Benjamin LaForest Edmonds Jr.

Noted music journalist and record company executive Ben Edmonds died at his home in Detroit on Friday. He was 65 and had been fighting pancreatic cancer since 2014.

Over the course of his career, Edmonds was an award-winning author, producer, artist manager and record executive. He was a gifted artist, and, as a Wellesly, MA teenager spent a summer in Paris studying painting. He attended Ohio Wesleyan University but a propitious trip to New York during Christmas break in 1968 changed the course of his life.

He saw Detroit's MC5. "I saw them and I thought that they were hands down the best rock and roll band I had ever seen in my life," Edmonds later told Perfect Sound Forever. "It's an opinion that I hold to this day." He told friends that he "wanted to be wherever they were from," and promptly left college and hitchhiked to Detroit. He never lost his fascination with the band, and was working on his definitive biography of the band No Greater Noise at the time of his death.

"There wasn't anyone who understood the MC5 the way Ben did," MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer said. "I even stole some of his theories to explain exactly what we were and what we did. I could never articulate the MC5's purpose as well as Ben could."

His parents insisted he return to school, but Edmonds stayed at Wesleyan only briefly. By early 1970, he had returned to Detroit, where he wrote and edited for Creem Magazine for the next five years. While at Creem, he wrote some of the first important articles on Alice Cooper, the New York Dolls, Bob Seger, and Buffalo Springfield and covered the rise of Southern Rock.

He was one of the very few rock writers who could also make records and he had an unswerving ear for new talent. "You never knew what would happen when Ben was around," said his former housemate Dick Williams. "One night I came home and found a guy with colorful hair sitting at the piano in our living room. It took me awhile to figure out it was Todd Rundgren."

He left Creem on his 25th birthday to relocate to Los Angeles. He initially worked for the trade magazine Record World. But Ben Edmonds never defined himself so narrowly. Before that year was through, Edmonds funded and oversaw the demo tapes for what became Iggy Pop and James Williamson's Kill City album, which was the birth of Iggy's solo career. Later he recounted the experience in the awarding-winning e-book Kill City Revisited: Confessions Of A Fool For The Stooges."

"Writer was a too narrow a self-definition for Ben," said former Creem editor and writer Dave Marsh. "All the best ideas in his magazine stories were put to use in his recording career. Everything he learned making music went into his books. In the most direct way they reflect many of Ben's best qualities: clarity, intensity, meticulous research, determination, loyalty, a crafty sense of humor."

He was drafted into service as an A&R man at Capital EMI Records, where he signed proto-punk Mink Deville after spotting them at New York's infamous punk palace CBGB. He later signed Rocky Burnette, who had a Top 10 hit, "Tired of Toein' the Line."

He left Los Angeles for London, where he was head of A&R at Arista.

Despite all his travels and accomplishments, Edmonds had put down his roots in Detroit, where he became the US Editor of UK music magazine Mojo, and a frequent contributor to The Detroit Free Press. In addition he was one of the sparks that lit the new generation of Motor City rock bands that followed the White Stripes."

In 2001 he published, after several years of research and writing, Marvin Gaye: What's Going On and the Last Days of the Motown Sound. He was twice nominated for a Grammy award twice for writing liner notes and won two ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards, given annually for the best music journalism and criticism, most recently in 2013.

"Ben was a visionary, a grand thinker and the perhaps the best writer of all of us at Creem. He was undoubtedly the best dressed staff member," said Jaan Uhelszki, longtime friend and another former Creem editor. "While he spent his life unraveling the lives of some of rock's biggest artists as if they were subjects in an impenetrable mystery, he remained a selfless enigma himself. None of us ever knew what he was really thinking, and he liked it that way."

He died at his Detroit home, attended by Mary Restrepo, his longtime partner (and a member of the Detroit Cobras, a band he championed). He is also survived by two sisters; Nancy Paull of Westport, Mass., and Katharine Paty of Atlanta, two nephews and a niece. There will be a private cremation. No plans for a memorial have yet been announced.

Arrangements under the direction of Harry J Will Funeral Homes, Redford, MI.