton farm, a name change, and a restless hunger to write about music that no one around him seemed to share.

  How does a boy who grew up near Campti, Louisiana, surrounded by blues and country sounds, become the critic that John Prine credited with launching his career, the writer that U2 and Bruce Springsteen and Dr. Dre spoke of warmly? And what does it mean to champion artists nobody else is paying attention to, for decades, from a single desk at one newspaper? The answers run through prison concerts, Sex Pistols road trips, Zimbabwe stadiums, and a string of biographies that kept arriving long after most critics had retired.

• 2. A Name and a Place

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  Natchitoches, Louisiana gave Hilburn his earliest education, though not the one that shows up on a resume. His mother, Alice Marie Taylor, was a homemaker; his father, Charles Merritte Nelms, ran a Ford dealership. Their marriage did not last. After the divorce, his mother married John Edward Hilburn, an Army lieutenant, and the boy took on his stepfather's surname.

  Until he was five, Hilburn lived mostly on his grandfather's cotton farm in Campti, just outside Natchitoches. Those early years put him in earshot of blues and country music, the twin roots of rock and roll. He kept returning to his grandparents in summer, deepening that exposure. The family later spent time in Dallas before settling in Southern California, where John Edward Hilburn worked as an electronic engineer in the aerospace industry.

  Hilburn attended Reseda High School and then California State University, Northridge, where he earned a journalism degree in 1961. Before he ever wrote about music professionally, he worked as a news reporter for a suburban Los Angeles paper, The Valley Times, and later as a public information officer for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

• 3. At the Barricades

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  Hilburn started writing for the Los Angeles Times as a freelancer in 1966, filing pieces on artists including Johnny Cash and Janis Joplin. By 1970, he had replaced Pete Johnson as the paper's rock critic on a full-time basis. What followed was not a life spent in press boxes: it was a life spent in transit.

  He was with Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison in 1968, the concert that has since become one of the most celebrated in American music history. He rode a week of road dates with the Sex Pistols during the British band's first tour of the United States. He flew to Russia for Elton John's inaugural visit there. He was in Zimbabwe when Paul Simon brought the Graceland tour through, and he witnessed Bob Dylan's first concerts in Israel.

  Hilburn was also an early advocate for artists who had not yet broken through. John Prine, Patti Smith, Tom Petty, Prince, Elvis Costello, Guns N' Roses, Rage Against the Machine, Nine Inch Nails, Ice Cube, Public Enemy, Eminem, The White Stripes, Arcade Fire, and X all received his attention before the broader critical world caught up. John credited Hilburn directly for helping to launch his career. U2, Prine, Springsteen, and Dr. Dre, among others, made similar remarks.

  In a 2009 interview with the Washington Post, Hilburn described his philosophy plainly: "I thought the message of the artist was more important than the writing style. I tried to be clear, I wanted everyone to be welcome." He accepted a buyout package in 2005 and stepped back from his staff position, though he kept contributing features to the paper.

• 4. The Biographer's Work

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  In 2010, Hilburn published Corn Flakes with John Lennon, a memoir built around the work and influence of John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Phil Spector, Michael Jackson, U2, Kurt Cobain, and N.W.A. A reviewer in The Austin Chronicle wrote: "It's not just that Hilburn has been there and gotten the tour T-shirt. Hilburn is the real thing writing about the real thing."

  His biography of Cash, Johnny Cash: The Life, came out in 2013. Michiko Kakutani, then the chief book critic of The New York Times, named it one of her ten favorite books of that year. Kirkus called it "an instant-classic music biography with something to offer all generations of listeners."

  The Cash book opened an unexpected door. Paul Simon, who had declined multiple offers to tell his story, read it and agreed to sit for more than a hundred hours of interviews with Hilburn. Simon & Schuster published Paul Simon: The Life in 2018. Rolling Stone called it "epic." USA Today gave it four stars, praising Hilburn's "reportorial skill" and "nuanced attention to the dynamics and the substance of Simon's artistry."

  The biography of Randy Newman, A Few Words in Defense of Our Country, arrived from Hachette in October 2024. Hilburn and Newman had known each other since Newman's debut concert at the Troubadour in 1970. Despite that long friendship, it took time to persuade Newman to cooperate. In an interview with The Independent, Hilburn noted that Newman disliked talking about his songs. Newman himself described songwriting as torture. "He always had to find what was important enough to say; he really wanted to truly explain his country." The book explored the catalog of socially conscious songs Newman wrote to challenge racism, sexism, and greed in the American character, and was called "immersive and satisfying" for how it clarifies the thinking behind his most challenging work.

• 5. Still on the Air

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  Hilburn, who lives in Los Angeles, hosts a weekly Wednesday evening music program called Rock 'n' Roll Times on 885 The SoCal Sound, a public broadcasting radio station in Southern California. The show continues his five-decade practice of bringing music to the widest possible audience, on a different platform but with the same purpose he described to the Washington Post in 2009. His first biography, Springsteen, was written while he was still at the Times, making it the earliest marker of an authorial project that would eventually stretch from Cash to Newman across a span of more than twenty years.